I think being inconsistent and contradicting yourself and not really knowing your own position on most topics is good, actually, as long as you keep working to craft better models of those topics and not just flail about randomly. Good models grow and merge from disparate fragments, and in the growing pains those fragments keep intermittently getting more and less viable. Waiting for them to settle makes you silent about the process, while talking it through is not a problem as long as the epistemic status of your discussion is clear.
Sticking to what you’ve said previously, simply because it’s something you happened to have said before, opposes lightness, stepping with the winds of evidence at the speed of their arrival (including logical evidence from your own better understandings as they settle). Explicitly noting the changes to your point of view, either declaring them publicly or even taking the time to note them privately for yourself, can make this slightly inconvenient, and that can have significant impact on ability to actually make progress, for the numerous tiny things that are not explicitly seen as some important project that ought to be taken seriously and given the effort. There is little downside to this, as far as I can tell, except for the norms with some influence that resist this kind of behavior, and if given leave can hold influence even inside one’s own mind.
I totally agree that being able to change your mind is good, and that the important thing is that you end up in the right place. (Although I think that your caveat “as long as you keep working to craft better models of those topics and not just flail about randomly” is doing a lot of work in the thesis you express; and it seems to me that this caveat has some requirements that make most of the specifics of what you endorse here… improbable. That is: if you don’t track your own path, then it’s much more likely that you’re flailing, and much more likely that you will flail; so what you gain in “lightness”, you lose in directionality. Indeed, I think you likely lose more than you gain.)
However.
If you change your mind about something, then it behooves you to not then behave as if your previous beliefs are bizarre, surprising, and explainable only as deliberate insults or other forms of bad faith.
Subjectively, it seems the things that are important to track are facts and observations, possibly specific sources (papers, videos), but not your own path or provisional positions expressed at various points along the way. So attention to detail, but not the detail of your own positions or externally expressed statements about them, that’s rarely of any value. You track the things encountered along your own path, so long as they remain relevant and not otherwise, but never the path itself.
If you change your mind about something, then it behooves you to not then behave as if your previous beliefs are bizarre, surprising, and explainable only as deliberate insults or other forms of bad faith.
That’s the broadly accepted norm. My point is that I think it’s a bad norm that damages effectiveness of lightness and does nothing useful.
Alright. Well, I guess we disagree here. I think the broadly accepted norm is good, and what you propose is bad (for the reason I describe in the grandparent comment).
I think being inconsistent and contradicting yourself and not really knowing your own position on most topics is good, actually, as long as you keep working to craft better models of those topics and not just flail about randomly. Good models grow and merge from disparate fragments, and in the growing pains those fragments keep intermittently getting more and less viable. Waiting for them to settle makes you silent about the process, while talking it through is not a problem as long as the epistemic status of your discussion is clear.
Sticking to what you’ve said previously, simply because it’s something you happened to have said before, opposes lightness, stepping with the winds of evidence at the speed of their arrival (including logical evidence from your own better understandings as they settle). Explicitly noting the changes to your point of view, either declaring them publicly or even taking the time to note them privately for yourself, can make this slightly inconvenient, and that can have significant impact on ability to actually make progress, for the numerous tiny things that are not explicitly seen as some important project that ought to be taken seriously and given the effort. There is little downside to this, as far as I can tell, except for the norms with some influence that resist this kind of behavior, and if given leave can hold influence even inside one’s own mind.
I totally agree that being able to change your mind is good, and that the important thing is that you end up in the right place. (Although I think that your caveat “as long as you keep working to craft better models of those topics and not just flail about randomly” is doing a lot of work in the thesis you express; and it seems to me that this caveat has some requirements that make most of the specifics of what you endorse here… improbable. That is: if you don’t track your own path, then it’s much more likely that you’re flailing, and much more likely that you will flail; so what you gain in “lightness”, you lose in directionality. Indeed, I think you likely lose more than you gain.)
However.
If you change your mind about something, then it behooves you to not then behave as if your previous beliefs are bizarre, surprising, and explainable only as deliberate insults or other forms of bad faith.
Subjectively, it seems the things that are important to track are facts and observations, possibly specific sources (papers, videos), but not your own path or provisional positions expressed at various points along the way. So attention to detail, but not the detail of your own positions or externally expressed statements about them, that’s rarely of any value. You track the things encountered along your own path, so long as they remain relevant and not otherwise, but never the path itself.
That’s the broadly accepted norm. My point is that I think it’s a bad norm that damages effectiveness of lightness and does nothing useful.
Alright. Well, I guess we disagree here. I think the broadly accepted norm is good, and what you propose is bad (for the reason I describe in the grandparent comment).