Will My Opinion/Idea Change in 10 Years?
Any year that passes in which you don’t destroy one of your best loved ideas is a wasted year — Charlie Munger
Think about how we form ideas and opinions. How many of them go through critical thinking and gets stress tested? The odds are, not many.
The more we talk or write about our ideas and opinions, the more they get cemented in our brain, even if they’re false. The effect is amplified if we’re publishing papers and building a career around those ideas.
Science Progresses One Funeral At A Time
That’s the reasoning behind the saying, science progresses one funeral at a time. It’s difficult even for brilliant physicists to change their mind when the facts have changed because they’ve built their success on those very same ideas.
Imagine spending 20 years of your academic life publishing papers, giving lectures, writing books to the wide acclaim of friends and colleagues. Suddenly a young hotshot that happens to be the same student you lectured to upends all of that with striking insight.
