If you’re actually a truth seeker, then finding out you’re wrong is part of the process, and it’s a good thing. It means you just discovered that you didn’t have the truth and can now move closer to finding it.
But almost nobody sees it this way.
People feel stupid when they find out they’re wrong, especially when they’ve been duped. Underneath that feeling is another that pains their ego: they feel that they were wrong, rather than that the belief was wrong.
Notice that this isn’t always the case with every belief; it’s in specific cases.
A person who holds a belief can turn it over, argue the other side, and let it go if it doesn’t add up, without any defense mechanisms getting in the way. A person who is held by a belief defends it the way he’d defend himself, as if insulted by someone.
The longer you’ve held a belief, the more likely it’s the second one.
People are reluctant to double-check their beliefs at all, and they’re most reluctant exactly where it matters most—where they’ve invested the most time, money, and emotion. If you’ve held something for decades and then learn it was false, that isn’t a correction; that’s a massive paradigm shift. And if you built your life on it, it’s going to hurt—a lot.
Which brings up why people don’t change their minds so easily.
Denial is free. Correction is expensive.
Denying something requires nothing. You wave it off, you don’t look into it, you go on with your day, and your life stays exactly as it was. But to correct yourself, you have to change how you think, how you act, and how you deal with the people around you. You might have to leave a social circle or a job or have to go back to people who trusted you and tell them you were wrong about something you told them with total confidence.
When someone is held by a belief, they identify with it. Identities don’t dissolve so easily under evidence, because ego guards them hardest. They dissolve when holding them costs more than changing them. In other words—pain.
If you tell someone that some trivial thing they learned from a Snapple cap is wrong, they won’t resist it with every fiber of their being. But tell someone they’re wrong about their religion, politics, or judgment of someone they trusted, and now you’re not discussing trivial matters. Now you’re talking about the most important thing that matters to them—who they are.
The world we live in has raised the price of being wrong. Public certainty gets attention, agreement, and reach. This is why con men and grifters can dupe people in desperate situations, where uncertainty is so painful; even a semblance of certainty is enough to create some kind of comfort. However, someone who openly revises a position he’s known for gets read as weak or unreliable, because the person who’s not going with the herd must have been rejected by it.
Changing one’s mind used to be a private matter, or at worst a local one. Now everything someone has ever said is on the Internet—retrievable, timestamped, and permanent. And there’s an entire business in retrieving and reacting to it, mocking or shaming the person to protect the herd.
The clip of a man contradicting himself is a product, which means there are people whose income depends on your never updating in public. They don’t care what you believe. They only care that the clip performs. So the cost of revising isn’t just what it does to you internally; there’s a public bill, payable to an audience that includes people who profit from your having to pay it and those who will harass you for doing so.
Which produces something strange: a lot of people have already changed their minds privately and keep performing the old belief anyway. The incentive was never to be right. It was to never be visibly wrong.
Every incentive available is pointed at staying exactly where you are.
Being smart is no protection either, because an intelligent person produces better defenses. He’ll find the flaw in the study, the problem with the source, the motive behind the messenger—and he’ll find them fast, and they’ll be more sophisticated than the reasoning that built the belief in the first place. His intelligence has gone to work for the defense instead of the investigation. That isn’t a failure of thinking; it’s thinking aimed at self-defense, because protection is cheaper than revision.
I’ve written about this before: doxastic involuntarism, the position that belief isn’t subject to the will. It’s the majority view in epistemology, and you don’t need a philosophy degree to check it.
Let’s demonstrate this to you right now.
Take God’s existence. Choose, right now, to believe the exact opposite position you have on the matter. You can’t. Nobody can. You’re either convinced of God’s existence or you’re not, based on what you believe is evidence for or against, and the only thing that can change your mind is evidence convincing enough to change your belief.
This inability to change your belief at will means that if you’re holding something false, you were given the evidence that led you there or kept from the evidence that would have led you elsewhere. Nobody handed you what you needed to see to change the belief. That’s not a defect in your character; that’s an input problem.
Sometimes the inputs were manipulated: facts get left out; facts get twisted. There’s an entire business model built on doing manipulation, because most people are reasonably honest. They might shade the truth on small things, but they don’t sit around all day constructing elaborate lies, so it doesn’t occur to them that anybody else does either, which makes them the perfect prey for professional grifters and cult leaders.
This is a vulnerability, not a form of stupidity. Your inexperience with professional deception isn’t a flaw; it’s what comes from not being the kind of person who does it. If you’ve never met a con man, you have no particular reason to suspect that the man explaining the world to you is one.
So being wrong isn’t a verdict on you. But that doesn’t leave you with nothing to do, either. Your job is to question your beliefs by asking: What is this belief actually doing for me?
Has it made your life better? Has it gotten you anywhere? Has it given you a single thing you can point to? When it’s one of the intense ones, the answer is usually no.
I’m not saying believe whatever feels better—you can’t choose to do that anyway. I’m saying a belief should be held because it’s true, and nothing else.
Shedding false beliefs can be painful, but each time your sense of yourself comes through intact, the next one you shed is less painful.
And that’s why being wrong is okay; it’s part of the learning process and healing process, which will only make you stronger and wiser, that is, if you’re willing to go through some growing pains to become stronger and wiser.
That’s a choice you can make.
Very well said in reference to the "muh religion" crowd
Very well said!!!!