Why you think you’re right, even when you’re wrong (2017)

It's not really a liberal or conservative thing, either. Someone making a passionate progressive speech is going to appeal to those inclined that way more than someone making a careful, nuanced progressive argument.

Politicians know this and so will always hedge towards appearing decisive and "strong".

That’s something on which I have never actually settled my opinion. One month I conclude “nope, unit testing takes too long and offers no net benefit”. The next, I switch - “unit testing is glorious and helps push errors down significantly”.

Part of the reason why my answer to most questions is “I don’t know” or “It depends”.

I try to take the approach that everything I think I know is correct, but that I need to reevaluate when presented with new information, and I constantly look for new information to disprove what I know. The subtle difference here is that I assume I'm right, which gives me confidence. I used to doubt everything, which led me to being very noncommittal and unconfident.

It's important to question your assumptions, but it's harmful if you completely distrust them.

If the foot soldier cannot be trusted to place the Drayfus in prison without having to look through all the evidence himself, he's a useless soldier.

Similarly, if the Scout is told to believe there's always a bridge if you need it, and is gone for months trying to find a bridge over the river, he's a useless scout.

Often, the best leaders have a bit of both - open mindedness to find the best solution until they've made the decision, then steadfastness to defend that decision.

There is a difference between choosing your values and choosing your facts. We have a big problem in not being able to distinguish the difference between our opinions and facts - and values are more akin to opinions than facts.

There isn't a problem with people coming up with different values. The problems start to arise when you're not willing to be wrong about those values, especially when you start ignoring facts that contradict those values.

I feel like the assumption in the article is that neither is right, but that the scout is searching for right, and the solider is defending right.

> Seems like the author has already come to the conclusion that its always going to be right. Doesn't that just bring us back to the mindset of the soldier?

I don't think so. The mindset distinction isn't between right and wrong, both types prefer to be right. The distinction is whether you're a motivated defender of an idea in spite of the evidence, or whether you're searching for truth and willing to change your position.

If you think about this in just pure statistical probabilities, who's more likely to be right at any given time, the person who is certain they're right, or the person who has changed their mind to favor the evidence?

It feels like this might even be related to the Monty Hall problem to me; once you have some evidence that something's wrong, there's a distinct statistical advantage to changing your mind, even when you don't know and you're choosing randomly.

From the book "Being Wrong" by Kathryn Schulz. I highly recommend it!

People who actually thought about this tended to pretty quickly figure out that the only shape that works is the globe, a big ball. They estimated how big it was. The ancient Greek estimates are pretty good. The result was disheartening if your employer was an emperor because the globe was much bigger than their empire. Still, you could point out that maybe most of it is just ocean.

Most people didn't think about it at all. Seriously insisting that you believe the Earth is flat, generally as part of some larger grand conspiracy theory, is a modern phenomenon.

This debate is (somehow) still raging, in case you didn't know.

"Motivated reasoning" has it's own Wikipedia page: it's fine to talk about it as something distinct from cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning