There is a small social event I have been paying close attention to for about a decade now, because the event has turned out to be the most reliable diagnostic I have ever found for who, in any given conversation, is worth taking seriously. The event is the moment one of the participants, having just advanced a position, encounters a piece of information that genuinely contradicts it, and visibly updates the position in real time, in front of everyone in the room.
This event is much rarer than the wider culture’s self-image would suggest. The wider culture likes to imagine itself as composed of reasonable people who update their views when presented with good evidence. The actual evidence, available to anyone who has spent any time in adult conversations, is that almost nobody does this in public, ever, under any circumstances. The not-doing is so consistent that the doing, when it occurs, has the quality of a small public event that the room registers, even if nobody comments on it.
What most people do instead
What most people do, when their position has been contradicted in real time, is deploy one of three cognitive maneuvers that allow them to preserve the position without having to acknowledge that the position has been challenged.
The first is the qualification. The person, having heard the contradicting information, modifies their original position just enough to absorb the new information, in a way that allows them to present the modification as having been their position all along. The original is not abandoned. The original is retrofitted.
The second is the deflection. The person redirects the conversation to a related but different question. The redirection is, in most cases, conducted smoothly enough that nobody in the room registers that the original contradiction has been left unaddressed. The position is preserved by being moved out of the field of view.
The third is the framing shift, which is the most common one in my experience. The person recasts their original position as having been more nuanced, more provisional, or more carefully hedged than it actually was when they advanced it five minutes earlier. The recasting allows them to incorporate the new information as a small refinement of an already-nuanced original, rather than as a contradiction of a position that, when they first stated it, had considerably less hedging on it than the recast version retroactively claims.
All three of these maneuvers are, on close examination, the structural opposite of changing one’s mind. They are techniques for preserving one’s position while appearing to engage with the contradicting information. The appearing-to-engage is the social cover that allows the maneuvers to operate without anyone in the room noticing what is happening. Most adults are doing some version of this, in most contested conversations, without registering that they are doing it.
What the high-level thinker does
The high-level thinker, faced with the same contradicting information, does something different that the wider room often does not have language for. They stop. They consider what has been said. They allow the considering, visibly, to occur. And then, if the contradicting information has, on their honest evaluation, actually contradicted their position, they say so. They say something like, “huh, you are right about that.” Or, “okay, that does seem to contradict what I just said.” Or, more directly, “yeah, that means I am wrong about this.”
The saying-so is small. The saying-so produces, in the room, a particular kind of small public moment that the rest of the conversation has to absorb. The absorbing is not, in most cases, comfortable. The other participants have been operating, by long habit, on the cognitive maneuvers I described. They are not currently prepared to receive the saying-so as a normal feature of conversation. They register it as something slightly unusual. The registering is the data.
What the thinker has revealed, in this small public moment, is a particular structural feature of their relationship to their own positions. The feature is that the positions are not, in their internal experience, identity-bearing. The positions are current best guesses about how some piece of the world works, and the best guesses are, by design, subject to revision when better information arrives. The positions can be updated without the thinker feeling that anything has been lost by the update. The update is, in some real way, the entire point of holding the positions in the first place.
The ordinary participant, by contrast, holds their positions as if the positions were, in some real way, them. The thinker holds their positions as if the positions were tools the thinker happens to be currently using. The tools can be put down when better tools become available. The putting-down is not, in the thinker’s internal experience, a loss. The putting-down is an upgrade.
The dinner party version of this
At any dinner party of moderate intellectual ambition, there will be, on average, between one and three people doing most of the visible talking on contested subjects. These people are, in most cases, perfectly intelligent. They are also, almost without exception, operating with the standard adult relationship to their own positions, in which the positions are identity-bearing and accordingly defended through the cognitive maneuvers above.
What I have noticed, over years of paying attention, is that the most interesting person at the dinner party is almost never one of these visible talkers. The most interesting person is, in most cases, one of the quieter participants, who contributes less often, listens more carefully, and, on the occasions when they do contribute, has a particular quality of contribution that is structurally different from the contributions of the talkers.
The difference is the quiet participant’s willingness to say, in real time, that they had not previously considered some aspect of the subject that another participant has just raised. The willingness is, in the texture of the dinner party, almost invisible. The willingness is, however, the structural feature that allows their thinking to be, in some real way, current with the conversation, in a way that the talkers’ thinking, by the structural necessity of their cognitive maneuvers, cannot be.
The visible talkers, by the end of the dinner, have advanced their positions and successfully defended them. They leave with their positions intact. The quiet participant, by the end of the dinner, has, in some real way, learned something. The learning is what the willingness to update produced. The learning is what the talkers’ positions were structurally preventing them from being able to do.
Why the public mind-change is so rare
The wider culture rewards the appearance of consistency. The person who has maintained their positions across decades is treated as more reliable than the person who has updated theirs in response to new evidence. The treatment is, on examination, almost exactly the wrong way to evaluate cognitive seriousness. The person whose positions have not updated across decades is, in most cases, the person whose apparatus is no longer engaging with new information. The person whose positions have updated is the person whose apparatus is still operating. The reward structure, however, has been miscalibrated for so long that most adults have absorbed the assumption that consistency is the goal.
The public mind-change also requires the thinker to occupy, briefly, a particular vulnerable social position. The position is the position of having been visibly wrong. The other participants in the conversation, when one of them changes their mind in real time, are not, in most cases, equipped to register the change as the admirable move it is. They register it, more accurately, as a small social anomaly they then have to figure out how to absorb. The thinker who performed the change has paid a small social cost that the other participants have not paid.
And the public mind-change requires the thinker to override a particular psychological pull that is almost universal: the desire to feel that one’s previous statements were correct. The pull operates beneath conscious awareness. The pull is what produces, in most adults, the small automatic resistance to acknowledging that one’s previous statement was, in fact, wrong. The high-level thinker has, by some combination of practice and temperament, learned to override the pull. The override is the actual cognitive work. Most adults have not developed it.
What I have been trying, in my own conversations
I am not, on most days, the high-level thinker I am describing. I am an ordinary participant who has, in the last few years, started trying to develop the capacity I am writing about. The development is partial. It involves, in selected conversations, the deliberate practice of saying, when it is true, that I had not previously thought about some aspect of the subject in the way the other person has just framed it. The saying is uncomfortable. The saying is, in most cases, the most useful thing I produce in the entire conversation.
What I have noticed is that the conversations in which I have managed the saying tend to go somewhere that the conversations in which I successfully defended my position do not go. The going-somewhere is the only kind of conversation that produces new thinking on either side. The successful-defense conversations are almost entirely ceremonial. The participants have, in those conversations, simply restated positions they already held.
The willingness to change one’s mind in public is, accordingly, not just a sign of being a high-level thinker. The willingness is the structural precondition for being in the kind of conversation in which thinking can actually occur. The conversations in which nobody changes their mind are, in most cases, the conversations in which nobody is, in any meaningful sense, thinking. The participants are performing thinking for each other while not doing any of it.
I would rather be in the other kind of conversation. The being-in-the-other-kind requires me to be willing, sometimes, to be the person who changes their mind in front of the others. The willingness is the small daily price of admission to the conversations that are worth being in. I am, slowly, learning to pay it.
