So it’s important to keep “taking seriously” and “believe strongly” or “believe useful” from contaminating each other, or maybe just to take seriously everything (while retaining ability to tell what’s plausible/useful to what extent).
I tried to convince my roommate that my comparative advantage was in being wrong about a lot of different things, since everybody else spends time being wrong about stupid boring things but would still never change their mind, and anyways in order to be wrong about something you have to have had anticipations and counter-able intuitions in the first place with is an important virtue. I think my arguments were rather persuasive. Anyway my point is that once you get to the point where you’re not afraid of having been wrong or changing your mind then “taking seriously” becomes more useful, more fun, and less dangerous. I’m reasonably sure it’s not a problem, since if you can’t change your mind anyway you had bigger things to worry about.
I think the largest costs of sticking your neck out and taking things seriously are social ones, which is unfortunate since talking to smart people is the best way to check yourself.
ETA: Hmuh… huge typical mind fallacy alert on what I just said, I do not actually know my audience well enough to have written the above so confidently. ;)
I tried to convince my roommate that my comparative advantage was in being wrong about a lot of different things, since everybody else spends time being wrong about stupid boring things but would still never change their mind, and anyways in order to be wrong about something you have to have had anticipations and counter-able intuitions in the first place with is an important virtue. I think my arguments were rather persuasive. Anyway my point is that once you get to the point where you’re not afraid of having been wrong or changing your mind then “taking seriously” becomes more useful, more fun, and less dangerous. I’m reasonably sure it’s not a problem, since if you can’t change your mind anyway you had bigger things to worry about.
I think the largest costs of sticking your neck out and taking things seriously are social ones, which is unfortunate since talking to smart people is the best way to check yourself.
ETA: Hmuh… huge typical mind fallacy alert on what I just said, I do not actually know my audience well enough to have written the above so confidently. ;)