Tower of Beliefs

The famous economist, John Maynard Keynes supposedly said:
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
And yet, it is so hard to do for most people most of the time.

In his book, Superpredictors, Philip Tetlock has a great explanation as to why people resist changing their minds (no, the reason’s not always ego):
“Visualize the children’s game Jenga, which starts with building blocks stacked one on top of another to form a little tower. Players take turns removing building blocks until someone removes the block that topples the tower. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world are built on each other in a Jenga-like fashion.”
When people find a core belief proven wrong, the reason they resist is:
“It’s a lot harder to pull that block out without upsetting other blocks.”
A big chunk of the tower of beliefs may come crashing down: that’s why people are so pig-headed.

This made a whole lot of sense. It also explains why kids seem so open to changing their minds: their tower isn’t so tall yet; and they’re still used to finding new facts that disrupt their worldview all the time.

Take my 4 year old. Once, I tried explaining how eclipses happen using a torch (sun), and two balloons (earth and moon). I told her that when the shadow of the first balloon falls on the second balloon, it’s called an eclipse. Immediately, she interrupted me and asked, “So you’re telling me the earth is like a balloon?” When I said Yes, she dismissed me saying:
“Can’t be true. If we stand on a balloon, we’d just fall off.”
So I gave up. And then some time later, when I was reading her a Tintin comic where an eclipse happens, she turns to me and says:
“Oh, that’s just the moon’s shadow. Don’t they know that?”

Since then, she’s noticed that the earth is shown to be round everywhere (globes at school, TV serials); and so I tried cornering her by asking, “How can that be true? Wouldn’t we fall off?” To which she replied:
“We live at the top of the ball; so we don’t fall off.”

I can see she’s finding ways to incrementally update her tower of beliefs without bringing it crashing down. I guess most people keep trying to do just that: incremental updates. But when they run headlong into a contradictory fact that cannot be reconciled, that’s when they either make the (mentally) painful change to a new model or take an ostrich like approach of pretending that the new fact doesn’t exist or that it is wrong.

I hope my kid turns out to be more like Darwin and Newton than like the Church that killed Galileo.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarMarch 3, 2016 at 10:07 AM

    That made me recall an exchange between Bertrand Russel and a stubborn Christian faithful dame.

    Dame: Your science is all wrong. The earth is not round.
    Russel: Why do you say that?
    Dame: If earth were round we would all fall off. Earth is flat. (She said flatly!)
    Russel: Oh! So you believe that the flat earth rests on a tortoise too? (which was the superstition of many there.)
    Dame: Sure I do.
    Russel: Well then, on what do the legs of the tortoise stand?
    Dame: Young man, don't try to be clever! The tortoise legs go all the way down!

    That is when Russel realized that it a monumental task to pull people out of the pit of ignorance. The ignorance goes all the way down! :-)

    Some people are inclined to believe that only science about truth and religion is about dogmas. Actually science is by no means a unique contender for truth. It is said that Mahatma Gandhi believed in truth intrinsically and he was no scientist. And he was a religious faithful. It was observed many a time that if he was found wrong and when he realized that, he had no difficulty at all in changing his stand. No unease, no ego about it at all. There have been, and there are, some others like him too.

    Thus, what is needed in us is the ability to set aside our ego (which survives through clinging/attachment and dislikes/hates in order to enslave us) while developing an open mindset towards acceptance of truth. Not many people succeed in this though.

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