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Strong beliefs are great things to have, but when they contradict with the truth it can be troublesome. You might change your mind and be glad you’re now less wrong that you were before, but some people will hold their beliefs above the truth.

In her book “I Never Thought of It That Way“, author Mónica Guzmán shares a snippet of a conversation that she had where this came up:

David then asked his second question: “Which do you value more: the truth or your own beliefs? “’Cause they’re not synonymous,” he told the class. “If I’m wrong about some things—my beliefs about everything all put together—my beliefs are not synonymous with the truth. If I value my own beliefs more than the truth, I’m going to defend myself to the death. And why would I listen to you?”

For example, this man is convinced of his belief, including words like “look at the facts”, “that is true, look it up”, for something that was totally false.

At the NRA Convention someone told us that hammers are used to kill more people than guns. So we looked up the stats in front of them. pic.twitter.com/ju5R8Pqbvk

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) May 31, 2022

If someone is willing to defend their beliefs despite contrary evidence, they become someone not worth listening to or trusting. I’m not a fan of being wrong (like I was here), but I prefer to learn and grow as time goes on and sometimes that means changing what I believe.

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I talk about this a lot, largely because I struggle with it myself — if someone has beliefs that are completely counter to mine, pushing them away is likely a bad idea for a large number of reasons.

A few months ago I shared the idea of not “unfollowing if you disagree”, which can be a challenging thing to do. It’s easy to cull your friend group and news sources to only fit what you already believe, but that’s most likely to lead to more and more extreme levels of belief. The more extreme you become, the less you’re able to see the nuance in moderate viewpoints, and those moderate viewpoints are often the ones that are nearest the truth.

Going back to Mónica Guzmán’s book “I Never Thought of It That Way“, which I’ve referenced in a few posts, she talks more about the title of this post and how it ties into the “unfollow if you disagree” way of thinking:

When you shove away the hostile, you push away the curious. The people who were learning from you, from whom you might have learned something yourself. “Unfollow if you disagree” is more efficient othering. And it carries over to real life. The week before the 2020 election, a prominent anchor on CNN, Don Lemon, told his viewers that he “had to get rid of” friends who would reelect the Republican president “because they’re too far gone.” He’d be friends with them again, he said, if “they want to live in reality.”

There may be people that are rethinking their stance on a major issue, but if they see you say “everyone that believes x is a moron”, their curiosity will fade. Your stance might have been aimed at hostile folks on “the other side”, but you’re unintentionally pushing away those that were merely curious.

It’s a tough place to be, no doubt, but I always believe that staying in a place of curiosity and seeing issues from both sides is the best way to become well-educated with your own opinions.

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I talk about memory quite a lot on here, as it’s a concept that is fascinating to me. I frequently talk about using Anki to improve what I remember, but that’s ultimately just brute-force practice. It’s a good thing, and I use it every single day, but understanding more of the science behind memory is always interesting.

While listening to a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, host Shankar Vedantam was interviewing Daniel Willingham, the author of “Outsmart Your Brain” on ways to improve memory. During the interview, Willingham shared the results of study that really surprised me: if you hear something and you consciously think “I want to remember that”, it improves your odds of remembering it by 0%!

I wasn’t sure it would help a lot, but if all you do is wish to remember it, nothing happens in your brain to actually make that a reality. Instead, you need to actually put in the work to help build a memory around the concept at hand. As Michael Nielson has shared, “memory is a choice”. If you can’t remember things that you wish you could, it’s mostly because you don’t care enough to make it happen.

Solving that issue goes far beyond the scope of this blog, but there are a lot of things you can do:

• Repeat someone’s name when you first meet them.
• Use tools like a memory palace to remember a long list of items.
• Use tools like Anki to help with other individual items.
• Actually study for that next test, using tips like the ones that Willingham shares in his book.

If you want to remember something, the “want” isn’t going to get you very far, so it’s worth putting in the effort actually help your brain to remember it in the future.

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I write a lot about honesty on here, but being honest doesn’t mean always keeping your beliefs the same. As I wrote more than 10 years ago, it’s a good thing to be willing to change your mind and it’s often the logical thing to do.

However, changing your mind can sometimes appear as contradictions coming out of your mouth, and it’s indeed a thin line between being willing to change your mind and just being wishy-washy, particularly as you’re working your way through an idea.

In her book “I Never Thought of It That Way“, author Mónica Guzmán shared it like this:

And don’t confuse honesty for a lack of contradiction! If people contradict themselves, they might be revealing their own messiness, not some inability to think straight. A contradiction doesn’t need a correction or confession. Just some curiosity to plumb its depths.

I really work hard to “plumb the depths” of my curiosity, and that can come out as being contradictory at times, particularly when I do it in an open way on this site.

It feels kind of similar to how we watched scientists try to sort out the details of COVID in the early months, or when the SpaceX Starship exploded not long after launched. Those were both looks into processes that we rarely get to see. Have you been around to see a new vaccine being developed in real-time? Did you see the first F-14 and F-16 crash on testing? As we get more media coverage on literally everything, we see more of the process behind the outcome.

If you’re a person that is actively curious about the world around you, it’s ok if you contradict yourself from time to time. When it happens, it just means that it’s time to dig a little deeper and figure out what you really believe.

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I’ve talked about my use of Anki for years now, and it’s a tool I’ve used on-and-off for nearly a decade and one I’ve used every single day for almost five years.

While I use it for a lot of different purposes, one of the early uses was to better remember names and faces. It’s something I often have struggled with and as I find myself in more situations with lots of people who I should know, such as a couple of boards that I’m on, it’s a wildly helpful tool.

Remembering the names of people that you meet isn’t necessarily difficult, but it takes a bit of effort. When people say they’re bad at remembering names, I don’t buy it — they just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

However, I’m finding that I put two very different kinds of people in Anki and both are helpful.

In person

The main type of card I add is for people that I know personally, will see personally, and it’d be great if I could always remember their name. This is probably 90% of the people I store in there and it’s fantastic.

I’ll never meet them in person

However, I also add in cards for people that I might never meet in person, generally clients that are out-of-state. This is of lesser value, but I’m finding it worthwhile. While most of our interactions will be via video chat, so their name will be on the screen right in front of me, it’s nice to remember their name during other parts of the day.

For example, we’ll be having a team meeting and someone will say “Should we add x feature to Acme? Who should we talk to over there?“, it’s nice to immediately have a name and face come to mind for our Acme client, so my response can be “Great idea, I’ll reach out to Susan this afternoon”.

Others?

I’m considering adding a few more in a different category, called something like “people I should know about but will never meet”. This would primarily be political, to remember who my local senators are and things like that, but we’ll see. Right now my overall Anki use is getting a bit too high, so I need a bit more space to open up before I add much more.

“I’m bad at names”

Most people consider themselves pretty bad at remembering names, but it can be solved. You can just own the fact that you’re bad at remembering names, or you can do something about it.

I’m still very imperfect at remembering names, and they sometimes escape my brain at the wrong time, but I’m 10x better than I was in the past so I’ll consider that to be a solid investment of my time.

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You likely saw last week when SpaceX launched their new “Starship” rocket, which exploded minutes after launch. If you’ve not seen it, here is a video of it:

The odd part of the explosion is that it was actually a huge success. Granted, I’m sure they would have preferred that the flight lasted longer, but it was the largest rocket ever launched, and simply clearing the launch tower was a massive success — everything after that is just data that can help for next time.

Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station, explains further in this short interview:

As he mentions, the first F-14 and F-16 both crashed at launch, and even the Wright Brothers suffered many crashes along the way.

It’s somewhat like what Daniel Kahneman has said when he says he “enjoys having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before”.

SpaceX will determine the failure(s) that occurred with this launch, and the next will be better. The crash was ugly, but it was a huge learning experience and should lead to great things in the future.