People don't want to change their minds

You have probably noticed that it's rare that people change their minds. People are wrong about lots of things - you know that and I know that - so we know that the reason they don't change their minds is not because they are right. It's because they're stubborn. Or, really, just because they don't want to, and people tend not to do things if they don't want to if they can help it.

Religion is a good example of how rare it is to change one's mind, so much so that we have special words for the different ways in which people can sometimes do it: conversion, reversion, lapsing, apostasy, losing faith and so on.

Politics nowadays is pretty similar, with quasi-religious levels of commitment demanded of adherents to various causes. We are even developing a vocabulary to show how unusual changing one's mind is: I give you "being red-pilled" (and other colours of pill) as an example. I might have more to say about this in the future. 

So I am interested in people who do change their minds. This is an interesting interview with Marc Andreessen. (If you think an interview with Marc Andreessen, particularly about how he lives his professional life, can be interesting then you will want to read this.) He says this:

"So, generally speaking, most of the people you're around most of the time hate being told that they're wrong, right? They absolutely hate it. It's really an interesting question as to why that's the case. The best explanation I'm able to come up with is: people treat their ideas like they're their children. I have an idea the same way that I have a child and if you call my idea stupid, it's like calling my child stupid. And then the conversation just stops. I've really been trying hard to do is to spend less time actually arguing with anybody. Because people really don't want to change their mind. And so I'm trying to just literally never argue with people.

However, there *is* a group of people who do love to change their mind. And interestingly, it's the people everybody wants to hate. It's hedge fund managers. The really good hedge fund managers seem to all have this characteristic: if you get into this heated argument with them, they'll actually listen to what you're saying. They won’t always change their mind but sometimes they'll go “Oh, that's a really good point”. And then they'll say, “Oh, thank you” which is just really weird for it’s not usually the result of an argument. The reason they're thanking you is because they're gonna go back to the office next morning to reverse the trade."

This is similar to Rory Sutherland's point about business being the only activity where you are paid to change your mind. 

Business in general - and finance in particular - is not getting a good press at the moment. The thinking Right has turned somewhat against free markets because of, well, everything that has happened since 2008, while the thinking Left is pleased not to have to pretend to be ok with the grubby business of making money any more. But it is worth remembering McCloskey's account of the bourgeois virtues that business requires and nurtures: honesty, good faith, keeping one's word, hope, courage, courtesy in dealings with strangers, and so on and so on - doux commerce. To which we should add, courtesy of Andreessen and Sutherland, open-mindedness. 

In the years to come, open-mindedness may come to be regarded more as a vice than a virtue, a sign of weakness of faith rather than of confidence of mind. If you think of any of the fastest-growing political movements we have now, on either the Right or the Left, you will not find the phrase "easy-going, good-humoured tolerance" springing to mind. If we do want to find that kind of attitude in those who disagree with us - and I think we do, given that the alternative is someone changing their mind to reach agreement, and no one likes doing that - then we might have to look to the worlds of business and finance to find it.