This is a false dichotomy that can be resolved by coloring understanding with epistemic status. It's prudent to grow understanding of confused and contentious things, of points of view that seem alien, as long as you don't forget they are not your own (at least initially), and don't let them take over all of your time. Understanding things well requires taking them seriously, but carries no obligation to believe or endorse what you come to understand.
This understanding then lets you speak its language, to find signal in other things that otherwise would seem like noise or senseless conflict. Occasionally, it turns out to contain valuable lessons, something worth endorsing. Crucially, this is the only practical way to defeat path dependence, to make your own epistemic luck.
There is a different thing that is sometimes called "open-mindedness", but which is also called lightness —
The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting, the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.
People sometimes tell me to be more open-minded. That it’s always a positive trait, all else being equal.
I disagree.
I think what they mean is that you should be willing to take new arguments on board. That we should change our minds when presented with new evidence (and be willing to). And maybe that’s right if you have a small social circle and you’re meeting someone different to you for the first time. But I have 30,000 followers on Twitter and engage in multiple intellectual sparring matches a day, many of my friends are evangelicals, UK right wingers or bay area liberals. I am not lacking for content.
So implicit within the request is to be more open-minded to good ideas or sometimes, to me. This is a much flimsier request.
See what I need is to be more judicious—to triage the conversations coming in and engage with the ones that are actually likely to change my mind, or that are important somehow. Or that come from people who have a forecasting track record, or who have made a lot of money.
The thing the “be more open-minded” people miss is that changing your mind takes energy. Open-mindedness has a cost. And I am already near my limit. The advice then implicitly resolves to one of two things: develop huge new amounts of capacity, or be more closed-minded somewhere else to free up space. And it’s kind of exhausting to say this at the moment of challenge. Sometimes I prefer to say “No”.
I generally think that there is an underrated emotional component to changing one’s mind. That one often has to feel safe or relaxed. And unlimited open-mindedness doesn’t cause this in me. If I am at conferences for too long, able to be talked to by anyone, I want to go hide somewhere. This is how I feel about taking every new idea on board also. It gives me a burst of high cortisol (which is probably partly why I do it[1]).
What about people in general? Again, I tend to think “be more calibrated in your open-mindedness.” Are you in a new space, with kinds of people you haven’t met before? Or full of much wiser people than you tend to hang out with? I recommend being open-minded for a day or a week. Then going back and thinking about it, perhaps writing it down.
Perhaps be more openminded when reading community notes or prediction markets or wikipedia. Things where there is some mechanism that generally causes coherent things to float to the top. Perhaps be much more willing to take the seriously the first disagreement of each day and engage with it seriously, perhaps change your mind[2].
Overall I think people worry about epistemic lock-in. That if we stop being open-minded then we might get locked into bad decisions. And sure, this is a risk, but but I think too much open-mindedness can lead to harms too.
I recall reading one of those books telling white people how not to be racist. At the end of the first chapter it said that if I felt defensive, this was a sign that the book was especially for me. So I put it down. I know what it looks like when either answer (not feeling defensive or feeling defensive) leads to the same conclusion (one is probably racist). It’s a cult-y tactic. But uhhh, what happened to a lot of white liberals who engaged with such works and took on board any level of criticism. Are they glad of their open-mindedness? How did many vote in the last US election? I am not so sure that huge open-mindedness was the optimal strategy here[3].
So open-mindedness in general? It’s a mixed bag. There are many ideas out there and most of them are bad. I do not need to engage with them all. I am much more willing to update on someone with a track record than a reply guy with a blank profile picture. Most people implicitly know this—they’re more open-minded with their friends than with strangers[4]. So next time someone tells you to be more open-minded, consider if you should be more closed-minded to them!
Nathan do you have an unhealthy relationship to stress? Maybe.
I like this strategy by the way. Learn one thing. Have one substantive conversation. Turn one thing I don’t understand into a flashcard. There is a big difference between changing one’s mind zero times and giving it one genuine shot per social outing/social media session.
I am not saying this is a large effect, but my model is sometimes people get overwhelmed and then move to a hugely self protective position. See also: Immigration, trans rights. We might see the effect the other way on Iran and Trump in general. It’s been noted that the left could choose to copy Trump’s playbooks. Once people bend too far, they may snap.
Though many, in my view, choose bad friends.