As nearly everybody with a blog has already noted, the annual “World Question Center” question has been posted, with answers from the usual huge range of thinkers. This year’s question:
When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?
I’d love to say something deep and thoughtful about the answers, but honestly, it’s just too much. My eyes start to glaze over just reading the selected highlights posted at Biocurious and Cosmic Variance. I can’t imagine attempting to wade through the whole thing to pick out the highlights.
I will do the obligatory thing of highlighting a couple of responses that I jumped out at me, though:
I used to pride myself on the fact that I could explain almost anything to anyone, on a simple enough level, using analogies. No matter how abstract an idea in physics may be, there always seems to be some way in which we can get at least some part of the idea across. If colleagues shrugged and said, oh, well, that idea is too complicated or too abstract to be explained in simple terms, I thought they were either lazy or not very skilled in thinking creatively around a problem. I could not imagine a form of knowledge that could not be communicated in some limited but valid approximation or other.
However, I’ve changed my mind, in what was for me a rather unexpected way.
Surprisingly, the reason is not “It’s pointless to explain things with analogies, because every time you do, some literal-minded jackass on the Internet will pop up to complain that the correspondence isn’t absolutely perfect in every detail.” Instead, he’s rediscovered the idea of lies-to-children. Which is a more general case of the same thing, I suppose.
The other answer to really jump out at me was Carlo Rovelli on quantum mechanics:
I have slowly came to realize that in its most common textbook version, quantum mechanics makes sense as a theory of a small portion of the universe, a “system”, only under the assumption that something else in the universe fails to obey quantum mechanics. Hence it becomes self contradictory, in its usual version, if we take it as a general description of all physical systems of the universe. Or, at least, there is still something key to understand, with respect to it.
The reason why this caught my eye ought to be obvious.