Ideas v/s Changing Your Mind

Sometimes, when we see people (or companies) make terrible choices and get butchered, we wonder: How could they not have seen that coming? Why didn’t they think deeper about it when they had a chance?

There are (obviously) many reasons for that, but here are a few more of the common ones. Sometimes, it’s because people have a mental model of the world that they truly believe in. Leonardo di Caprio describes it in the movie, Inception:
“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

What’s worse is that just having an opinion is bad enough at times, says Leo Tolstoy:
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

Then there’s the incentive issue at play. Or as Upton Sinclair said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Having discussions about topics and ideas may sound like a good way to avoid these traps. Except that too has a risk: discussions inevitably become debates; and in a debate, you have to pick a side. That reminds me what Mike Burry said:
"I hated discussing ideas…because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.”

Mental laziness, the unwillingness to re-think a topic, is another cause, writes Seth Godin:
“The laziness of rules of thumb, which means we won't have to think very hard about the problem in front of us.”

And even if you surmount all those hurdles, there’s another mountain to climb at the end of it all, says Charlie Munger:
“The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it.”

All of the above is probably is why Howard Aiken once said:
"Don't worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you're ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarFebruary 19, 2018 at 11:09 AM

    A good blog, which covers more ground than what looks on the surface. It is about human psychology: "as stuck as it gets"!

    The blog writer seems to have the ability to make the idea-flow happen through continuous quotes with very little of own words, which is never easy. It may be one kind of ability which is Shakespearean, in which the author 'becomes' a character and says what the character says it would appear; and then the author switches to the other character magically, and so on! It is surely another kind of ability to say what one wants to say through the words of others (I mean quotes here) who say it all with 'a punch' perhaps. Mind you the 'ability part' that I talk about comes when there is 'a development, not one single quote'. :-)

    Some quotes I particularly liked in this blog are:

    “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he ... knows already...”

    "I hated discussing ideas…because I then become a Defender of the Idea, ...” (See, almost nobody would believe that you can stand outside and analyse pros and cons!)

    "Don't worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you're ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (I know this pretty well. It happens to many of us in life. Sometimes I could be victim, for example; and sometimes sadly I could actually be the perpetrator, out of ignorance in specific areas! We are all human.
    By the way, many glorious scientists have suffered on this account actually. Fortunately in sciences, however much other traditional scientists and science establishment reject upcoming ideas that are based on both rationality and properly based on cause-effect relationship, truth will triumph over time. It is one domain where subjectivity cannot take over overriding truth and consistency. Probably no other domain can never rise to that standard.)

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