Ideas
Felix Hartmann
Why changing your mind is the most underrated skill.
The ability to update your thinking based on new evidence is not weakness. It is the whole point.
The problem with consistency
Consistency is treated as a virtue in most public contexts. The politician who has always held the same position. The commentator who has never needed to update their view. The expert whose analysis has not changed in twenty years. These people are described as principled, reliable, worth listening to. The implicit suggestion is that changing your mind is a form of weakness or unreliability. This is exactly backwards. Consistency in the face of new evidence is not a virtue. It is a failure of thinking.
What changing your mind actually means
Changing your mind means that you have encountered information or an argument that was better than the information or argument you were previously working with, and you have updated accordingly. This is not weakness. This is the correct response to being wrong, which everyone is, regularly, about things that matter. The person who never changes their mind is either never encountering new information or is systematically ignoring it. Neither is a good sign.
Why we resist it
We resist changing our minds for reasons that are well documented and not particularly flattering. Identity is invested in positions. Changing a position feels like losing. The social cost of being seen to have been wrong is real in most environments. The architecture of most public discourse rewards conviction and punishes revision. None of this has anything to do with whether the position was right or wrong. It has to do with the social dynamics of holding positions publicly. These dynamics are worth understanding because they are actively hostile to good thinking.
The environments that make it possible
The environments where good thinking happens are almost always environments where changing your mind is not only permitted but expected. Where the quality of the argument is what matters rather than the consistency of the position. Where being wrong is treated as the beginning of a better understanding rather than as a failure to be minimised. These environments are rare and worth seeking out and worth creating when they do not exist. They are the conditions under which the best thinking happens.
What it looks like in practice
Changing your mind in practice looks like saying I was wrong about this and here is why. It looks like updating a position publicly when the evidence changes. It looks like being more interested in getting to the right answer than in having been right at the start. It looks like treating your past positions as drafts rather than commitments. None of this requires abandoning principles. It requires distinguishing between principles, which should be stable, and positions, which should be responsive to evidence.
Changing your mind publicly is one of the most useful things you can do. It is also one of the least rewarded.
The people worth arguing with
The people worth having arguments with are the people who are capable of changing their minds. Not the people who will eventually be worn down into agreeing with you but the people who, if you make a sufficiently good argument, will actually update their position. These people are rarer than you might expect. When you find them, the arguments are worth having because both people are genuinely trying to arrive somewhere rather than simply trying to win.
Why it matters more than it used to
In a media environment where positions are held publicly and permanently and searchable forever, the pressure against changing your mind has increased significantly. The cost of being seen to have been wrong is higher than it has ever been. This makes the people who change their minds publicly when the evidence warrants it more valuable rather than less. They are demonstrating something that the environment actively discourages. That is worth noticing and worth doing.
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About the author
Felix Hartmann
Contributing writer at Commonplace. Writes about design, travel, and the decisions behind things most people use without ever thinking about. Has a habit of turning a short piece into a long one and an even worse habit of being right about it. Based in Berlin.
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