Thursday morning, October 9th. Watching someone defend a position they clearly no longer believe just because they argued for it last week, and realizing we've confused intellectual consistency with being trapped by our past selves.

Being wrong is supposed to feel bad. That's what we're taught. If you believed something incorrect, you should feel embarrassed. If you change your mind, you should explain why you were wrong before. If you held a position and later abandoned it, you need to justify the shift or risk looking inconsistent.

This is completely backward. Being wrong and realizing it should feel amazing. It means you just got less wrong about the world.

The Identity Tax on Truth

Here's the problem: we've welded our beliefs to our identity. "I believe X" becomes "I am a person who believes X," which becomes "questioning X is questioning who I am."

This makes belief change incredibly expensive. When new evidence contradicts what you believe, you can't just update your belief. You have to navigate identity threat, social consistency, past public statements, and the fear that if you were wrong about this, maybe you're wrong about other things too.

So instead of updating, you defend. You find reasons why the new evidence doesn't count. You reinterpret it. You question the source. You do anything except the simple, costless thing: change your mind.

The tax on updating is so high that most people only change their beliefs when the evidence becomes absolutely overwhelming. By that point, everyone around them already updated, so they look like the last person to get it rather than someone admirably tracking truth.

Meanwhile, the person who comfortably updates their beliefs as soon as evidence suggests they should looks inconsistent. They believed X last month and Y today. They must be wishy-washy, or easily influenced, or not rigorous in their thinking.

But actually they're just responding to information faster than people who need to defend their prior beliefs until defense becomes impossible.

Consistency as Intellectual Prison

We celebrate consistency like it's a virtue. "He's been saying the same thing for 20 years." "She really stands by her principles." "That's what I've always believed."

Sometimes consistency is a virtue—when it reflects principles that remain valid across changing circumstances. But often consistency is just stubbornness, or fear of looking wrong, or inability to process new information.

The world changes. Evidence accumulates. You learn new things. Why would you expect your beliefs to stay the same? Consistency in a changing environment isn't principled—it's evidence that you stopped learning.

The person who believed X ten years ago and still believes X today has either been proven incredibly right (rare), or has found ways to ignore every piece of evidence that contradicted X (common). The person who believed X ten years ago and believes Y today has probably been paying attention.

But we treat the first person as principled and the second as inconsistent. We've built a social system that penalizes updating, then we wonder why everyone is so attached to false beliefs.

The Liberation of Wrongness

Here's what happens when you stop treating belief change as failure: you become much better at being right.

If you don't have to defend your past self, you can update as soon as you get new information. You're not waiting for overwhelming evidence. You're not building defensive interpretations. You're just tracking truth as efficiently as possible.

"I used to think X, but I was wrong" becomes a simple statement of fact, not a confession of failure. Your past self believed X with the information they had. Your current self has different information. No conflict, no identity threat, no need to explain or justify. Just: here's what I believe now.

This makes you dramatically more accurate over time, because you're not accumulating layers of defensive reasoning to protect old beliefs. Each update is clean. You believed X, now you believe Y, and if tomorrow you get evidence for Z, you'll believe that instead.

The person who treats being wrong as comfortable is much more often right than the person who treats being wrong as failure—because they update faster and pay no cognitive cost for updating.

The Social Cost of Truth-Seeking

The challenge is that comfort with being wrong comes with social costs. People interpret your updates as weakness.

You say, "I changed my mind about X." They hear: "I was wrong, and I'm admitting I don't know what I'm talking about." They update their assessment of your reliability downward. They trust your future opinions less.

This is irrational—you should trust people more when they demonstrate ability to change their minds in response to evidence—but it's common. So people learn to hide their updates, or justify them extensively, or pretend their new position is actually consistent with their old one if you squint right.

This is why experts are often the last to update. They have the most reputational investment in their past positions. Admitting error threatens their expert status. So they defend longer than makes sense, update slower than evidence warrants, and gradually become less reliable than informed amateurs who have no reputation to protect.

The expert who can comfortably say "I was wrong about that" is rare and valuable precisely because expert incentives work against it. They've deliberately opted out of the game where consistency equals credibility.

How to Be Comfortably Wrong

First: Separate belief from identity. You are not your opinions. Your beliefs are tools for navigating reality, not core personality traits. When you update a belief, you haven't changed who you are—you've improved your tools.

The way to do this is to practice provisional belief. "Based on current evidence, I believe X" instead of "I believe X." The first form includes built-in acknowledgment that new evidence might change things. It's just description of your current state, not a claim about eternal truth.

Second: Make updating low-cost. Don't explain or justify changes unless someone asks. Don't apologize for past beliefs. Don't treat your past self as embarrassing. Just: "I believed X, now I believe Y." That's it.

The more ceremony you attach to changing your mind, the more expensive it becomes. Keep it simple and updates become trivial.

Third: Track your updates. Keep a record of significant belief changes and what caused them. This does two things: it proves to yourself that updating is normal and frequent, and it lets you audit your reasoning to get better at it.

When you can look back and see "I changed my mind about these 47 things in the last three years, and here's what convinced me each time," belief change stops feeling like failure and starts feeling like learning.

Fourth: Find people who reward updating. Some social contexts penalize belief change. Others reward it. Spend time in the latter. The people who value truth-seeking over consistency will make it much easier to be comfortably wrong.

You need at least a few people with whom you can say "I was totally wrong about that" and have them respond "cool, what changed your mind?" instead of "see, I told you so" or "how did you not know that already?"

The Thursday Insight

The ability to be comfortably wrong might be the most valuable cognitive skill you can develop. Not because being wrong is good, but because comfort with wrongness is what lets you become right faster than everyone else.

The person who can't stand being wrong will defend incorrect beliefs until defense becomes impossible. The person who's comfortable being wrong will update as soon as evidence suggests they should. Over time, the second person becomes much more reliable than the first.

This isn't about being intellectually careless or believing things without evidence. It's about being willing to abandon beliefs when evidence contradicts them, without treating the abandonment as failure.

Your past self believed what made sense with the information they had. Your present self has different information. If you can't update without feeling like you failed, you'll stay wrong much longer than necessary.

The goal isn't to be right all the time—that's impossible. The goal is to be wrong for as little time as possible. And the only way to do that is to make updating your beliefs feel comfortable instead of shameful.

Stop defending your past self. That person is gone. They believed things with partial information. You have more information now. Use it.

The most intellectually honest thing you can say isn't "I've always believed this." It's "I believed X, but I was wrong, and here's what I believe now." That's not weakness—it's the only way to actually track truth instead of just defending your past positions.

Be comfortable being wrong. Not because accuracy doesn't matter, but because comfort with wrongness is what makes accuracy possible.

We've built a culture where changing your mind looks weak and stubbornness looks principled. This is backward. The person who changes their beliefs in response to new evidence is tracking truth. The person who maintains consistency despite contradictory evidence is just refusing to learn. If you make belief change costly, people will defend bad beliefs longer than necessary. If you make it comfortable, they'll update as soon as they should. The most reliable people aren't the ones who are always right—they're the ones who become right quickly after being wrong. Stop treating consistency as a virtue and start treating updating as normal. Your past self had less information than you do. Why would you defend their conclusions?