Tuesday morning. Watching someone double down on a position they clearly no longer believe, just to avoid the social cost of changing their mind publicly. Thinking about how rare it is to see someone genuinely update their thinking in real time—and how much more I trust people who do.

The Performance of Consistency

We've made consistency a virtue when it should be evidence of intellectual stagnation. Someone who holds the same positions for years, who never admits error, who never says "I used to think X but now I think Y"—this person isn't wise. They're performing certainty for an audience that mistakes stubborn consistency for strength.

Real thinking is messy. It involves false starts, dead ends, and embarrassing mistakes. It requires changing your mind when evidence warrants it, even when that change is inconvenient or socially costly. But we've created a culture where intellectual evolution looks like weakness rather than growth.

The Social Cost of Thinking

Here's why most people avoid thinking publicly: it's genuinely risky. When you work through complex ideas in front of others, you inevitably say things that are half-formed, wrong, or socially awkward. You make mistakes that can be screenshot and weaponized. You reveal the uncertainty and confusion that careful thinking requires.

Much safer to think privately, polish your conclusions, and present only your finished thoughts. But this approach sacrifices the collaborative nature of good thinking. The best ideas emerge from engagement with other minds, from having your assumptions challenged, from being forced to articulate what you actually believe versus what you think you should believe.

The Compound Returns of Intellectual Courage

People who think publicly—who are willing to be wrong where others can see, who change their minds when evidence warrants it, who admit confusion about complex topics—compound their intellectual growth in ways that private thinkers cannot.

They get better feedback because people can see their actual reasoning process, not just their polished conclusions. They attract collaborators who are drawn to genuine intellectual engagement rather than performance. Most importantly, they develop the skill of updating their beliefs efficiently instead of defending them reflexively.

What Public Thinking Actually Looks Like

Intellectual courage doesn't mean being reckless or inflammatory. It means being transparent about your reasoning process. It means saying "I'm thinking through this as I write" instead of pretending you have it all figured out. It means acknowledging when you've changed your mind about something, explaining what led to the change, and treating that change as evidence of growth rather than failure.

It means engaging with the strongest versions of ideas you disagree with instead of attacking strawmen. It means admitting when someone has a point, even when that point complicates your argument. It means being more interested in getting to truth than in being right.

The Trust Factor

Here's what's counterintuitive: people who admit uncertainty, who change their minds publicly, who acknowledge the limits of their knowledge—these people are more trustworthy, not less. When someone shows you their reasoning process, including its flaws and revisions, you can actually evaluate their conclusions. When someone only shows you polished certainty, you have no way to assess the quality of their thinking.

I trust people more when they say "I might be wrong about this, but here's how I'm currently thinking about it" than when they say "this is obviously true" about anything complex. The first person is showing you their work. The second person is asking you to take their word for it.

The Courage to Be Wrong in Public

The highest form of intellectual courage is the willingness to be wrong where others can see—not because you're careless about truth, but because you care more about eventually being right than about appearing right in the moment.

This requires genuine confidence: the confidence to let your thinking be examined, criticized, and potentially corrected. It requires security in your identity beyond your ideas. It requires accepting that intellectual growth necessarily involves intellectual mistakes.

But it's also the most efficient path to better thinking. Every time you think publicly, you're running your ideas through a distributed error-correction system. Every time you change your mind based on good evidence or argument, you're demonstrating that you care more about truth than about reputation.

Tuesday Morning Practice

Here's an experiment for this Tuesday: try thinking out loud about something you're genuinely uncertain about. Share your reasoning process, not just your conclusions. Admit what you don't know. Invite correction or alternative perspectives.

Notice how it feels to be intellectually vulnerable. Notice whether people respond with judgment or with engagement. Notice whether the quality of your thinking improves when you're forced to articulate it clearly enough for others to follow and potentially challenge.

The goal isn't to be wrong—it's to be more interested in getting to truth than in appearing to already have it.

The most intellectually honest thing you can say is "here's how I'm thinking about this, but I could be wrong." The most intellectually courageous thing you can do is say it publicly and mean it. Most people won't—which is exactly why it's so powerful when you do.