I agree there’s something to the exploration-exploitation view of people becoming more closed-minded. But don’t be too quick to write it off as “people don’t think carefully anymore”, or simple tribalism. Some important questions really do get settled by all those late-night college debates, though often the answer is “I don’t think it’s possible to know this” or “It’s not worth the years of effort it would take to understand at a more-than-amateur level.”
People are recognizing their limitations and zeroing in on the areas where they can get the highest return on investment for their thoughts. That’s a difficult thing to do when you’re younger, because you don’t have much to compare yourself to. If you’ve never met a physicist more knowledgeable than your 9th-grade science teacher, you might well think you can make big contributions to the theory of relativity in the space of a few weeks’ discussion with your friends.
Similarly, when it comes to politics, the idea of considering every idea with an open mind can fall victim to the pressures of reality—some ideas are superficially appealing but actually harmful; some are nice in theory but are so far from what could reasonably be implemented that their return on investment is low. And because politics is so adversarial, many ideas that are promoted as novel and non-partisan are actually trying to sneak in a not-so-novel agenda through the back door.
That’s an interesting thought. However, I tend to observe that most people do not take strictly agnostic positions on most things. In fact, it seems that people tend towards certainty rather than uncertainty. So I’m not sure that I’m seeing people tend to give up on questions they think are too difficult or that they don’t have the expertise or time to really come to a conclusion on. From my perspective it seems that people really do fall into ideological camps where they believe a lot of matters have been completely settled and do not need further discussion.
An interesting sort-of reverse phenomenon that I’ve noticed, is that on matters where people really have more expertise, they actually tend to be a little more agnostic about and open to debate. So for example you might notice people having an in depth discussion on some aspect of software engineering, like a library or a framework, weighing the pros and cons of each and citing expert opinion—but on politics, which we understand even less about—you really don’t see this at all.
I agree there’s something to the exploration-exploitation view of people becoming more closed-minded. But don’t be too quick to write it off as “people don’t think carefully anymore”, or simple tribalism. Some important questions really do get settled by all those late-night college debates, though often the answer is “I don’t think it’s possible to know this” or “It’s not worth the years of effort it would take to understand at a more-than-amateur level.”
People are recognizing their limitations and zeroing in on the areas where they can get the highest return on investment for their thoughts. That’s a difficult thing to do when you’re younger, because you don’t have much to compare yourself to. If you’ve never met a physicist more knowledgeable than your 9th-grade science teacher, you might well think you can make big contributions to the theory of relativity in the space of a few weeks’ discussion with your friends.
Similarly, when it comes to politics, the idea of considering every idea with an open mind can fall victim to the pressures of reality—some ideas are superficially appealing but actually harmful; some are nice in theory but are so far from what could reasonably be implemented that their return on investment is low. And because politics is so adversarial, many ideas that are promoted as novel and non-partisan are actually trying to sneak in a not-so-novel agenda through the back door.
That’s an interesting thought. However, I tend to observe that most people do not take strictly agnostic positions on most things. In fact, it seems that people tend towards certainty rather than uncertainty. So I’m not sure that I’m seeing people tend to give up on questions they think are too difficult or that they don’t have the expertise or time to really come to a conclusion on. From my perspective it seems that people really do fall into ideological camps where they believe a lot of matters have been completely settled and do not need further discussion.
An interesting sort-of reverse phenomenon that I’ve noticed, is that on matters where people really have more expertise, they actually tend to be a little more agnostic about and open to debate. So for example you might notice people having an in depth discussion on some aspect of software engineering, like a library or a framework, weighing the pros and cons of each and citing expert opinion—but on politics, which we understand even less about—you really don’t see this at all.