Learning to Change My Mind in Public Without Shame

I worked in policy research in St. Louis and had spent several years developing positions on a set of urban development questions that I had written about, spoken about publicly, and that had become identified with my name in a specific professional community.

The positions had been formed from evidence and I held them with the kind of conviction that I had confused, for a long time, with the requirement to hold them permanently.

At 27, a colleague shared a paper that addressed a specific dimension of one of my positions with evidence I had not previously had access to and that was rigorous enough to require me to update my view in a meaningful way. The update was private and immediate.

The publication of the update was something I deliberated about for two weeks, because having a named position reversed in a community where I was known for that position felt like a public reduction of credibility.

I eventually published a short piece acknowledging the new evidence and revising my view with the specific changes it required. The response surprised me. Several people I respected commented that it was one of the more credible things I had done - that the willingness to update a public position in response to better evidence was, in a discourse culture where people almost never did this, more rather than less impressive.

I had expected the update to cost me something and it produced the opposite. What I understood from that experience was something about the difference between intellectual consistency and intellectual integrity. Consistency means holding positions once taken. Integrity means holding positions only as long as the evidence supports them.

I had been confusing the two and in doing so had been protecting my positions from the evidence rather than protecting my conclusions from confirmation bias. I update views more readily now, publicly and without excessive performance of either confidence or humility.

The credibility I was protecting by not updating turned out to be less valuable than the credibility produced by updating honestly.