David Eagleman explaining changing your mind

I want to outline how present me currently thinks about thinking, belief formation and the value of changing your mind based on evidence.

Let’s start with the fundamentals

Scientific Method

Science is not about finding evidence to support a claim. It is not a body of knowledge.

Science is a methodology to seek truth. Veritas.

Start with a question. Explore possible stories that could answer said question : coming up with a hypothesis. Which is essentially an idea, it requires intense creativity. In fact you come up with multiple hypotheses. Multiple stories that may explain whatever one wants to explain.

Then you go out and gather evidence that seeks to disprove the hypothesis (falsifiability) And you shift your confidences around based on the weight of the evidence (Bayesian thinking)

Crucial step : you never truly discard any hypothesis, its just the probability of it being true is severely diminished if there is no supporting evidence

Constantly reassess.

Let’s look at an example

Creation stories

I remember ever since my early teens I was deeply concerned about religion. I was a pretty militant atheist.

I’ve changed my view on this, I’m neither a theist, agnostic or atheist. More of what David Eagleman calls a ‘Possibilian’ 😎.

Applied to Religion There are multiple religious stories. The Judea-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Greek, Roman, African tree spirits etc. They seek to answer the question of ‘creation’. In fact physics is essentially a creation story as well.

The problem is these stories don’t really value evidence, apart from the story created by modern physics. They are non-falsifiable, you can’t disprove the existence of God. Therefore they fall out of the domain of evidence, and into the domain of belief.

The most harmful aspect is this. It requires dogmatic certainty. How can you be 100% certain that this story is true?

This is the crux : please don’t hold onto anything dogmatically. You have to reassess the evidence, and then shift your views.

As a human you are already prone to countless biases documented in psychology. The way you think is so flawed. As Feynman said “you are the easiest person to fool”. It’s very easy to lie to oneself.

“We know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too little to commit to any religious ideology”. So… say “I don’t know” or the more accurately : the best evidence disproves a lot of the claims made in many religious stories.

Don’t know mind

All the Big Questions… What happens after we die. Is there a God. What is love (baby don’t hurt me). You have to start from a point of I don’t know, rather than any conditioned stories that society has consciously or unconsciously implanted. Empty your cup.

Explore the question, disprove certain claims.

Then come to a best guess, and realise that for most of these questions, we don’t know.

(Actually for a lot of the big questions, I don’t think there is an answer. But the question, and the process of searching for the truth is valuable)

That’s all I want. I think a little intellectual humility goes a long way. And future me, if you ever ‘believe’ in anything 100%, something has gone wrong.

Peace.

TLDR : Useful reminders when giving a speech, or just talking.

I’ve compiled a list of heuristics and directives in speaking well. By speaking well, I mean : ‘the ability to articulate your opinion/argument/point in a manner that is easily understood by the other person’.

Speaking is a meta skill. It is incredibly valuable but rarely taught. All human endeavours are cooperative efforts and speech is the medium for transmitting ideas. Ideas are how civilisation advances.

These are useful reminders for myself :

1. Know the subject stone cold then speak naturally.

It’s best never to memorise any speech. You want to be able to speak spontaneously without any self conscious thought. You want to speak without a sense of self. At best you can memorise your structure or plan if doing a formal speech, but ad libbing is vital. By doing this, it comes across as more natural, less forced and authentic.

2. Have something valuable to say, otherwise keep silent

Often the most uninformed are the most vocal in speaking about it. This is called the Dunning Kruger effect in psychology. It’s a human tendency to pretend we understand more than we do and to overrate our knowledge on a topic. You have to catch yourself. If you have nothing valuable to add (which is likely for many topics!) then do not speak. Just listen. If interested, go read more about it, write about it and formulate your own opinions. Or don’t. Just don’t pretend to know about the topic. As Feynman said “You must never fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”

3. Simplicity

This is a mnemonic tool you can bring to mind when speaking. Speak in a manner that is

• Simple
• Structured
• ConverSational

Simple because speech should be far simpler than writing. It is much easier to risk pretension when writing than speaking.

Structured because you want to lead the listeners through a logical argument to the conclusion that you have made. If you simply unleash a barrage of unconnected points without elaboration, it is far less persuasive.

ConverSational because this is simply easier. We can’t all talk like Martin Luther King Jr. That would be strange. Imagine if the person across from you at a dinner party suddenly started talking like MLK.

4. Anecdotes and Stories > Data

Anecdotes and stories trump data. Humans are just big story telling monkeys. We live in a world of stories (go read Sapiens for a further exploration of this thesis).

We make sense of the world through stories. We can be moved to tears or moved to elation by a well told story. Most great story tellers have been telling stories since they were young. It is a skill that is hard to master. I don’t think I’m particularly well informed about how to best do this. But observe friends/acquaintances that are good story tellers.

5. Record yourself

You have a particular speech pattern that has been baked into you since you were a child, reinforced in your teenage years and now it’s hard set. This may involve:

• Using filler words (like, um)
• Using a limited set of words (I say ‘cool’ a lot!)
• Speaking in a monotone voice
• Speaking too fast
• Lack of eye contact etc
• Hesitancy or unconfident speech

These are hard patterns to overcome.

The first thing to do is to be aware of them. Unfortunately this involves recording yourself. Becoming aware of your idiosyncrasies and bringing them to mind on a regular basis. Then when you speak day to day, just catch yourself.

6. Read, Write, Listen

All the best artists steal. Nothing under the sun is original. But when you steal it is your imperative to improve upon it and to make it your own. So

• Read good books. Make a note of any beautiful language (BL as Maria Popova uses) and overtime you may find yourself using some of the same language in your speech

• Write : writing and speaking are inextricably linked. They are both reflections of the process of thought. They are a marker of clear thought. So write. Write whatever you feel like. Articles, journals, fiction, non fiction. What is important is the habit of writing.

• Listen to good audio : podcasts and audiobooks have literally changed my life. So many smart and amazing people are on audio. A common theme is that many of them are excellent speakers.

Overtime, whatever you consume, you will become.

Conclusion

This list is not exhaustive. I will hopefully add to it as I learn to improve.

I watched this fantastic YouTube video called “Think Deeply About Simple Things’ where a mathematics professor describes how magic appears when we question the simple.

He gives the example of a circle. The simplest shape. In one mindset, we can just accept it - “It’s a circle, it’s simple”.

But what if we thought more deeply about it? How many dimensions is it in? How would it look like in 3D - a sphere. What about 4D? Why is ‘pi’ the way it is, and how did it emerge from something as basic as the circle.

Another example- we all accept the sky is blue. But… why? Off the top of my head, it’s got to do with light refraction. But then why does light refract? What actually ‘is’ light? What is colour? And on and on.

Ultimately he boils it down to asking two main questions

1. Why —- Why —- Why

Like your 4 year old nephew, constantly question everything. Underneath your why, there is always another why. It leads to deeper thinking. Ask why about simple things. We have an inbuilt curiosity that we tend to squash as we get older, because ‘who has time to think about this’. This is tragic. Because the more you learn and question, the more you realise ‘how little we know’. It grants a level of humility. This leads to awe, as you realise how small ‘you’ are.

2. What if …

This is asking hypothetical ‘what if’s’. For example, what if I imagined myself chasing a beam of light? This is of course one of Einsteins ‘gedanken’ - though experiments. One that led to his understanding of the theory of relativity.

In thinking about consciousness. We can ask what it is. Why it arises etc. But we can take thought experiments too. Suppose we were to construct a conscious entity, atom by atom- like a Lego set. At which atom, would you suddenly become conscious. When would consciousness arise in that system?

This leads you to interesting hypotheses.

Thought experiments afford us different perspectives on problems, because the truth is that ‘reality’ and science tends to violently violate our intuitions. For example, that we are at the centre of the universe, violated by the copernican revolution that we are not even at the centre of our solar system.

’Hard’ things are not hard

There is this idea that complex maths or science is ‘hard’.

Yes, it requires focused effort, but that doesn’t mean that ‘you are doomed’ and that you’re just ’not a maths person’.

It is a structure. A building that one has to construct from simpler concepts. But you have to understand the simple concepts first, before you can layer on them, and learn ones that require you to understand previous concepts.

For example to understand what mitochondria is, you have to understand a layer below that : ‘what a cell is’. Then you have to understand what a cell wall is, or what ATP production is, then you need to understand what a molecule is, what atoms are etc etc. It’s interlinked and interdependent. And you can go deeper and deeper into these concepts.

But it’s all just concepts layered on top of each other.

In the video he gives the example of 1+1. We can all do this. But what about 1+ 1/2.

If we haven’t been exposed to fractions, this seems like a ‘hard’ task. But if we understand what fractions are, then suddenly it’s just a problem. Neither hard nor easy.

What about 1+ 1/2 ^2

Again, the same, if you don’t know what square number is, then you cannot do this. It is simply concepts stacked on top of each other.

A problem in school is that students all move at the same pace. If one day, you miss a concept, or don’t understand it, often the teacher does not come and explain it to you. Then the next lesson, you are completely lost because you didn’t understand the previous concept. People who are ‘bad’ at maths just missed a concept, then they couldn’t progress any further. If only it was said in a different way, or expressed in a different medium, it would have ‘clicked’.

Thank God for YouTube. If you don’t understand something, you can go at your own pace on YouTube. Some really smart kids are being brought up in this generation thanks to YouTube.