What Does It Mean to Think Well?

Why we must stop obsessing about perfection and embrace being wrong

What does it mean to change your mind? If we’re talking about something that truly matters to you, being wrong is a kind of moral shock, a realignment of personality and purpose. It’s a kind of life experience akin to other great shocks. Some of us are one kind of person before we have children and another kind of person afterward — not all at once, not overnight, but as our experience of parenthood seeps into old assumptions and alters them. Similarly, a realignment of reasoning is never brought about by reason alone. It requires us to admit not only that someone else’s stance is reasonable, but also that those reasons have a claim upon us — that we are willing to be changed by them.

Another way of looking at this is to consider the truism that if you were me, you would believe what I believe. If it’s true of us and others, it must also be true of our own past and present. Whoever you were when you believed something that you now disagree with — or when you felt something that you no longer feel — the old you is now lost to time. And it’s in our relationship with these past selves that I think we can find a model for thinking more usefully about thinking.