PreScript:

Insights serve well when cataloged online, as not only you, but the whole world can better understand your positions.. said every blogger ever

an approach..

Let us start by giving them the benefit of doubt:

People make the best decision possible with all the information that they have access to.

As you know so well from solving all those Math problems in school, how easy it is to be absolutely wrong!
And the sad part is, you may not even know it unless your error is pointed out and the right answer is explained.

Thus, if correct answers are what you are after, it only serves you better if you can accept these errors, learn the best approach and make better decisions in the future…

a point of view..

open-minded people are curious why people do not agree with them. close-minded people are frustrated that people do not agree with them.
— Auren Hoffman (@auren) November 25, 2017

an opinion..

At a glance, this intelligent quote makes you nod in agreement seeming to indicate that everybody tends to disagree with others, doggedly stand their ground, and wonder why the ‘other side’ does not agree with us more.

Give it a few seconds, and you may notice the mischaracterization of the two sides here.

When it comes to subjective opinions, people may not agree with eachother because:

they don’t understand the reasoning of the other side well enough.
or
the opinion does not resonate with their values.
or
they are too stubborn to try and learn anything new!

Disclaimer:
As always, I am not a big fan of bucketing of people into such broad categories. Depending on the situation, these are just different states of mind that everybody is subject to and capable of displaying.
Calling out people as close-minded, just because they are more prone to standing their ground, or open-minded , just because they claim that they are just isn’t fair

Expert Systems

There is an extremely important but acutely undervalued virtue today:

the importance of being able to change your mind!..

Let’s quickly go through the advent of our attempt to crack AI: developing systems that display aspects of intelligent behavior. One of the earliest successful solutions to the knowledge acquisition problem was modeling decision-making of highly skilled experts in certain fields (say doctors) by means of a set of if-then-else rules. Although these Expert Systems proved to be reasonably reliable in many fields (even financial risk management, etc), some of the issues observed were:

It was difficult to simplify many questions to simple limited sets of rules
Even if done in intricate detail, exceptions can throw off the predefined rules
Performance drops exponentially ($2^n\,rules$ even for simple systems) as domain knowledge grows
Adaptability to change can be very tedious depending on which level the change lies

Apart from more experiment-design issues such as:

Getting the time and resources of the real Experts to contribute knowledge in the face of actually doing their tasks
Encoding more complex rules in subject domains with many pathways becomes difficult without data model changes
Available technology can be a problem, but Moores law usually kicks in to save the day

Long story short, knowledge transference problems needed a more versatile and probabilistic model that adapts its internal state (more fuzzy than binary) to figure out the answer. Hence the necessity of something more than a simple rule-based approach gave rise to a more amenable evolution of this system: in the form of Neural Networks.

Transposing the insight from the above exercise into a workable life lesson, we have:

How-to

Opinions are like objects you carry with you in a box and should be easily replaceable: swaping it out for a better opinion if they turn out to be no good anymore..

The trick is to keep your identity separate from your opinions.

If you attribute your opinions to your identity, i.e: what’s in the box is who you are, then you will cling to them despite any evidence to the contrary!

Because

If you want to be right all the time, you have got to be ready to change your mind!!

From the three possible degrees of improper information, being:

Uninformed,
Under-informed and
Utterly Misinformed

the only way to be properly informed is to put new information through an evaluation filter. No matter how clean or cluttered your information pathway is, you can better it with effort. Honing this data-processing-knowledge-acquisition procedure, in practice, can help you process prejudiced propaganda and purge it for purity!
Watch the unfolding of this natural process in our brains beautifully simplified and visualized (by Nicky Case) in this link
Simple probability shows us how we are more likely to be wrong about things we have little knowledge or experience in: by the sheer fact that there are many more ways to be wrong than right! The significance of this self-correction feedback loop should not be understated, because, isn’t this exactly what we call learning!

In defense of inflexibility!

Could there be any merits to narrow/close-mindedness?
Though we regard people displaying this trait as a nuisance, this quote (that I remember seeing somewhere) underlines the primary pain point about these weird and wonderful folks:

The problem with close-minded people is that their mouth is always open!

Once you take the time to learn more about where they stand, and you imagine them more complexly, you begin to see why their perspective may not be as absurd as you initially thought.

Sometimes it is just that they struggle to communicate their internal thoughts and emotions clearly
Sometimes they just don’t care, as they falsely assume everybody else is as closed-off to listening to reason as they are
Sometimes it may be that they don’t have the courage of their convictions and are honestly afraid that their crutch, i.e: their belief system, may crumble if they truly test out the tenets of their system…

quick side-note (or a side-swipe!)

The extent to which I wonder if people really believe in what they say is illustrative in that some of my dear friends, who I love and respect, are proud to brand themselves as Conservatives, and I find it amusing how the thesaurus generously adorns this characteristic with such epithets as :

illiberal
inflexible
unimaginative
unprogressive
traditionalistic
reactionary
unchanging
controlled
timid
firm

Jokes aside,

Although I feel that healthy skepticism is always a benefit, the sustenance and prevalence of the trait of narrow-minded support of an in-group through evolutionary history can only be ascribed to it being useful.

Tribalism is a good survival strategy, as it is more favorable to flourish or fall as a flock!

Circumstances

Some major prerequisite to broad-minded explorations are:

appropriate mental faculty
latent ability
the luxury of Time!

Though in game-theory terms, every species is locked in an infinite game against the universe and everything else in it, the subjective experience of every specimen in it is time-bound.

Hence delayed decisions are naturally undesirable as it comes at a cost and packaged with:

logarithmically diminishing returns
the ticking time-bomb of the price we pay, in terms of opportunity cost!.. (For more info, do check out the papers in the References section)

‘The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’
– Oscar Wilde

Critical impartial pursuit of all problems is not practical, and hence we must be capable of deciding

which problems we have the option of investigating before committing to and
which ones we outsource our choice

Just that it needs to be a conscious decision, and not just a forced-hand (hopefully) or laziness.

Watch out for

Sometimes when your vision is limited and direction is uncertain, there is merit in following authority (or the elite)…
Chief among the many cautions to be mindful of with this approach are:

the ambiguity in establishing the credibility of the leader to handle the situation
the possibility of selecting charlatans and rhetoricians and salesmen! (if the political climate of late is anything to go by)
the effects of committing regrettably disgraceful deeds as a result

And In practice

“I was only following orders!”

Historically Close-minded adherence to leadership at times of crises:

at it’s best leads to Revolutions and Independence movements
like the French and American Revolutions etc., laying the groundwork for these thriving economic centers of today
at it’s worst leads to World Wars
from the Nuremberg defense to Manhattan Project.. both sides, both sides (oh! 2017 presidential references, how long will you be remembered?)

It is very hard to prescribe a generic course of action, for the multivariate problems we solve every day and the decisions we are faced with. But IMHO, I feel a certain degree of self-consciousness (of your mental station) along with factoring in facts (both historical and evident scientific facts) goes a long way in keeping bias at bay.

On neutral, non-opinionated, nonviolent stoicism

Okay… this post has inflated enough already! and we have covered both the edge cases (close- and open-mindedness)
Check out the analysis of the dispassionate neutral-mind on the next installment of reasoning by making connections from non-intuitive disparate subject fields!

Bottomline

But for any topic (casual or contentious), if I have time to revel on it, and intellectual prowess to pry into its depths, I myself opt for the former, as I believe in this cheesy one-liner:

An open mind surely opens doors!

and for those who feel I am being too idealistic, remember (to vaguely (mis)quote something I have heard before)

No pessimist has ever won a war…

PS:

If you feel any of the above could use a kind word (or two) of advice, I would like to encourage you to let me know in the comments below please

Cheers!

References

Read, D., Olivola, C. Y., & Hardisty, D. J. (2016). The value of nothing: Asymmetric attention to opportunity costs drives intertemporal decision making. Management Science.
Plantinga, A., Krijnen, J. M. T., Zeelenberg, M., and Breugelmans, S. M. (2017) Evidence for Opportunity Cost Neglect in the Poor. J. Behav. Dec. Making, doi: 10.1002/bdm.2041.

Opinions and The Self