It amazes me the amount of people who never change their stance & opinions on something.

We are led to believe that once “decided” we have to hold onto our views with an iron-clad grip and never let them go, whilst arguing to our dying breath if they’re challenged.

An important mark of intelligence (in my *opinion*) is being able to change your stance on something as more information comes in.

As I get older, I’m less interested in being proven ‘right’ and more interested in being correct. There’s nuance there.

I find this very hard as I’m naturally competitive and my ferocious will to win that drives me in all things is hard to contain, although I’ve learned to dampen it quite effectively in social settings over the years.

It’s tough and I often don’t live up to my core belief on this. In discussions, I try to take the view that everything is open and everything is possible, and I have always tried to take an empathetic stance.

It’s tough when one’s ego is challenged, of course, and my long history of ‘arguing’ with passion in my prior life has led ashamedly to more than one very heated argument.

I took ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ to its extreme.

Plenty of grey areas and all that. And plenty of examples of people that are able to change opinions & stances on the fly. 

Another is being able to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. This is very hard and still mostly working on that.

Nothing worse than meeting up with someone for a beer and finding out they have the same stolid, old-fashioned views that they had 10 years ago.

It’s fine to be old-fashioned, of course, but if you aren’t willing to at least try on other views then it’s not a life well lived. In my opinion.

I have readily admitted to people when I have been wrong about something. The reaction is some form of shock as it just doesn’t happen often, especially when it concerns some major political view or something.

There are at least 3 major philosophical issues that I go back and forth on roughly every year, flip-flopping and never holding a view on one side or another for too long.

The nature of life is that we should wrestle with these issues.

Many people hold onto their opinions as some form of identity. I’d rather be correct than ‘right.’

Everything is, after all, an iteration, a kind of work in progress.

Here’s a good one:

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes