Somehow I Trust the Flip-Floppers More
Frequent changes of mind don't make you interesting but they can be good anyway 🩴
Sometimes I feel like I flip-flop on important issues a lot, maybe too much. I can easily stand on one side of any current debate one day, and then read a persuasive argument for the other position and actually change my mind the next day. I have noticed that with things like environmental issues, AI risk, technological optimism/pessimism, a number of political questions, where to stand relative to various ideologies from effective altruism to progress studies, even trivial personal stuff like “what is my favorite color.”
This seems bad in some sense. Isn’t it better to be opinionated? Like, if you don’t know much about a topic, sure, it’s probably better to be open to be convinced by any good argument; but it’s better to know and then pick a side. Right? At the very least, it’s more interesting. Nobody wants to read an article by someone who changes their mind all the time on that particular topic. Nobody likes indecisive people.
And if you’re going to accomplish something, anything, you have to charge ahead in some direction you’ve picked. If you want to revolutionize nuclear power, you can’t flip flop all the time about nuclear power.
Yet I find myself somehow trusting the indecisive people a bit more. The reasoning goes like this: once you pick a side, you stop being objective and open about it. You start rooting for your side. You make it part of your identity. You become, perhaps, an activist, or you become known as “the X guy” where X is anything from socialism to YIMBYism to AI accelerationism to really liking the color purple. This is all good and fine, and in a pluralistic society that moves forward through debate between people with opposing views, it is productive. But it makes you, individually, less trustable.
Tim Urban has a pretty good typology of ways to think in his book What’s Our Problem?:
Scientists (idealized and metaphorical ones, not necessarily real scientists) keep an open mind and don’t decide in advance what the answer to a question is; they trust their thinking process to get them to the right answer, and they accept whatever the outcome is.
Sports fans also have an objective process, but they kind of want one of the answers to be true, just like they want a game to be fair while also wanting their team to win. This makes their thought process a bit less trustable.
Lawyers are paid by a client to make a particular answer win. They still have what looks like an objective process, but the process is rigged and not trustable. This is fine if there’s an equally biased lawyer on the other side of the courtroom, but not as a general metaphor for thinking processes.
Zealots don’t even have a process: they just have an answer, and they (claim to) know that all other answers are wrong.
Someone with strong, unwavering opinions could be on any rung of the ladder. But a flip-flopper cannot be a zealot and would make a poor lawyer indeed. They can be a sports fan anyway, but they’d be a lame one — for maximum enjoyment, you’re supposed to pick a team.
The ideal case, of course, is to be an open-minded “scientist” who has thought deeply, robustly, about a question to reach their current views. But we can’t really know this without digging into your personal history. Determining which category you’re in is too much work, so if you have strong opinions without showing signs of hesitation, I default to trusting you less, except if you’re able to send a credible signal of belonging to the first category.
(And those signals are tricky. Degrees and other credentials are one kind, but as we all know, they’re rather imperfect. Showing nuance is another, but nuance is by definition difficult to do and to communicate. And having a publicly accessible body of work is yet another, but again there’s no guarantee that people are going to look at it and understand it.)
Whereas if you openly flip-flop, then at least I can trust that you don’t have any vested interests (e.g. you think AI is not risky and you also happen to be the head of an AI company) or an overly large identity (you are part of a community that believes in socialism/nuclear/AI risk/ etc. and it would be devastating on a personal level to leave that community), and so on.
For better or for worse, however, society in general, and social media in particular, does not reward flip-floppers much. You’re supposed to pick a team. This is true in politics as in everything else. If you want to become a popular influencer writing about whatever, you need Strong Opinions. And to be fair, it’s probably good to hold Strong Opinions in a few areas where you have some degree of expertise. You do want some identity.
So I wouldn’t exactly advise you to start wearing your flip-flops all the time in all contexts. Like I said, the best is to be opinionated and have the scientist mindset. But if you’re like me and you tend to hold your opinions lightly in many areas, to the point that a slight change in the wind of public opinion might change your mind, it’s probably fine. Even though it’s not the best way to be interesting or to accomplish ambitious goals, it can provide you with unexpected credibility.
There is, after all, a kind of aura that accompanies big changes of mind. This week, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the biggest names in AI, officially quit his employer (Google) to warn people about the dangers of AI, and said he regretted some of his past work. This is a far stronger signal that AI is dangerous than we’d get from someone who’s been saying this for decades.
After a few years of saying this, maybe Hinton will become set in his anti-AI views. Or maybe he’ll change his mind again after some new development in the field, in which case he would become a flip-flopper (which implies changing your mind often). At that point people might stop paying attention to him, because nobody likes flip-floppers. But those who follow him anyway might find themselves somehow trusting him more than they’d expect.
There's a lot to be said for "Strong opinions, lightly held."
I'd trust flip-floppers more if they explained *why* they changed their minds.
Otherwise, I suspect they have a hidden agenda.