13 ms·

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

177 points by mhb 3y ago

bitwize 3y ago
Some of these anecdotes about Keynes remind me of the bit from Theory of Everything where Hawking and his wife are entertaining a guest. The guest asks Hawking what he is working on and Hawking replies that he is attempting to prove black holes don't exist. "But I thought you'd proven that black holes do exist?" inquires the guest. "That was my Ph.D. thesis," says Hawking.
MaxGabriel 3y ago
Does anyone else get an infinite redirect loop visiting on mobile safari? Edit: it’s fixed by requesting the desktop website.
- alfanick 3y ago
  No, but I get 20 different ads that are covering 70% of a screen and they're not blocked. Instant close.
  - Vvector 3y ago
    Sometimes I just forget how awesome uBlock Origin has been doing it's job for EIGHT years
    - knodi123 3y ago
      I sent my father in law an article the other day, and he wound up clicking a scam ad that got his computer hacked. He showed it to me, it wasn't the most obviously scammy ad I've seen- plenty of people who didn't grow up with the internet might have fallen for it! But anyway, on my laptop, the article was just clean text and a byline with some well-formatted images. Failing to install ublock on your parents computer is a form of abuse! :-)
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    Interesting. I have Safari on MacOS, with Ads from AdBlockPro installed, and StopTheMadness, and I'm seeing zero ads.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Javascript kept disabled by default...zero ads, zero evidence of ads existing.
- jdoliner 3y ago
  When the url changes I redirect, what do you do sir?
fallingfrog 3y ago
Of course it’s important to also not accept without question the facts that a person gives you, because people do lie. For example, do you really think that shirt is 40% off today only? That’s probably just a lie. I saw a TikTok video yesterday that showed a picture showing a picture of a girl with an underdeveloped jaw and the voiceover said it was because she breathed through her mouth too much. One of the comments pointed out that this is actually a specific genetic condition. So the poster of the TikTok invented a new “fact” out of thin air and presented it as truth. To change my mind based on that would be a mistake.
- themitigating 3y ago
  This is a mistake I made recently. There are false facts, or lies. True facts and opinions
  - dylan604 3y ago
    This is what I've tried to instill in those that I've had the opportunity to preach on a soapbox. It is not wrong to have a belief that is different from others. It is also not wrong to not immediately change those beliefs when presented counter information so that you may take time to interpret what that new information means. If you decide that new information is correct, it is also not wrong to change your beliefs based on the new information. It is also not wrong to question the source of the new information.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      I'll add to be wise enough to distinguish from topics you should have your opinion drom those ypi shouldn't. E.g. a brain surgeon and his views on quantum physics, said surgeon should have an opinion on brain surgery, a good one that changes based on his qualified evaluation of new facts while he is perfectly fine of jist going with whatever the latest consensus regarding Higgs bosoms or some other quantum physics topic is. If that makes any sense.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      My opinions are parametrized. They're contingent on explicit premises, and if I'm exposed to new evidence they can change instantly.
meghan_rain 3y ago
I double down, Sir!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
thenerdhead 3y ago
I really value people who change their mind gradually when new information, events, etc happen. I do not value people who change their mind frequently because they cannot think for themselves. The last decade has really shown to me that people do not think for themselves. The devastating effect of the great depression changed Keynes mind and he adapted his theories to it, you would think the same would happen for significant events that have happened recently too.
- TOMDM 3y ago
  To be trite, "Don't be so open minded that your brain falls out"
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> The last decade has really shown to me that people do not think for themselves. Thinking takes time and effort. It's important to allocate those resources to things we care about. Some are lazy, but I suspect a lot don't really care.
- thieving_magpie 3y ago
  I agree with you but it's an awkward set of criteria: - Change your mind when new information is given, that is thinking for yourself. - Don't change it too much, that is not thinking for yourself. - Not changing your mind is also not thinking for yourself. Like I say, I agree with you but the nuance here is difficult to explain.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I think the nuance is: knee-jerk reactions are bad, thoughtful reactions are good.
  - canjobear 3y ago
    The key thing is to change your mind because the facts truly have changed, as opposed to changing your mind because everyone else did.
- fullshark 3y ago
ablob 3y ago
When the facts change, I consider changing my mind. Albeit nitpicky, not every changed fact forces a different conclusion.
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
brightball 3y ago
I questioned where the original facts came from and where the new facts came from and how we know that they actually changed?
lordkirchner 3y ago
A humbling exercise for anyone is, for any given belief, writing down specifically what inputs and logic lead to that belief, and specifically what inputs and logic would lead to changing that belief. Almost everyone would find that almost all of their beliefs are based on very flimsy input/logic, and the bar for changing that belief is unfairly and wildly asymmetric.
- ohwellhere 3y ago
  I think most people base most beliefs on being told that they're true. Full stop. It really comes down to who you are listening to and why; most critical to this is the birth lottery.
  - mabbo 3y ago
    But do they know that? I suspect most people believe themselves quite logical as to how they've arrived at their beliefs.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  Learning to do this formally in a college philosophy/logic class broke my brain in the best way and drastically altered the kind of person I became from that point on. For context: I came from a religious family which had trained me not to trust my science teachers, but they hadn’t warned me against philosophers.
deleted 3y ago
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steveklabnik 3y ago
“I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  This explains some of the physics in John wick then
  - nine_k 3y ago
    If the screenplay requires 2 and 2 to add to 5 for a dramatic effect, this certainty can be shown! But Mr Reeves says about (not) trying to change someone else's mind, not own mind.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    What is truly amazing about the production of John Wick is that while yes the physics of the movies are… not realistic, they take an obscene amount of care about the gun safety. Which given the themes of the movie is pretty funny, but for the members of the production, I’m glad it’s not a joke.
- throw7 3y ago
  "Don't wrestle with pigs." The issue though is when pigs get to make the laws.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Oh yeah, for sure. I wouldn't personally advocate for living your entire life by this quote. But it is funny.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > “I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves. Nice one. I say something more aggressive like: "excuse me, I go back down to earth talking with doctors saving patients' lives and engineers creating the planes in which you fly!".
renewiltord 3y ago
I'll put up with convincing my family and friends. But if there is arbitrary person X, and if you were to sample X's views and they had no correlation with the truth if "time studying subject" is removed, then that person is a low information source. For most people, I get to sample their view on something occasionally. I have no idea how far they are in the process of being wrong. Someone who is almost always wrong until they are convinced is a low coefficient source of information. It's not enough to be convinced. You have to be right a lot. That's just how it is. This has served me well so far.
fwungy 3y ago
If there's a scientist on TV I do what they say.
- slicktux 3y ago
  “ Hey, Man of Science with your perfect rules of measure Can you improve this place with the data that you gather?”
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  Same. I wait for academics and journalists to tell me what to think, then I go around wearing my "I Heckin' Love Science!" T-shirt, yell "Trust the science" from my car at random pedestrians, and try to cancel any heretics who don't loudly agree.
layer8 3y ago
> In conclusion, Keynes did express a similar idea in 1924, but he employed a different phrasing. Arguably, Bayes and Laplace already expressed that idea.
vonwoodson 3y ago
This is the second article (although the first was just a Tweet..) today about changing your mind. Here on the internet, I'm not surprised see how much hatred there is of people who change their minds/opinions. It's easy to see that folks appreciate consistency over correctness. This is obvious, primarily because folks who are consistent are easier to predict, in action and motivation, and therefore easier to plan for. This is a great personality for leaders/CEOs/politicians because the time-scale of large multi-person coordination requires that change is limited in scope and that only justifiable/authorized change is allowed. Allocation of power and authority being the purpose of social organization. If you are not a leader, than you need to stop holding onto this terrible world view. The only path to truthy-knowledge, that we know of, is empirical observation and testing of hypothesis; The Scientific Method. Believe it or not, leading people is a skill older than science and has it's foundations in manipulation and control. And, in this system, "truth" does not matter at all. Or, even worse, "alternative truth" is acceptable as long as it suits your power-structure and social goals. I am not a king/CEO/Pharaoh/President and, as such, hold consistency in about as high regard as used toilet-paper. I am, alternatively, an engineer and I have an ethical obligation to be correct. I have this duty, regardless of what people and their "common sense" or opinions may be. In other-words: I reserve the right to change my mind, at any time, when presented with new information. It absolutely must be this way. It may infuriate folks around me and make me look like a fool; yet, what is ethics if it's not doing the right thing in the face of adversity? I'm also going to leave this [here](https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...) as a starting point for any young or maturing software engineers who need a foundation or jumping-off point to expand their understanding about ethics.
- bodecker 3y ago
  With regards to The Scientific Method (and other ideas mentioned), I found some of David Deutsch's work thought-provoking. Namely, the idea that deductive reasoning is more effective than inductive when seeking new hypotheses. The Beginning of Infinity is a decent starting place [0]. Also related to some of Nassim Taleb's work. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143121359 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143121359
- 3y ago
membrcovidb 3y ago
[flagged]
- AYoung010 3y ago
  is this a joke lol
codexb 3y ago
Ironic that the article uses Keynes as an example for an admirable virtue that Keynes didn't really employ himself. Keynes didn't actually change his mind, he simply changed his arguments to justify a consistent belief that deficit spending was the answer to virtually all economic woes.
- ajross 3y ago
  I really don't think "deficit spending was the answer to virtually all economic woes" is a remotely correct characterization of Keynes' theories or contributions. Frankly that's just a libertarian strawman, and deploying it in a thread notionally about rational discourse seems sort of unserious.
  - knodi123 3y ago
    > and deploying it in a thread notionally about rational discourse seems sort of unserious. You should see the guy above complaining that woke liberals want to declare math to be white supremacy.
  - codexb 3y ago
    Forgive me for not writing a full dissertation dissecting all the terrible ideas that Keynes had. I think my characterization is a pretty accurate shorthand to summarize his primary contribution to economic theory, and the theory that he is best known for championing (in America at least). Either way, it's irrelevant what Keynes actual theory was; the point of my argument is that he continued to offer proposal after proposal and excuse after excuse for why his theory didn't actually work in practice (to end the Great Depression) instead of changing his mind and accepting that he was just wrong.
- imtringued 3y ago
  It's actually just a stopgap and since it generates inflation much sooner than monetary policy you also have to do less of it to achieve the same outcome. If you understand his liquidity preference theory and his Bancor proposal, then you would understand that the irrationality of deficit spending mirrors the irrationality of the system. Why bother with deficit spending if the system worked even if you leave it alone? Oh right the problem is that the system won't work if you leave it alone. Thus any attempt to bring it back to rationality will look as irrational as the system that is being fixed. The system leaves an irrational gap that needs to be closed with a filler that takes on the shape of the irrationality. Anyone who thinks that Keynes wasn't aware of the temporary nature of deficit spending doesn't know Keynes and instead fell for some caricature of him. The answer to neutralising liquidity preference is to charge symmetric fees to both positive and negative money balances that are immediately available. The Bancor plan was an implementation of that concept for trade/current account balances between nations. If your country generates too many export surpluses, then it has an incentive to reduce the surplus. If your country has an port surplus it also has an incentive to reduce the surplus. Thus there is an automatic stabilising mechanism that requires no intervention whatsoever. Countries can voluntarily join the Bancor system and although you might object that a perfect implementation requires strong capital controls, as long as there are political levers to encourage or discourage exports/imports, no capital controls are necessary. Balanced trade between nations means that the inequality between nations would quickly disappear because poorer countries are no longer building up foreign debt and richer countries are no longer piling up favours that they can use as geopolitical poker chips to go against the people's wishes in the poorer country. Alas there is no Bancor system. So deficit spending it is. Politicians love deficit spending so at least you can accomplish a tiny massively distorted fragment of the original plan instead of nothing at all. Applying symmetrical liquidity fees to domestic balances would result in intervention free full employment at which point the vast majority of neoclassical predictions would become true. If unemployment is nonexistent then there will be fewer unemployment benefits to pay out, which in turn means taxes can be cut, which in turn means that the purchasing power of workers goes up, which in turn means a lot of public spending becomes unnecessary. The one thing it wouldn't fix is that the rent will still be too damn high but since people have jobs they can afford to pay rent.
andrewclunn 3y ago
I ask where you get your "facts" from. Humility is important for sure (or perhaps taking pride in becoming right rather than being right), but it is pointless if you have no solid footing for epistomology. A "humble" academic who is endlessly skeptical of all personal observations, but turns a blind eye to the distorted incentives and lackluster filtering within the halls of the academy (concerning both publication at the surface level and the demarcation problem at a more fundamental one), is just a different form of arrogant.
adamwong246 3y ago
It doesn't matter whats "right" or "correct". What matters is what people _believe_. And humans seem to love confident strong-men who clear away their doubts. So while I understand that value of reason, there's a tragic flaw in this high-mindedness- no one wants to follow a man without a clear voice. No one wants to listen to the manager , or CEO, or President, who "waffles".
- 0xEF 3y ago
  They do, however, want to listen to the leader who can discern good into from bad, and make decisions or alter course as needed as new good info comes to light. I think it's important to zoom out a bit when considering what we humans seek in a leader. Confidence, yes, but also the ability to change one's mind is a marker of intelligence as opposed to the cognitive impairment that is concrete thinking.
  - adamwong246 3y ago
    I do not mean to be rude but were you not witness to the terrible spectacle of DJT as POTUS? Stupid-confidence led that fool to the highest office in the world. It seems to me the average voter prefers to maintain "the feels" over even their very survival?
- mihaic 3y ago
  Sure, everyone like to follow strength. I don't want someone to lead me just with confident bullshit though, which has been hyperoptimized for in recent years in politics. When before confidence came as the result of skill and experience, now it's all "fake it till you make it". The fact that we can't distinguigh between the two is a problem with our culture, which we actually can improve upon by explicitly condemning in public baseless confidence.
- kashunstva 3y ago
  > follow a man or woman
Anon_Forever 3y ago
[flagged]
- knodi123 3y ago
  [flagged]
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
This in my mind can be a dangerous path, if I am not disciplined to validate the new information. In all this the presumption is the "facts change", "information change", and "persuasion" is done from a basis of objective truth. In Keyes (btw Sun Tzu 孫子 said something similar a wee bit earlier) notes this presumption is present, such that the information added to financial decision is objectively true. But, in my experience in life (and even in investing) there are objective truths and then derivatives of objective & subjective truths. These second type of truths are often presented still as objective truths. To what percentage of the objective & subjective intermingle and when I decide the "truth" is now too subjective is... subjective. Its that puzzled look in my inner monologue that triggers the question "is this truth objective enough to be considered to influence my current stance?" In general I think as we gain more life experiences, the less subjective truths we tolerate in such derivative truths. Externally, this may manifest itself as jaded, or stubborn. And, finally, even when we think something is objective -> 2+2=5
deleted 3y ago
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knorker 3y ago
If my internet arguments are anything to go by, when people hear that they yell "facts don't change, that's what makes them facts!".
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: It's weird that people get mocked for changing their minds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491735 - June 2023 (179 comments)
Libre___ 3y ago
Reminds me of Julia Galefs videos on Bayesian inference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8
- jonathanstrange 3y ago
  Bayesian inference only works for "the cat is on the mat" examples. In reality, hypothesis and theory discovery and model selection are highly complex and neither a theory/hypothesis/model's accuracy nor the subjective probability that it's true are the decisive criterion for choosing the best one.
dpcan 3y ago
I have lived by these words for many years: “Every time I’m wrong, I learn something new.” I repeat this to myself. I look for reasons to be wrong. Everything I think I know how to do well, I assume someone has a better way of doing it, and I want to know that way. I don’t even stop short when it comes to religion or politics. You believe in God, convince me, that sounds great. Your political views are right? Okay, show me the evidence, I’ll listen and explore the idea. But I do stand by what I am pretty certain is a fact if there would be consequences otherwise. That being said, I have very little confidence that I know any actual “facts”.
brabel 3y ago
Sorry for the tangent, but TIL: the word "kudos" was already in use in 1933: "But since there are people who deem it creditable if one does not change one’s mind, I should like to get what kudos I can from not having done so on this occasion!" And I thought it was some kind of youth slang :D (English is my second language but I've been using it primarily for most of my life).
JimtheCoder 3y ago
Is it just me, or is it usually the people who usually profess loudly that, "When the facts change, I change my mind" are the people who are least likely to change their mind when facts change. Just a random observation
nologic01 3y ago
Is that some sort of Turing test? I mean, obviously LLM's would "change their minds" every time the "facts" change as they get retrained. Are all of them Keynesians now? [1] So maybe steadfast refusal to acknowledge reality is what makes us really human? An interesting thought. 8-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_all_Keynesians_now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_all_Keynesians_now
nerdchum 3y ago
I never have my mind set in the first place. Life is massively ambiguous with an infinite myriad of solutions to any problem. I think the smart way to be is to simply say I truly don't know but the data I'm currently using leads me to believe such and such...
GMoromisato 3y ago
I personally believe that there are two kinds of beliefs: 1. Factual: These are beliefs based on models, e.g., "the Earth goes around the sun". You can test these models with predictions and if the predictions are wrong, you need to update your model. 2. Value preferences: E.g., "chocolate ice cream is the best dessert". These are non-testable beliefs because they do not have an objectively correct value. You can't say that a preference is "wrong" or "right". The problem is that all important arguments are arguments about value preferences, but we treat them as factual arguments. Take something like what to do about global warming. This seems like a factual argument because lots of people don't even agree that the world is getting warmer. But the real problem is a value preference: People who don't believe in climate change simply don't think the effort required to solve the problem is worth the benefit, and they're using motivated reasoning to deny the warming. This is obvious when you see them move the goalposts: 1. The climate is not changing. 2. The climate is changing, but not because of humans. 3. Humans are changing the climate, but it's too late to do anything about it. The real issue is that we disagree on how much sacrifice we should make to help people of the future--people who, on current trends, will be richer than we are, just as we are richer than the world of the 1950s. But there is no correct answer to "how much should we sacrifice to solve global warming." It's a value preference. And this is true for every issue. Any issue can be reduced to a disagreement on value preferences. [Thank you for putting up with my ranting--I just had to get it out.]
- esafak 3y ago
  I think these are distinct concepts that unfortunately share the same word in the English language.
- th0ma5 3y ago
  But you list a bunch of factual inaccuracies which go beyond just preference.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    If I understood correctly: Those factual inconsistencies betray that it is just a value preference. Value arguments presented as factual arguments are the de facto mode of arguing. And this is wrong.
numeromancer 3y ago
"When the facts change..." So it is possible to go back in time! Good to know.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  It's possible to go forward in time, which might change the statement, "It is currently daytime," to become false (or true).
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. For that, it is necessary to allow oneself to be persuaded. Sometimes you become so hardened by argumentation that you react by becoming dismissive even when others attempt to engage seriously. I try not to fall into this trap especially when posting here but I don't think I always succeed. There are truths I really do hold to be self-evident and it's tiring to have to constantly defend them. For example, it's extremely tiresome to defend encryption against endless "think of the children" arguments.
chris_wot 3y ago
I am just wondering how facts can change? I thought they were provable truths… Isn’t this why Kelly Anne Conways was blasted for her “alternative facts” statement? Apologies for adding a controversial political aspect to this, btw, it’s just that it seems to be an excellent example of the use of the word.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  Consider facts which are necessarily circumstantial or evidence-based-sans-evidence. In the former case, the fact will change based on circumstance and, in the latter, one does not know a fact. “Knowing” is an area of philosophy called epistemology: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology. No clue about the “alternative facts” quote but that sounds a lot like “facts which I would prefer to believe” and was perhaps rightly condemned (from an epistemological perspective). Note that “alternative” does not mean the same thing as “changed” or “updated”. As far as “changing or updating facts”, think about what this statement means at each hour of a 24-hour period: “It is currently daytime.”
  - chris_wot 3y ago
    Thank you, that actually answers my question.
zackmorris 3y ago
It's refreshing to see John Maynard Keynes pop up from time to time. Whenever I saw a video clip of a rival like the late Milton Friedman, it set off alarm bells in my gut, because he had a way of trying to convince questioners that their concerns were unfounded. It's easy to forget that economics is mostly made up like politics, so I found his adamant defense of various policies (as if they were natural law) grating and even disingenuous. Where this affected me personally was growing up under Reaganomics, watching Bill Clinton roll back social safety nets under Friedman-driven republican pressure to "control" spending (note that I didn't say "reduce"), then witnessing the abandon of common sense after the Dot Bomb and 9/11 as we entered an us-vs-them black and white view of reality where experienced people like John Kerry were called flip-floppers and discredited through propaganda campaigns. The COVID-19 pandemic, among other things, finally revealed how disconnected monetary policy is from outcomes. We now live in a world where we witnessed the lowest-paid people die on the front lines feeding us, while people shrilly squealed about the excess of $1400 relief checks. We see how the fight for a $15/hr living wage was eliminated overnight by profit-driven inflation and home prices increasing by 500% or more since 2000. Now half the US and global population lives on basically no money, having no wealth or access to capital to speak of, while a few hundred billionaires own everything, due to the free market abandon of progressive tax rates. I could go on literally forever here, because things have gotten so bad along so many indicators that now everyone can see that the emperor has no clothes. We could very easily undo all of this today through the democratic process of using our voting power to choose policies which actually help people. The total wealth of US billionaires is $4.5 trillion, about 15% of the national debt. The top 10% owns $95 trillion: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-g... So the money is out there, it's just held in the hands of a small minority of people. Why are we paying the taxes? The national debt is an assured investment that provides those with capital (money) a guaranteed income, while working people barred from capital are the ones paying. In what reality does it make sense for workers to pay people who already have money? Yet this is the basis of our current economic system. Soo... now what? I highly recommend reading up on Keynes, check out people like Thom Hartmann for an alternative reading of these trends, and avoid broadcast news. Loosely that means to endorse policies which increase the median quality of life, not the average (which is skewed by wealthy outliers). I know that many of you will disagree with my analysis here, but we're past that now. Gen X as a whole has about half the disposable income of Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z have more like 1/4. With the consolidation of most resources and capital under a handful of companies and Congress only aligning with the public's majority vote 10% of the time, we're facing the loss of the American Dream and America itself if geopolitical forces align against the dogmatic policies we cling to.
kgodey 3y ago
I'm always amazed that people have so many opinions to begin with. My default for most things is "I don't know enough about that to have an opinion".
bell-cot 3y ago
Gut reaction: Did the facts actually change...or did a new fact just show up in your too-small and poorly-curated collection of facts? If the latter - be very aware that adding one perhaps-important-feeling new fact will not substantially change the quality of your collection.
mrangle 3y ago
The trivially easy method for bad actors to create "new information" is to lie. This often can be accomplished by leaving out a single line of context. In other instances, the lie is more brazen. Politics is little more than a debate over the final authority to establish and contextualize facts, and the moral authority that arises out of that victory to tax and legally suppress the political competition. Which means that politics, and their facts, are only the caveman survival competition moved to the realm of (mostly) Media and Law. It is axiomatic that those who mostly win at establishing the facts are those who have most of the political and social power.
ineedasername 3y ago
Controversial answer (maybe. also Xpost from similar popular story today [4]:): Not changing you mind may be appropriate* (I'll explain [1]) though it also reminds me of a famous and apt observation [2]. [1] New facts do not always permit a change of mind because they they may support. indisputable but incompatible explanations/opinions/points of view.More facts are needed to reconcile things. For this reason a person should strive to cultivate the skill of believing positions at the some time opinions, wholly incompatible. This is difficult. It takes effort and practice to partition your mind in a way that separates belief in one viewpoint from the belief in the other. It is often uncomfortable [3], and for me I can only truly achieve it for brief moments. Nonetheless it's an extremely useful skill to navigate encountering new information & consider another person's viewpoint when it contradicts my own. Ideally new information eventually comes along that explains how both can be true at the time. [2] Quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" --Ralph Waldo Emerson [3] To reveal some very personal details, I was helped in honing this skill by having to deal with mental health issues that force completely irrational thoughts on me at the same time that I attempt, with varying degrees of success, to bring down a hammer of rational reasoning and logic against those thoughts. The former makes for a tortuous experience in itself, while the later imposes an very strange but helpful contradictory belief with both held in my head simultaneously. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497361
CodeWriter23 3y ago
The thing about facts, they don’t change. What changes is what you perceive to be facts.
apienx 3y ago
"When the facts change" is another way of saying "When your interpretation of reality is wrong and it gets corrected".
deleted 3y ago
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Borrible 3y ago
Depends on their utility. Facts are throwaway truths. They lose their value over time.
scott-smith_us 3y ago
I've never understood that proud declaration some people make "Once I make up my mind, I never go back". "Oh, so in the face of new information, you doggedly stick to your original conclusion? You magnificent bastard, you."

177 points by mhb 3y ago

Some of these anecdotes about Keynes remind me of the bit from Theory of Everything where Hawking and his wife are entertaining a guest. The guest asks Hawking what he is working on and Hawking replies that he is attempting to prove black holes don't exist. "But I thought you'd proven that black holes do exist?" inquires the guest. "That was my Ph.D. thesis," says Hawking.

MaxGabriel 3y ago

Does anyone else get an infinite redirect loop visiting on mobile safari? Edit: it’s fixed by requesting the desktop website.

alfanick 3y ago
No, but I get 20 different ads that are covering 70% of a screen and they're not blocked. Instant close.
- Vvector 3y ago
  Sometimes I just forget how awesome uBlock Origin has been doing it's job for EIGHT years
  - knodi123 3y ago
    I sent my father in law an article the other day, and he wound up clicking a scam ad that got his computer hacked. He showed it to me, it wasn't the most obviously scammy ad I've seen- plenty of people who didn't grow up with the internet might have fallen for it! But anyway, on my laptop, the article was just clean text and a byline with some well-formatted images. Failing to install ublock on your parents computer is a form of abuse! :-)
- gcanyon 3y ago
  Interesting. I have Safari on MacOS, with Ads from AdBlockPro installed, and StopTheMadness, and I'm seeing zero ads.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Javascript kept disabled by default...zero ads, zero evidence of ads existing.
jdoliner 3y ago
When the url changes I redirect, what do you do sir?

fallingfrog 3y ago

Of course it’s important to also not accept without question the facts that a person gives you, because people do lie. For example, do you really think that shirt is 40% off today only? That’s probably just a lie. I saw a TikTok video yesterday that showed a picture showing a picture of a girl with an underdeveloped jaw and the voiceover said it was because she breathed through her mouth too much. One of the comments pointed out that this is actually a specific genetic condition. So the poster of the TikTok invented a new “fact” out of thin air and presented it as truth. To change my mind based on that would be a mistake.

themitigating 3y ago
This is a mistake I made recently. There are false facts, or lies. True facts and opinions
- dylan604 3y ago
  This is what I've tried to instill in those that I've had the opportunity to preach on a soapbox. It is not wrong to have a belief that is different from others. It is also not wrong to not immediately change those beliefs when presented counter information so that you may take time to interpret what that new information means. If you decide that new information is correct, it is also not wrong to change your beliefs based on the new information. It is also not wrong to question the source of the new information.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    I'll add to be wise enough to distinguish from topics you should have your opinion drom those ypi shouldn't. E.g. a brain surgeon and his views on quantum physics, said surgeon should have an opinion on brain surgery, a good one that changes based on his qualified evaluation of new facts while he is perfectly fine of jist going with whatever the latest consensus regarding Higgs bosoms or some other quantum physics topic is. If that makes any sense.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    My opinions are parametrized. They're contingent on explicit premises, and if I'm exposed to new evidence they can change instantly.

meghan_rain 3y ago

I double down, Sir!

deleted 3y ago
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thenerdhead 3y ago

I really value people who change their mind gradually when new information, events, etc happen. I do not value people who change their mind frequently because they cannot think for themselves. The last decade has really shown to me that people do not think for themselves. The devastating effect of the great depression changed Keynes mind and he adapted his theories to it, you would think the same would happen for significant events that have happened recently too.

TOMDM 3y ago
To be trite, "Don't be so open minded that your brain falls out"
phkahler 3y ago
>> The last decade has really shown to me that people do not think for themselves. Thinking takes time and effort. It's important to allocate those resources to things we care about. Some are lazy, but I suspect a lot don't really care.
thieving_magpie 3y ago
I agree with you but it's an awkward set of criteria: - Change your mind when new information is given, that is thinking for yourself. - Don't change it too much, that is not thinking for yourself. - Not changing your mind is also not thinking for yourself. Like I say, I agree with you but the nuance here is difficult to explain.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think the nuance is: knee-jerk reactions are bad, thoughtful reactions are good.
- canjobear 3y ago
  The key thing is to change your mind because the facts truly have changed, as opposed to changing your mind because everyone else did.
fullshark 3y ago

ablob 3y ago

When the facts change, I consider changing my mind. Albeit nitpicky, not every changed fact forces a different conclusion.

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

brightball 3y ago

I questioned where the original facts came from and where the new facts came from and how we know that they actually changed?

lordkirchner 3y ago

A humbling exercise for anyone is, for any given belief, writing down specifically what inputs and logic lead to that belief, and specifically what inputs and logic would lead to changing that belief. Almost everyone would find that almost all of their beliefs are based on very flimsy input/logic, and the bar for changing that belief is unfairly and wildly asymmetric.

ohwellhere 3y ago
I think most people base most beliefs on being told that they're true. Full stop. It really comes down to who you are listening to and why; most critical to this is the birth lottery.
- mabbo 3y ago
  But do they know that? I suspect most people believe themselves quite logical as to how they've arrived at their beliefs.
escapedmoose 3y ago
Learning to do this formally in a college philosophy/logic class broke my brain in the best way and drastically altered the kind of person I became from that point on. For context: I came from a religious family which had trained me not to trust my science teachers, but they hadn’t warned me against philosophers.

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steveklabnik 3y ago

“I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves.

grogenaut 3y ago
This explains some of the physics in John wick then
- nine_k 3y ago
  If the screenplay requires 2 and 2 to add to 5 for a dramatic effect, this certainty can be shown! But Mr Reeves says about (not) trying to change someone else's mind, not own mind.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  What is truly amazing about the production of John Wick is that while yes the physics of the movies are… not realistic, they take an obscene amount of care about the gun safety. Which given the themes of the movie is pretty funny, but for the members of the production, I’m glad it’s not a joke.
throw7 3y ago
"Don't wrestle with pigs." The issue though is when pigs get to make the laws.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  Oh yeah, for sure. I wouldn't personally advocate for living your entire life by this quote. But it is funny.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> “I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves. Nice one. I say something more aggressive like: "excuse me, I go back down to earth talking with doctors saving patients' lives and engineers creating the planes in which you fly!".

renewiltord 3y ago

I'll put up with convincing my family and friends. But if there is arbitrary person X, and if you were to sample X's views and they had no correlation with the truth if "time studying subject" is removed, then that person is a low information source. For most people, I get to sample their view on something occasionally. I have no idea how far they are in the process of being wrong. Someone who is almost always wrong until they are convinced is a low coefficient source of information. It's not enough to be convinced. You have to be right a lot. That's just how it is. This has served me well so far.

fwungy 3y ago

If there's a scientist on TV I do what they say.

slicktux 3y ago
“ Hey, Man of Science with your perfect rules of measure Can you improve this place with the data that you gather?”
gettodachoppa 3y ago
Same. I wait for academics and journalists to tell me what to think, then I go around wearing my "I Heckin' Love Science!" T-shirt, yell "Trust the science" from my car at random pedestrians, and try to cancel any heretics who don't loudly agree.

layer8 3y ago

> In conclusion, Keynes did express a similar idea in 1924, but he employed a different phrasing. Arguably, Bayes and Laplace already expressed that idea.

vonwoodson 3y ago

This is the second article (although the first was just a Tweet..) today about changing your mind. Here on the internet, I'm not surprised see how much hatred there is of people who change their minds/opinions. It's easy to see that folks appreciate consistency over correctness. This is obvious, primarily because folks who are consistent are easier to predict, in action and motivation, and therefore easier to plan for. This is a great personality for leaders/CEOs/politicians because the time-scale of large multi-person coordination requires that change is limited in scope and that only justifiable/authorized change is allowed. Allocation of power and authority being the purpose of social organization. If you are not a leader, than you need to stop holding onto this terrible world view. The only path to truthy-knowledge, that we know of, is empirical observation and testing of hypothesis; The Scientific Method. Believe it or not, leading people is a skill older than science and has it's foundations in manipulation and control. And, in this system, "truth" does not matter at all. Or, even worse, "alternative truth" is acceptable as long as it suits your power-structure and social goals. I am not a king/CEO/Pharaoh/President and, as such, hold consistency in about as high regard as used toilet-paper. I am, alternatively, an engineer and I have an ethical obligation to be correct. I have this duty, regardless of what people and their "common sense" or opinions may be. In other-words: I reserve the right to change my mind, at any time, when presented with new information. It absolutely must be this way. It may infuriate folks around me and make me look like a fool; yet, what is ethics if it's not doing the right thing in the face of adversity? I'm also going to leave this [here](https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-code/ https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...) as a starting point for any young or maturing software engineers who need a foundation or jumping-off point to expand their understanding about ethics.

bodecker 3y ago
With regards to The Scientific Method (and other ideas mentioned), I found some of David Deutsch's work thought-provoking. Namely, the idea that deductive reasoning is more effective than inductive when seeking new hypotheses. The Beginning of Infinity is a decent starting place [0]. Also related to some of Nassim Taleb's work. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143121359 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143121359
3y ago

membrcovidb 3y ago

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AYoung010 3y ago
is this a joke lol

codexb 3y ago

Ironic that the article uses Keynes as an example for an admirable virtue that Keynes didn't really employ himself. Keynes didn't actually change his mind, he simply changed his arguments to justify a consistent belief that deficit spending was the answer to virtually all economic woes.

ajross 3y ago
I really don't think "deficit spending was the answer to virtually all economic woes" is a remotely correct characterization of Keynes' theories or contributions. Frankly that's just a libertarian strawman, and deploying it in a thread notionally about rational discourse seems sort of unserious.
- knodi123 3y ago
  > and deploying it in a thread notionally about rational discourse seems sort of unserious. You should see the guy above complaining that woke liberals want to declare math to be white supremacy.
- codexb 3y ago
  Forgive me for not writing a full dissertation dissecting all the terrible ideas that Keynes had. I think my characterization is a pretty accurate shorthand to summarize his primary contribution to economic theory, and the theory that he is best known for championing (in America at least). Either way, it's irrelevant what Keynes actual theory was; the point of my argument is that he continued to offer proposal after proposal and excuse after excuse for why his theory didn't actually work in practice (to end the Great Depression) instead of changing his mind and accepting that he was just wrong.
imtringued 3y ago
It's actually just a stopgap and since it generates inflation much sooner than monetary policy you also have to do less of it to achieve the same outcome. If you understand his liquidity preference theory and his Bancor proposal, then you would understand that the irrationality of deficit spending mirrors the irrationality of the system. Why bother with deficit spending if the system worked even if you leave it alone? Oh right the problem is that the system won't work if you leave it alone. Thus any attempt to bring it back to rationality will look as irrational as the system that is being fixed. The system leaves an irrational gap that needs to be closed with a filler that takes on the shape of the irrationality. Anyone who thinks that Keynes wasn't aware of the temporary nature of deficit spending doesn't know Keynes and instead fell for some caricature of him. The answer to neutralising liquidity preference is to charge symmetric fees to both positive and negative money balances that are immediately available. The Bancor plan was an implementation of that concept for trade/current account balances between nations. If your country generates too many export surpluses, then it has an incentive to reduce the surplus. If your country has an port surplus it also has an incentive to reduce the surplus. Thus there is an automatic stabilising mechanism that requires no intervention whatsoever. Countries can voluntarily join the Bancor system and although you might object that a perfect implementation requires strong capital controls, as long as there are political levers to encourage or discourage exports/imports, no capital controls are necessary. Balanced trade between nations means that the inequality between nations would quickly disappear because poorer countries are no longer building up foreign debt and richer countries are no longer piling up favours that they can use as geopolitical poker chips to go against the people's wishes in the poorer country. Alas there is no Bancor system. So deficit spending it is. Politicians love deficit spending so at least you can accomplish a tiny massively distorted fragment of the original plan instead of nothing at all. Applying symmetrical liquidity fees to domestic balances would result in intervention free full employment at which point the vast majority of neoclassical predictions would become true. If unemployment is nonexistent then there will be fewer unemployment benefits to pay out, which in turn means taxes can be cut, which in turn means that the purchasing power of workers goes up, which in turn means a lot of public spending becomes unnecessary. The one thing it wouldn't fix is that the rent will still be too damn high but since people have jobs they can afford to pay rent.

andrewclunn 3y ago

I ask where you get your "facts" from. Humility is important for sure (or perhaps taking pride in becoming right rather than being right), but it is pointless if you have no solid footing for epistomology. A "humble" academic who is endlessly skeptical of all personal observations, but turns a blind eye to the distorted incentives and lackluster filtering within the halls of the academy (concerning both publication at the surface level and the demarcation problem at a more fundamental one), is just a different form of arrogant.

adamwong246 3y ago

It doesn't matter whats "right" or "correct". What matters is what people _believe_. And humans seem to love confident strong-men who clear away their doubts. So while I understand that value of reason, there's a tragic flaw in this high-mindedness- no one wants to follow a man without a clear voice. No one wants to listen to the manager , or CEO, or President, who "waffles".

0xEF 3y ago
They do, however, want to listen to the leader who can discern good into from bad, and make decisions or alter course as needed as new good info comes to light. I think it's important to zoom out a bit when considering what we humans seek in a leader. Confidence, yes, but also the ability to change one's mind is a marker of intelligence as opposed to the cognitive impairment that is concrete thinking.
- adamwong246 3y ago
  I do not mean to be rude but were you not witness to the terrible spectacle of DJT as POTUS? Stupid-confidence led that fool to the highest office in the world. It seems to me the average voter prefers to maintain "the feels" over even their very survival?
mihaic 3y ago
Sure, everyone like to follow strength. I don't want someone to lead me just with confident bullshit though, which has been hyperoptimized for in recent years in politics. When before confidence came as the result of skill and experience, now it's all "fake it till you make it". The fact that we can't distinguigh between the two is a problem with our culture, which we actually can improve upon by explicitly condemning in public baseless confidence.
kashunstva 3y ago
> follow a man or woman

Anon_Forever 3y ago

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knodi123 3y ago
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WaitWaitWha 3y ago

This in my mind can be a dangerous path, if I am not disciplined to validate the new information. In all this the presumption is the "facts change", "information change", and "persuasion" is done from a basis of objective truth. In Keyes (btw Sun Tzu 孫子 said something similar a wee bit earlier) notes this presumption is present, such that the information added to financial decision is objectively true. But, in my experience in life (and even in investing) there are objective truths and then derivatives of objective & subjective truths. These second type of truths are often presented still as objective truths. To what percentage of the objective & subjective intermingle and when I decide the "truth" is now too subjective is... subjective. Its that puzzled look in my inner monologue that triggers the question "is this truth objective enough to be considered to influence my current stance?" In general I think as we gain more life experiences, the less subjective truths we tolerate in such derivative truths. Externally, this may manifest itself as jaded, or stubborn. And, finally, even when we think something is objective -> 2+2=5

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knorker 3y ago

If my internet arguments are anything to go by, when people hear that they yell "facts don't change, that's what makes them facts!".

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: It's weird that people get mocked for changing their minds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491735 - June 2023 (179 comments)

Libre___ 3y ago

Reminds me of Julia Galefs videos on Bayesian inference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8

jonathanstrange 3y ago
Bayesian inference only works for "the cat is on the mat" examples. In reality, hypothesis and theory discovery and model selection are highly complex and neither a theory/hypothesis/model's accuracy nor the subjective probability that it's true are the decisive criterion for choosing the best one.

dpcan 3y ago

I have lived by these words for many years: “Every time I’m wrong, I learn something new.” I repeat this to myself. I look for reasons to be wrong. Everything I think I know how to do well, I assume someone has a better way of doing it, and I want to know that way. I don’t even stop short when it comes to religion or politics. You believe in God, convince me, that sounds great. Your political views are right? Okay, show me the evidence, I’ll listen and explore the idea. But I do stand by what I am pretty certain is a fact if there would be consequences otherwise. That being said, I have very little confidence that I know any actual “facts”.

brabel 3y ago

Sorry for the tangent, but TIL: the word "kudos" was already in use in 1933: "But since there are people who deem it creditable if one does not change one’s mind, I should like to get what kudos I can from not having done so on this occasion!" And I thought it was some kind of youth slang :D (English is my second language but I've been using it primarily for most of my life).

JimtheCoder 3y ago

Is it just me, or is it usually the people who usually profess loudly that, "When the facts change, I change my mind" are the people who are least likely to change their mind when facts change. Just a random observation

nologic01 3y ago

Is that some sort of Turing test? I mean, obviously LLM's would "change their minds" every time the "facts" change as they get retrained. Are all of them Keynesians now? [1] So maybe steadfast refusal to acknowledge reality is what makes us really human? An interesting thought. 8-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_all_Keynesians_now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_all_Keynesians_now

nerdchum 3y ago

I never have my mind set in the first place. Life is massively ambiguous with an infinite myriad of solutions to any problem. I think the smart way to be is to simply say I truly don't know but the data I'm currently using leads me to believe such and such...

GMoromisato 3y ago

I personally believe that there are two kinds of beliefs: 1. Factual: These are beliefs based on models, e.g., "the Earth goes around the sun". You can test these models with predictions and if the predictions are wrong, you need to update your model. 2. Value preferences: E.g., "chocolate ice cream is the best dessert". These are non-testable beliefs because they do not have an objectively correct value. You can't say that a preference is "wrong" or "right". The problem is that all important arguments are arguments about value preferences, but we treat them as factual arguments. Take something like what to do about global warming. This seems like a factual argument because lots of people don't even agree that the world is getting warmer. But the real problem is a value preference: People who don't believe in climate change simply don't think the effort required to solve the problem is worth the benefit, and they're using motivated reasoning to deny the warming. This is obvious when you see them move the goalposts: 1. The climate is not changing. 2. The climate is changing, but not because of humans. 3. Humans are changing the climate, but it's too late to do anything about it. The real issue is that we disagree on how much sacrifice we should make to help people of the future--people who, on current trends, will be richer than we are, just as we are richer than the world of the 1950s. But there is no correct answer to "how much should we sacrifice to solve global warming." It's a value preference. And this is true for every issue. Any issue can be reduced to a disagreement on value preferences. [Thank you for putting up with my ranting--I just had to get it out.]

esafak 3y ago
I think these are distinct concepts that unfortunately share the same word in the English language.
th0ma5 3y ago
But you list a bunch of factual inaccuracies which go beyond just preference.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  If I understood correctly: Those factual inconsistencies betray that it is just a value preference. Value arguments presented as factual arguments are the de facto mode of arguing. And this is wrong.

numeromancer 3y ago

"When the facts change..." So it is possible to go back in time! Good to know.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
It's possible to go forward in time, which might change the statement, "It is currently daytime," to become false (or true).

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. For that, it is necessary to allow oneself to be persuaded. Sometimes you become so hardened by argumentation that you react by becoming dismissive even when others attempt to engage seriously. I try not to fall into this trap especially when posting here but I don't think I always succeed. There are truths I really do hold to be self-evident and it's tiring to have to constantly defend them. For example, it's extremely tiresome to defend encryption against endless "think of the children" arguments.

chris_wot 3y ago

I am just wondering how facts can change? I thought they were provable truths… Isn’t this why Kelly Anne Conways was blasted for her “alternative facts” statement? Apologies for adding a controversial political aspect to this, btw, it’s just that it seems to be an excellent example of the use of the word.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Consider facts which are necessarily circumstantial or evidence-based-sans-evidence. In the former case, the fact will change based on circumstance and, in the latter, one does not know a fact. “Knowing” is an area of philosophy called epistemology: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology. No clue about the “alternative facts” quote but that sounds a lot like “facts which I would prefer to believe” and was perhaps rightly condemned (from an epistemological perspective). Note that “alternative” does not mean the same thing as “changed” or “updated”. As far as “changing or updating facts”, think about what this statement means at each hour of a 24-hour period: “It is currently daytime.”
- chris_wot 3y ago
  Thank you, that actually answers my question.

zackmorris 3y ago

It's refreshing to see John Maynard Keynes pop up from time to time. Whenever I saw a video clip of a rival like the late Milton Friedman, it set off alarm bells in my gut, because he had a way of trying to convince questioners that their concerns were unfounded. It's easy to forget that economics is mostly made up like politics, so I found his adamant defense of various policies (as if they were natural law) grating and even disingenuous. Where this affected me personally was growing up under Reaganomics, watching Bill Clinton roll back social safety nets under Friedman-driven republican pressure to "control" spending (note that I didn't say "reduce"), then witnessing the abandon of common sense after the Dot Bomb and 9/11 as we entered an us-vs-them black and white view of reality where experienced people like John Kerry were called flip-floppers and discredited through propaganda campaigns. The COVID-19 pandemic, among other things, finally revealed how disconnected monetary policy is from outcomes. We now live in a world where we witnessed the lowest-paid people die on the front lines feeding us, while people shrilly squealed about the excess of $1400 relief checks. We see how the fight for a $15/hr living wage was eliminated overnight by profit-driven inflation and home prices increasing by 500% or more since 2000. Now half the US and global population lives on basically no money, having no wealth or access to capital to speak of, while a few hundred billionaires own everything, due to the free market abandon of progressive tax rates. I could go on literally forever here, because things have gotten so bad along so many indicators that now everyone can see that the emperor has no clothes. We could very easily undo all of this today through the democratic process of using our voting power to choose policies which actually help people. The total wealth of US billionaires is $4.5 trillion, about 15% of the national debt. The top 10% owns $95 trillion: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-generations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-g... So the money is out there, it's just held in the hands of a small minority of people. Why are we paying the taxes? The national debt is an assured investment that provides those with capital (money) a guaranteed income, while working people barred from capital are the ones paying. In what reality does it make sense for workers to pay people who already have money? Yet this is the basis of our current economic system. Soo... now what? I highly recommend reading up on Keynes, check out people like Thom Hartmann for an alternative reading of these trends, and avoid broadcast news. Loosely that means to endorse policies which increase the median quality of life, not the average (which is skewed by wealthy outliers). I know that many of you will disagree with my analysis here, but we're past that now. Gen X as a whole has about half the disposable income of Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z have more like 1/4. With the consolidation of most resources and capital under a handful of companies and Congress only aligning with the public's majority vote 10% of the time, we're facing the loss of the American Dream and America itself if geopolitical forces align against the dogmatic policies we cling to.

kgodey 3y ago

I'm always amazed that people have so many opinions to begin with. My default for most things is "I don't know enough about that to have an opinion".

bell-cot 3y ago

Gut reaction: Did the facts actually change...or did a new fact just show up in your too-small and poorly-curated collection of facts? If the latter - be very aware that adding one perhaps-important-feeling new fact will not substantially change the quality of your collection.

mrangle 3y ago

The trivially easy method for bad actors to create "new information" is to lie. This often can be accomplished by leaving out a single line of context. In other instances, the lie is more brazen. Politics is little more than a debate over the final authority to establish and contextualize facts, and the moral authority that arises out of that victory to tax and legally suppress the political competition. Which means that politics, and their facts, are only the caveman survival competition moved to the realm of (mostly) Media and Law. It is axiomatic that those who mostly win at establishing the facts are those who have most of the political and social power.

ineedasername 3y ago

Controversial answer (maybe. also Xpost from similar popular story today [4]:): Not changing you mind may be appropriate* (I'll explain [1]) though it also reminds me of a famous and apt observation [2]. [1] New facts do not always permit a change of mind because they they may support. indisputable but incompatible explanations/opinions/points of view.More facts are needed to reconcile things. For this reason a person should strive to cultivate the skill of believing positions at the some time opinions, wholly incompatible. This is difficult. It takes effort and practice to partition your mind in a way that separates belief in one viewpoint from the belief in the other. It is often uncomfortable [3], and for me I can only truly achieve it for brief moments. Nonetheless it's an extremely useful skill to navigate encountering new information & consider another person's viewpoint when it contradicts my own. Ideally new information eventually comes along that explains how both can be true at the time. [2] Quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" --Ralph Waldo Emerson [3] To reveal some very personal details, I was helped in honing this skill by having to deal with mental health issues that force completely irrational thoughts on me at the same time that I attempt, with varying degrees of success, to bring down a hammer of rational reasoning and logic against those thoughts. The former makes for a tortuous experience in itself, while the later imposes an very strange but helpful contradictory belief with both held in my head simultaneously. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497361

CodeWriter23 3y ago

The thing about facts, they don’t change. What changes is what you perceive to be facts.

apienx 3y ago

"When the facts change" is another way of saying "When your interpretation of reality is wrong and it gets corrected".

deleted 3y ago

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Borrible 3y ago

Depends on their utility. Facts are throwaway truths. They lose their value over time.

scott-smith_us 3y ago

I've never understood that proud declaration some people make "Once I make up my mind, I never go back". "Oh, so in the face of new information, you doggedly stick to your original conclusion? You magnificent bastard, you."