Unfortunately the reason people are reluctant to admit their mistake is that the potential return is usually negative. If you admit that you were the kind of person to espouse and defend an idea you suspect to be false even though you claim to have changed, that’s mostly what people are going to conclude about you, especially if you add that espousing this idea gained you status. They may even conclude that you simply shifted course because it was no longer tenable, and not because you were convinced to be sincere.
I’ve certainly wondered this! In spite of the ACX commenter I mentioned suggesting that we ought to reward people for being transparent about learning epistemics the hard way, I find myself not 100% sure if it’s wise or savvy to trust that people won’t just mark me down as like “oh, so quinn is probably prone to being gullible or sloppy” if I talk openly about my what my life was like before math coursework and the sequences.
I think that (for this thing and many others too), some people are going to mark you down for it and some people are going to mark you up for it. So the relevant question is not “will some people mark me down” but “what kinds of people will mark me down and what kinds of people will mark me up, and which one of those is the group that I care more about”.
Unfortunately the reason people are reluctant to admit their mistake is that the potential return is usually negative. If you admit that you were the kind of person to espouse and defend an idea you suspect to be false even though you claim to have changed, that’s mostly what people are going to conclude about you, especially if you add that espousing this idea gained you status. They may even conclude that you simply shifted course because it was no longer tenable, and not because you were convinced to be sincere.
I’ve certainly wondered this! In spite of the ACX commenter I mentioned suggesting that we ought to reward people for being transparent about learning epistemics the hard way, I find myself not 100% sure if it’s wise or savvy to trust that people won’t just mark me down as like “oh, so quinn is probably prone to being gullible or sloppy” if I talk openly about my what my life was like before math coursework and the sequences.
I think that (for this thing and many others too), some people are going to mark you down for it and some people are going to mark you up for it. So the relevant question is not “will some people mark me down” but “what kinds of people will mark me down and what kinds of people will mark me up, and which one of those is the group that I care more about”.
Well said