Changing your Mind is a Skill
And you should do so when better information becomes available.
The podcast version of these ideas is here (be gentle, this was my first one!)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock your entire life, you’ve heard this quote ad nauseam.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” —Einstein
If obvious and somewhat overused, it’s a good one. To get different results, we have to do something different…and to do that, the first thing we have to do is change our mind.
But most people can’t, and that is why the quote is so often repeated. Because whether it’s losing weight, getting a better job, saving money, earning better grades, or some other goal we have, we’re creatures of habit: not just our acts, but our thoughts—we think the same thoughts, inhabit the same environment, experience the same emotions, and…get the same results.
Behavior lives downstream of what’s in our heads: this is what it means to have free will.1 Unless it’s an autonomous process (like breathing), we have to decide what to do before we can do it. This is an easy task when deciding what to order for lunch, because the tradeoff between ordering a turkey melt instead of a ham sandwich isn’t something that’s going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. But in other cases, it’s not so easy, especially when it comes to the patterns of behavior that are central to our lives.
Why Change is so Difficult: Environment and Emotions
Enacting change is difficult for most people because we’re still thinking and living an existence that cannot accommodate such a change. For example, one could have the goal of running a marathon, but if she works 12 hours a day and orders takeout for half of her meals, her life has to change radically to accomplish this goal—even if we reduced it to simply running more often and eating healthy. This is why it’s almost impossible for people to change their beliefs about politics, morality, religion, philosophy, relationships, etc. Not only is it uncomfortable to wrestle with new ideas on their own, our habits and environment—unless they also change—keep the old ones locked in. For example, it would be very difficult for a cattle rancher in Montana to stop supporting Trump if all of his friends and neighbors are true believers.
Emotion further complicates the matter. Thought precedes behavior, but at the same time we are reacting to our emotions—not just the good ones, like happiness, satisfaction, or joy, but ANY emotion, because it makes us feel alive. Unfortunately, if social media has taught us anything, it appears that when it comes to politics and social behavior, people feel most alive when experiencing fear, anger, disgust, schadenfreude, and sanctimony.
It’s a hard cycle to break: the same thoughts influenced by the same emotions within the same environment lead to the same behaviors and manifest as a living homeostasis. It’s why people choose to live in ways that can be hard to understand—for example, why some women return to abusive relationships. Even though it is literally unsafe to stay with a man who hits her, it somehow feels safe, because it’s what she’s used to. Paradoxically, it also makes her feel alive, which is tragic. This dovetails with another common reason people don’t change their minds: because we’re waiting for other people to change so we don’t have to. 99% of the shouting and virtue signaling on social media is precisely this—people asking others to change to accommodate the world they would like to live in, rather than changing their own beliefs or behavior.
To change one’s mind takes an intentional interruption of this cycle—not just once or twice, but on an ongoing basis (on average, 66 days), until a new pattern is ingrained and becomes the status quo.
Step 1: Being Open-Minded to Access Our Intelligence
That said, people do it all the time, right? People quit jobs and start new ones, leave and enter relationships, learn new skills, embark on ambitious projects, move to a new city or country, get into better shape—some, after feeling that high you get after a hard work out, end up becoming gym rats. What allows some people to do this more effectively than others? The answer is that changing your mind is a skill, and some people are far more practiced at doing so than others.
Being “open-minded” is the first step. To change our mind, we first have to be aware that there’s an alternative mode of thought and see it as worthy of consideration. Unfortunately, given the modern affliction of screens, social media, algorithms, tribalism, and virtue signaling, people aren’t generally inclined toward being “open-minded”, despite the fact that they have more opportunity to view other modalities of thought than has ever been possible in human history.
Consider That What You Believe May Be Wrong
Elon Musk once said: “You should take the approach that your wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” He seems to no longer be following this advice, but he’s correct here—we should always consider we might be wrong about what we believe, especially considering that our default is to think that everything we believe is correct, and that we’re behaving precisely as we ought to.
When better information becomes available, we should update our beliefs. The same goes for skills, habits, practices, work, etc. For example, when I was a teacher, if a lesson didn’t go well, or my students weren’t demonstrating growth in a particular skill or knowledge base, I knew it was my fault and I needed to figure out a better way to teach them. Could I have blamed them for not wanting to learn (and sometimes this was a factor) or find any other number of other excuses not to change my lessons? Sure, but doing so would have been a massive disservice to all, myself included. The students were showing me I was wrong, and the best thing for everyone was for me to become less wrong.
Once we decide there is a good reason to change, we move to step two: interrupting homeostasis and taking action.
Step 2: Interrupting Homeostasis and Taking Action
If we want to change our minds, we have to interrupt our environmental and emotional patterns. Radically. The woman who wants to run a marathon will have to find a way to work less than 12 hours a day, work far more efficiently, or change careers entirely. She will also have to start meal prepping or find another route to improving her diet. And whatever other tertiary factors in her environment that create resistance to change have to be mitigated or eliminated entirely.
We can start this interruption by taking the first baby steps: fortune favors the bold. We cannot accomplish anything by reacting. Achievement and success in any aspect of life require consistent action toward accomplishing our desired outcomes.
What Not to Do: The Anti-Vaxxers and Forever Maskers
To understand this better, consider the inverse: why people with extreme reactions to COVID couldn’t change their minds once the pandemic subsided.2
On one extreme we have the anti-vax crowd who still insist COVID vaccines are dangerous and have killed millions of people. There’s no good evidence for this, unless we attribute all deaths from heart disease as a product of taking the vaccine—but of course this forgets the obvious fact that people died of heart attacks and pulmonary issues before COVID, and sometimes people just die from old age. Attributing every death of anyone who’s been vaccinated to the vaccine, especially when the cause of death is obvious like in the case of a heart attack, makes about as much sense as blaming aspirin or orange juice. A basic scientific fact is being forgotten by these folks, which is that correlation does not equal causation (among several other scientific and logical missteps).3
On the flip side, I still see a lot of people wearing masks in grocery stores, alone in their cars, and even outside while walking their dogs, as if it were early April 2020 and we didn’t yet understand how COVID spreads or have incredibly effective vaccines that are especially good at protecting against severe illness or death. Like the anti-vaxxers, there’s no good evidence for this belief: masks are far more effective at preventing the wearer from spreading germs than they are at preventing the individual from getting ill, and even so, now that most people have been vaccinated against and/or exposed to the virus, there’s just not that big of a risk anymore. If there were, we’d see huge rates of infection and soaring hospital admissions...but we don’t. And even when COVID was raging, there was NEVER a good reason to wear a mask outside or alone in a car—it’s like wearing a bike helmet to bed: you’re no safer and look like an idiot.
So why haven’t people in either of these camps changed their minds? Because changing your mind is a skill, and in the case of the anti-vaxxer or lifelong masker, they are either not open-minded and/or intelligent enough to do so—in this case it’s likely a lack of intelligence, because both groups should be aware by now that their behavior is at odds with conventional wisdom and medical science. COVID happened, but now that it’s over and better information is available, they’re unable to change their mind.4
They are also environmentally and emotionally locked in: if you listen to Rogan and Weinstein, it’s very difficult to avoid conspiratorial thinking, and if you’re surrounded by people who are still obsessed with identity politics and wear masks, what choice, really, do you have?
Unfortunately, this has real consequences: the rate of death for Americans who aren’t vaccinated against COVID is far higher than those who’ve had the jab—plus we now have children dying from measles because a huge portion of our population have become vaccine skeptics. And for the forever masked, it’s a visible indication that something about how you interpret the world is badly broken.5
The Software Analogy: How the Ego Resists Change
Think of the mind like software: we all start at version 1.0 and update to version 1.5, 2.0, 3.0, etc. as we get older and grow in our knowledge and skills. However, unlike software, the mind is also tied to our concept of self—the ego. And for the ego, changing one’s mind is the equivalent of cutting off a limb, if not full on death. After all, no one who has access to version 2.0 uses version 1.0, and if there are flaws in version 2.0, the engineer doesn’t go back to version 1.0—she simply creates version 2.5 or 3.0. But from the ego’s perspective, what are we if not the collection of our beliefs and skills? So ego resists change for good reason: because from the perspective of the self, whatever we’re doing is working…we’re alive, so why change. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. That may sound absurd in today’s world, but when you consider the environment our ancestors evolved in for hundreds of thousands of years, mere survival is really good!
So, like a lot of problems we face in the modern world, we’re fighting against our own biology. Because now, unlike in prior eras, changing your mind is quite useful when applied correctly. A good analogy is that of the alcoholic who decides to go dry: at first, his ego fears he’ll no longer be interesting to others. He won’t know how to interact. Parties will be boring. People will think he’s stupid for not drinking.
But what does he learn that first time he’s sober out at the bars with friends? It’s not that all of his fears were unfounded, because to be fair, some of the above is true: some people won’t understand, it might not be quite as much fun (that is, after all, the main reason people drink), and he’ll have to find something else aside from alcohol and the feeling of inebriation to focus on. What he’ll find, however, is that there are a number of other amazing things that happen: he saves money, he’s in control of his actions, women are more receptive when he’s not wasted, and most important, he’ll learn that people care a lot less that he’s not drinking than he assumes. A theme we’ll touch on often on GetBetterSoon is that people mostly worry about themselves and care far, far less about what we do that we imagine. Version 9.0 who’s not an alcoholic is vastly superior to Version 8.0 who is—but the ego is attached to version 8.0, and that’s what makes it so hard to change.
This is precisely why changing your mind is a skill: it has to be intentional, and it will cause discomfort at first. And while the prerequisites of open-mindedness and intelligence are necessary, we ultimately have to do it in order to understand and experience the fact that, even if there are some uncomfortable downstream effects or consequences, the overall result of change is that we get a better version of ourselves. The good news is that like any skill—riding a bike or doing geometry or reading or typing or surfing—the more you do it, the easier it is to do.
And you should! When better information becomes available, you should change your mind. When you want to change your life or lifestyle, you should change your mind. When a friend or family member makes a compelling argument that you should vote for a different political candidate, quit social media, or read a book…you should change your mind!
Indeed, in any discussion, everyone involved should ask themselves: am I willing to change my mind based on what other people say? Because if not, there’s absolutely no point in participating and they’d be better off finding other things to do with their time.6
When We Should NOT Change Our Minds
Clearly, there are times when we should not change our minds. The most common reason people change their minds for worse is due to social pressure. This is an especially dangerous trap people fall into when there’s a powerful, emotional event that captures national or international attention: like when George Floyd was killed in early summer 2020. In the aftermath, we heard news anchors justify riots and looting on national television, culminating into the suggestion by many on the left that we abolish or defund the police altogether.
This was insane. George Floyd’s murder was an absolutely avoidable tragedy, racism is still a problem, and we should do everything in our power to cut down on police violence and make make the justice system more humane and less cruel. But in June 2020, people believed these were far larger problems than the data shows them to be, and no matter how outraged we were by watching that terrible video, rioting and looting can’t be tolerated in a civilized society, nor can we expect social or economic order without a well-funded, functioning police force. In other words, it was OBVIOUSLY WRONG to hold these views, and yet many people on the political left—at least for a time—did.
A similar thing happened on the political right in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Trump lost, but as he promised before the election, he wouldn’t accept the results in that case—and surprise, surprise, he didn’t. Unfortunately, it has now become necessary to believe this lie to have any standing in the Republican Party, and so many people—due purely to social and political pressure—believe, or at least say they believe, that the 2020 election was illegitimate. And if he’d lost in 2024, we may well have had a full blown civil war on our hands due to this lie.
The remedy for this is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. How would you feel if your business regularly had it’s windows smashed so that looters could steal property? How would you feel if you were detained by ICE because you had a tattoo they didn’t like and were sent to a jail in El Salvador with no due process of law? If you wouldn’t want something like that to happen to you, then you shouldn’t want it to happen to ANYONE.
So, before you change your mind—or defend a position you already hold—think it through to it’s conclusion:
What is the general application: what would happen if this idea were enacted into policy and applied universally?
What is the personal application: Would I like this to happen to me or my family and friends?
A final test might be to do a gut check: does this actually seem right—like, is this something that is plausible?
For example, the recent increase in the number of people (especially teenage girls) who say they’re transgender strikes me as extremely unlikely to be a natural biological outcome. After all, 99% of us are born biologically male or female, and if we recall the fact that we’re products of evolution, how would any sexual confusion—even minor confusion—have benefitted the individual or species? The answer is it wouldn’t, and the data support this assertion. So while I don’t doubt that some small percentage of people truly experience gender dysphoria, and believe they should be treated with the same respect and compassion we apply to any other human being, when a bunch of teenage girls in my English classes started coming out as trans or non-binary—almost all of them in the same social circle—it always struck me as more of a social contagion than a reflection of reality, and the evidence looks more all the time to be in support of that hypothesis.
Here’s a few ideas on how to practice changing your mind:
Watch, listen to, or read people on the who have different political views for at least three months. That means, for example, if you watch Fox News, you only watch MSNBC for two months, or vice versa—if you’re more of a podcast listener or reader it’s easy enough to do the same thing. Maybe you’ll come back with the same opinions you always had, but at least you’ve stress tested them to see if you really believe what you say you believe. Another way to do this would be to completely leave the world of politics behind and see what you think after six months. One thing to remember about politics: you paying attention or yelling on the internet at people you don’t like/disagree with isn’t likely to change ANYTHING.
Introduce something new into your life. If you want to make this easier, do it with a friend/family member. For example, if you don’t like country music, ask a friend who does what bands you should listen to. Ideas to get you started:
Take a class at a local university or community college on a topic entirely outside your expertise (like if you’re an engineer, learn Spanish)
Get a pet (but only if you’re ready to be a good owner!)
Stop drinking coffee/tea/caffeine
Become a vegan, vegetarian, or go Keto
Drastically change your waking/sleep schedule (two hours or more)
Start listening to a different genre of music
Take a sabbatical or go on a long vacation (if you can—obviously this requires quite a bit of financial and/or occupational freedom)
Start a meditation or yoga practice
Try psychedelics…but only if you can do so safely/legally with supervision!
Put yourself in another person’s shoes at least three times a day and think through what they are experiencing or might have experienced. Truly try to rationalize their behavior or beliefs, even though you don’t agree, assuming that there’s an logical or reasonable explanation. Remember to assume ignorance as opposed to malice, because again, people are mostly worried about themselves—there are very, very few human beings who go about their daily lives with the explicit purpose of being assholes. Possible targets:
The jerk who cut you off in traffic
A homeless man who asks you for money
A co-worker or family member you don’t get along with
A political figure or foreign actor (person or country) you absolutely despise!
Someone who’s very different from you in terms of identity—far younger, older, the opposite gender, significantly richer or poorer, of a different race or ethnicity, etc.
Go for long walks, exercise, and/or work out WITHOUT your smart phone. Let your mind truly wander while undergoing physical exertion of some kind.
Remember: changing your mind is skill—and you should do it when better information becomes available!
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There are some who claim we do not have free will—most notably Sam Harris—and at some point I’ll lay out why that’s not true, but for now consider this: even people like Sam, who say we don’t have free will, still go about their daily lives as if we do. In other words, even if we don’t have free will—there’s no point in worrying about it, because no one behaves that way in real life. It’s kinda like Pascal’s wager: if he believes in God and God isn’t real, then he hasn’t lost anything, whereas if he doesn’t believe and God is real, he goes to hell for eternity. The same is true of free will: is it better to assume we have it, or to assume we don’t? If we’re going to behave the same way regardless, why bother with the existential crisis? Ironically, the same person who typically believes we don’t have free will is also an atheist, when they’re indulging in the most fantastic belief possible, which is that everything that’s every happened in the entire history of the universe is purely the result of destiny. But again, we’ll come back to this at another time.
Before we become too judgmental of these irrational subgroups, it’s important to remember that the vast majority of us are wrong about some or many aspects of life. Indeed, a future blog will center on the theory that everyone is fantastically wrong about at least one important thing in life—whether it’s ethics, politics, religion, science, etc.—myself included!
Think it through, right? If there was clear, substantive evidence that the COVID vaccines were truly dangerous and killing people, this would mean that the entire healthcare apparatus and vast majority of doctors and nurses are staying or being kept silent because there’s a monstrous conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry and multiple governments to keep them quiet…because otherwise they’d speak up right? And this is where conspiratorial thinking (which has become all too common—especially on the political right), falls apart, because it’s simply impossible to keep that many people quiet. Indeed, conspiratorial thinking is a defense for people who DON’T want to change their mind, even when there’s overwhelming evidence they should; it is a tool ignorant people use to justify their ignorance.
I’ll concede that they could also be consuming bad information, but this again, is a sign of stupidity. If you actually think you should take medical advice from Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein over the consensus of the scientific and medical community, you’re not a very smart person. The same is true of the mask wearer who finds reasons to continue wearing a mask when there aren’t any—like, I’m sure there are corners of the internet where COVID is still raging, but the internet isn’t real life, and to be this disconnected from reality can only be explained by a lack of intelligence.
Of course, if you think I’m wrong on either of these counts…change my mind! I’m open to do so if you present me with better information. On the flipside, if you think I’m wrong about the antivaxxers or maskers, but you can’t provide me with better information (logical arguments and clear evidence), then you should change your mind, right?
This is an excellent way to avoid or move on from conversations that could become contentious. Simply ask the other person(s): “is there anything I can say that will cause you to change your mind on this issue? Because if not, let’s move on and talk about something else.” This also has the added benefit of making the person publicly admit that they hold an irrational or indefensible belief if they’re not willing to engage.