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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?

Attributed to John Maynard Keynes (1932)

A strong thinker can explain their position and imagine new facts that would flip it.

Facts don't always change. Nature grants us some stability in her laws.

But they can always change. Our models are always downstream of measurements.

Imagining new facts that could cause you to change your positions makes you stronger.

Not only does it make you less likely to invest in wrong positions, but it will teach you how to better understand (and potentially alter) the positions of others.

On topic T, my position is P.

My model of T is M.

M is built of blocks B[].

What changed blocks CB[], would cause me to flip my position P?

What I'm talking about here is also very similar to the problem of sales.

In sales you are listening to the potential customer to understand their model of the world, and then giving them truthful block changes that will update their model so that their position P becomes "buy".

To identify mind changers one needs to be know what the current model of the world in the mind is.

If you're trying to identify your own mind changers, writing helps.

If you're trying to identify the mind changers in someone else, listening.

What might cause someone to change their mind on a position P might have little to do with the symbolic model you're able to dig out.

It might mostly be due to subconscious blocks.

Perhaps a person says "Y" would change their position to P', but then what actually changes their position to P' is something totally different (like a pretty person pitching P').

The surprising thing is not that every man has his price, but how low it is.

Attributed to Napoleon

In writing this one unexpected thing I realized is how easily and near universally even my positions are vulnerable to incentives.

I don't think you could pay me a price to promote a position I believed to be false, but you could probably pay me a (high) price to not promote a position I believed to be true.

In other words, my voice is not for sale, but my silence might be.

Why is this?

Simply because I have multiple things I care a lot about, I know my time is limited, and so working on certain things always comes at the expense of working on others. So if someone pays me $X to not promote opinion Y, but that allows me to promote 3 opinions that I care about when I otherwise might only be able to promote 1, I can see that is a deal I would be willing to consider.

So the block "suddenly I'm being paid not to promote P" would not get me to 180° flip my position P, but to at least rotate it 90° and go passive on P.

No one is currently paying me not to promote ideas (unfortunately?), but I think this is pretty widespread.

Some claim a lot of advertising in our world today isn't selling products, but buying silence.

Below I practice looking for mind changers on three of my most contrarian ideas.

What are some block changes that might cause me to reverse my contrarian position that IP laws should be abolished?

I don't think any of these would ever happen, but I guess my mind would change if reproducible data showed conclusively:

• Concentrating power into a tiny sliver of humanity, the "innovator class", creates vastly better innovation than diffusive innovation
• Without IP then the class of people adept with symbols are inevitably and hopelessly enslaved by the property controlling class
• IP allows better information control and without it there is inevitable weapons proliferation and civilization-ending violence
• Without IP information sharing plummets and information sabotage reigns
• Without IP for whatever 2nd order reasons we are no longer able to build such collabortive wonders as microprocessors
• If AGI arrives and can create so much great stuff on demand that IP laws become completely irrelevant

Again, I would be extremely surprised by data showing these things, but these are the types of things that might cause me to change my mind.

What are some block changes that might cause me to reverse my contrarian position that Scroll is a language worth strong investment?

• Putting time into improving Scroll often leads me to feel like I'm becoming a stronger thinker, so if that stopped being the case, I could see that.
• I definitely believe "thinking in 3D/4D", is 100x better than 2D thinking, so I could see if some type of 4D or 3D symbolic language were invented, that Scroll would become a much less important investment.
• Although I think Scroll is the language currently most alligned with LLMs, something new might arise significantly more aligned with them, which would make Scroll irrelevant.
• If the potential applications of Scroll to government and commerce were shown to be irrelevant, then it might show that the Metcalfe's law effect I predict will eventually come to Scroll might never happen.

What are some block changes that might cause me to reverse my contrarian position that mitochondrial populations are the root cause of human energy disorders?

• If it's shown that there is no difference in mitochondrial populations in the same human in different energy states
• If a wholly different biological model arises, perhaps with a different organelle, or that looks at things very differently (perhaps with some type of field theory), that explains things better.