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In reply to:

It probably doesn't help to live in a society where changing one's positions in response to evidence is considered "waffling", and is considered to show a lack of conviction.

Divorce is a lot more common than 4%, so people do admit mistakes when given enough evidence.

Changing your mind or "updating" is not necessarily a sign of rationality. You could also update for wrong reasons.

For example, a divorce can happen when a person has unrealistic expectations on marriage. Updating their beliefs about their partner would be just a side effect of refusing to update their beliefs about marriage.

Also, in some cases, the divorce could have been planned since the beginning (for example for financial gain), so it actually did not include a change of mind.

See comment in full context

We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

Oct 3, 2007

"Over the past few years, we have discreetly approached colleagues faced with a choice between job offers, and asked them to estimate the probability that they will choose one job over another. The average confidence in the predicted choice was a modest 66%, but only 1 of the 24 respondents chose the option to which he or she initially assigned a lower probability, yielding an overall accuracy rate of 96%."
—Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky, "The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence." (Cognitive Psychology, 24, pp. 411-435.)

When I first read the words above—on August 1st, 2003, at around 3 o'clock in the afternoon—it changed the way I thought. I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided. We change our minds less often than we think. And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question.

How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can't yet guess what our answer will be; the tiny window of opportunity for intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.

The principle of the bottom line is that only the actual causes of your beliefs determine your effectiveness as a rationalist. Once your belief is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the truth-value; once your decision is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the consequences.

You might think that you could arrive at a belief, or a decision, by non-rational means, and then try to justify it, and if you found you couldn't justify it, reject it.

But we change our minds less often—much less often—than we think.

I'm sure that you can think of at least one occasion in your life when you've changed your mind. We all can. How about all the occasions in your life when you didn't change your mind? Are you they as available, in your heuristic estimate of your competence?

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

Part of the Seeing With Fresh Eyes subsequence of How To Actually Change Your Mind

Next post: "Hold Off On Proposing Solutions"

Previous post: "How to Seem (and Be) Deep"

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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I hate changing my mind based on my parents' advice because I want to demonstrate that I'm capable of making good decisions on my own, especially since we seem to disagree on some fundamental values. Specifically, they love their jobs and put a moral value on productivity, while my goal in life is to "work" as little as possible and have as much "fun" as possible.

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I hate changing my mind based on my parents' advice because I want to demonstrate that I'm capable of making good decisions on my own...

Eliezer never said to change your mind based on wrong advice! However, if you feel as if you should be following your parents' advice, perhaps you should question exactly how capable you really are (at the moment).

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michael_vassar3

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It probably doesn't help to live in a society where changing one's positions in response to evidence is considered "waffling", and is considered to show a lack of conviction.

Divorce is a lot more common than 4%, so people do admit mistakes when given enough evidence.

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I think the embargo on mind-changing is a special case for politiicians: after all, if they say one thing on the hustings, and then do another in office, that makes a mockery of democracy. However, if it is applied to non-pliticians, that would be fallacious.

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If they say one thing and intend to do another, sure - but if they actually update? That may be bad PR, but I don't think it's undemocratic.

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Changing your mind or "updating" is not necessarily a sign of rationality. You could also update for wrong reasons.

For example, a divorce can happen when a person has unrealistic expectations on marriage. Updating their beliefs about their partner would be just a side effect of refusing to update their beliefs about marriage.

Also, in some cases, the divorce could have been planned since the beginning (for example for financial gain), so it actually did not include a change of mind.

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I recall having an argument over dinner with a friendly acquaintance about an unimportant but interesting problem. I thought about it for few days and decided he was right. I've hated him ever since.

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And now we're curious. What was the problem?

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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It is nice to have a clear example of where people are consistently underconfident. Are there others?

People tend to take into account the magnitude of evidence (how extreme is the value?) while ignoring its reliability, and they also tend to be bad at combining multiple pieces of evidence. So another good way to generate underconfidence is to give people lots of small pieces of reliable evidence. (I believe it's in the same paper, "The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence".)

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I wonder if the act of answering the question actually causes the decision to firm up. Kind of the OvercomingBias Uncertainty Principle.

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A lot of people probably already know that, it's a familiar "deep wisdom", but anyway: you can use this not-changing of your mind to help you with seemingly complicated decisions that you ponder over for days. Simply assign the possible answers and flip a coin (or roll a dice, if you need more than 2). It doesn't matter what the result is, but depending on wether it matches your already-made decision you will either immediately reject the coin's "answer" or not. That tells you what your first decision was, unclouded by any attempts to justify the other option(s).

Now, if you've trained your intuition (aka have the right set of Cached Thoughts), that answer will be the correct or better one. Or, as has happened to me more than once, you realize that both alternatives are actually wrong and your mind already came up with a better solution.

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I used to have a button that said "If you haven't changed your mind lately, how do you know you've still got one?" I really liked that sentiment.

It's very easy to get comfortable with our opinions and beliefs, and uncomfortable about any challenge to them. As I've posted elsewhere, we often identify our "selves" with our "beliefs", as if they "were" us. Once we can separate our idea of "self" as different from "that which our self currently believes", it becomes easier to entertain other thoughts, and challenges from others, to our beliefs and opinions. If we are comfortable and secure in our own selves, then we can discuss dispassionately the ideas that contradict what we have previously held to be true. It is the only way that we can learn, that we can take in new and different ideas without that being a blow to our ego. Identifying our selves with our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, blocks us, threatens us, so that we get stuck with our old ways of doing things and framing things, and we don't grow and change with ease.

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In the case of Divorce, the reasons cannot always be taken as evidence for the marriage having been a mistake to begin with.

Things happen and people change.

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That's true. Matters are not helped by the value society places on commitment and consistency. When we do, in fact, change our minds, we are more often than not labeled as "wishy-washy," or some similarly derogatory term.

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Marius_Gedminas

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Are you they as available, in your heuristic estimate of your competence?

I'm unable to parse this sentence.

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Drop the "you" and see the linked "Availability Heuristic".

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Here is one way to change your mind. Think through something carefully, relying on strong connections. You may at some point walk right into a conclusion that contradicts a previous opinion. At this point something will give. The strength of this method is that it is strengthened by the very attachment to your ideas that it undermines. The more stubborn you are, the harder you push against your own stubbornness.

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