Mental Liquidity
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Mental Liquidity
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Re: Mental Liquidity
#2I think this article is a little too overzealous with trying to simplify a topic like beliefs and ideas.
A lot of it also sounds like common sense to me, the people capable of grasping this:
> Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity.
Are quite capable of adjusting themselves.
Everything else falls into either Ego, or people being self-(un)aware, and for the latter - you can only change "their" belief system if they themselves are willing to change.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#3I like this nice little text. Einstein is a perfect example for mental liquidity. I think we should be very forgiving about this for two reasons: first, Einstein was one of the people establishing quantum mechanics. He also got the Nobel Price for his work on the photoelectric effect. Second, even the brightest minds have only a narrow time frame until mental ability starts to decline. So we cannot expect a brain to dig deep into general relativity and at the same time something completely different like QM.
Surprisingly, Einstein even contributed to QM in old age by trying to poke holes into the theory that later proved to be true (e.g., spooky effects at a distance).
Re: Mental Liquidity
#4Be a goldfish: Ted Lasso, 2020.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#5Re: Mental Liquidity
#6> Most fields have lots of rules, theories, ideas, and hunches. But laws – things that are unimpeachable and cannot ever change – are extremely rare.
This sounds like a rehash of Popperian epistemology. We should look forward to disproving existing theories (finding new problems), because it leads to new, better theories.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#7It’s easy to forget how difficult learning is, for us as individuals and as flocks in formation. Pick any topic and it’s likely it took you years to learn well. So simply switching out beliefs embedded in that topic requires overwriting years of patterns and synapses in sync.
Where Kuhn is so helpful in understanding that even scientists have immense difficulty, if not vigorous myopia, stuck with wrong beliefs. Paradigm shifts with funerals is easier over decades than getting scientists to evolve their models.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#8This article matches my own life experience: Rather than what have you changed your mind about in the past decade, I use 'in your whole life'. Speaking personally, there are only two big things I've changed my mind about. I'm working on a third... I wish the article had included something in the vein expressed by Charlie Munger, which is a 'how-to' for intellectual integrity.
"I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.”
Re: Mental Liquidity
#9One of the biggest beliefs I keep struggling with is the need to be perfect. I've been jamming away for many many weekends on a side project that literally was done. I just kept adding tiny tweaks left and right, until I literally just now launched it (https://amee.la).
Nothing ground breaking, and in the end nothing that needed to have so much perfectionism around.
The belief of having to need something perfect is one of the strongest I see among founders here on HN and elsewhere. It's almost always bad. I have zero examples where that ended up being good. Yet, even though the facts are clear, it's extremely hard to overcome.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#10Stay humble.