"Open-mindedness" is a useless term

[gwho]

I've been applying the philosophical thinking to fuzzy terms, as Stefan often does in shows - like "inappropriate",

I've been able to tease out and dissect one of these fuzzy specimen, and put it on display on medium.

I'd love to get some feedback!


 

“Open-minded” is a Redundant Word

"You're not open-minded. You're closed-minded to logic and evidence."

 

There is no open-mindedness. There is only rationality.

Without rationality, open-mindedness lets in both truths and falsehoods.
Without rationality, closed-mindedness keeps out dangerous lies as well as useful, life-changing, and life-saving ideas.

Rationality is the semi-permeable membrane of your mind.

If you’re rational, you’re open to new ideas.
If you’re rational, you don’t close yourself off to new ideas.

You weigh an idea through logic and evidence.
You deem an idea an hypothesis when the means of confirmation are not within grasp.
You deem an idea sophistry when it’s unfalsifiable.
You deem an idea a theory if describes all known evidence well, with few major errors.

Charlatans’ weapon of choice is to use open-mindedness as a Trojan horse to sneak in falsehoods past the semi-permeable walls of skepticism (AKA rationality), and wail that you’re not open-minded if you reject any falsehoods they try to pass off with shoddy reasoning if any at all.

You can recognize sophistry and manipulation by two when logic is actively avoided and it is substituted by emotional or economic incentives, positive or negative.

“Maybe you’re just not the type of person or good enough for X” (classic variant of PUA neg-ing).

“If you ask ‘why’ one more time, I’m not taking you to the video game store.”

Implied in the accusation of not being open-minded is that open-mindedness is a good thing (this is the widespread positive tone people have with the term today). Perhaps it is a good thing. But if so, then so is being closed-minded, strictly speaking. Being open-minded to the point of accepting falsehoods is problematic. So is being closed-minded to the point of rejecting sound logic. So you see, the virtue people are actually appealing to when they use terms like “open-minded” or “closed-minded” is actually rationality. Thus open-mindedness and closed-mindedness are redundant concepts because they‘re relative to rationality.

Poorly defined terms confuse and erect barriers to conversation. Everyone has experienced conversations that go to the point of hostility based on terms that never get defined — and funny enough, often times no one recognizes the need to define terms even after nuclear disaster . The predictable outcome based on game theory analysis of incentives (or even without it) is that most people end up avoiding philosophy and voicing differing opinions altogether. What a sad state of affairs. I believe there is a ton of learning that gets cut short. In such a destitute philosophical ecosystem, charlatans rise as prey becomes more plentiful. Arm yourself with clear thinking (also, please don’t be the A-hole predator charlatan).

Being open-minded is not the opposite of rejecting BS.
Being open-minded is not even the opposite of being being skeptical.
There’s a blatantly false dichotomy if one ever existed.

If the terms “open-minded’ and “closed-minded” as we commonly understand them to mean, then a few corollaries follow:
1) When you’re skeptical, you put ideas through the grinder of epistemology — how you know what’s true. You’re open-minded to any idea in that you’re willing to put it through that filter. You’re ready to accept any idea that passes the tests, no matter how unsettling, provocative, or unprofitable it may be— arguably the defining quality to watch for in people claiming open-mindedness.
2) To insistently accept falsehoods is not open-minded, but actually closed-minded to consistent, sound epistemology — the gates that guard against endless hoards of unfalsifiable nonsense.

But of course, charlatans sure do manipulate using the “open-mindedness” tactic. As with any win-lose predator, their target of choice are the logically weak, and emotionally vulnerable. Far too often this is kids. And their weapon of choice is overwhelmingly the use of positive and negative incentives.

A charlatan’s job is as easy as claiming “racism”, and hurling emotional and social incentives as red herrings to actual facts and logic.

A charlatan’s job is as easy as giving heaven and hell to a baby.

Every single one of us were born with a wonderful dual-boot defense/exploration system. It got bribed or crushed out of us through conditioning and being forced to be around toxic people. It was “rediscovered” and put into practice by industrial giants such as Toyota, and nurtured Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, and Kaizen. It’s a marvelous jewel that got stitched into our DNA. It’s a single word that’s far more useful and potent than “open-mindedness”: “Why?”

 

[PatrickC]

Great post! Open mindedness is the ultimate weapon of choice for the moral relativist.

 

By the way, to make it easier on the reader can I advise you to split your writing up with spaces between your paragraphs. It just makes it easier and more enjoyable to read that way.

[WasatchMan]

"[There is a] dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.” This is a very ambiguous term—as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having “a wide open mind.” That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices—and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.

 

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear." - Ayn Rand

[jpahmad]

come on, don't be so closed minded

[Sal9000]

Great post A few corrections though.

 

You deem an idea an hypothesis when the means of confirmation are not within grasp.
You deem an idea sophistry when it’s unfalsifiable.
You deem an idea a theory if describes all known evidence well, with few major errors.

 

A hypothesis is a statement that can be tested.You formulate it in such a way that it is open to verification or falsification.
Not everything that cannot be falsified is sophist. If this was the case, you would have to throw out history, psychology, and art out of the window. All those are products of our mind that are not scientific, but that does not make them sophist.
A theory is a bunch of hypotheses, that describe a wide ranch of natural phenomena. Deciding which theory is more likely to be correct is heavily disputed in the real of the Scientific Method. Notable suggestions include shortness, the ability to make more predictions, coherence and so on.

[EveryVoluntaryistIsLemons]

I use "open-minded" as meaning "being willing to consider other perspectives" as opposed to "not being judgmental" or "accepting all ideas or perspectives as equally valid." A better term for those would be "no-minded."

 

In one English class in high school, we had to write something in the style of a "This I Believe" piece. I wrote about the importance of being open-minded, and specifically clarified (even ranted a little) that being open-minded does not mean accepting everything you hear as true, but being willing to hear all ideas and evaluate them to see if they're true (and change your mind - or not - accordingly), as opposed to being closed-minded, being unwilling to consider perspectives other than those that you already hold.

[Jer]

I use "open-minded" as meaning "being willing to consider other perspectives" as opposed to "not being judgmental" or "accepting all ideas or perspectives as equally valid." A better term for those would be "no-minded.

same here, I had a dinner conversation with a friend of a friend that started with him saying he saw God when he died on the operating table. "tell me more" I say...

"I saw God and I'm enlightened now. I don't give a shit about money or any trivial bs. You can say anything you want to me and I won't get upset." he repeats it a couple times in a weird way to the point where I feel like he's challenging me.

I ask how he knows it was the god of the bible and he just knows. I ask a few more questions and suggested ISIS could use the bible to justify most of its actions. he (apparently) got pretty upset and left when I was taking my kid to the bathroom.

[neeeel]

I see open minded as having the ability to look at all your beliefs dispassionately and openly, and be willing to find out that they are false. Even the seemingly obvious and true ones. Humans as a rule dont like having their core beliefs challenged. This is not the same as accepting all ideas or perspectives as equally valid.

[gwho]

Great post! Open mindedness is the ultimate weapon of choice for the moral relativist.

 

By the way, to make it easier on the reader can I advise you to split your writing up with spaces between your paragraphs. It just makes it easier and more enjoyable to read that way.

 

Definitely. I did that on medium.com I just copy-pasted for this forum.

 

 

 

come on, don't be so closed minded

 

touche! well played sir.

 

 

 

 

@WasatchMan

I guess I reinvented the wheel.

 

 

 

same here, I had a dinner conversation with a friend of a friend that started with him saying he saw God when he died on the operating table. "tell me more" I say...

"I saw God and I'm enlightened now. I don't give a shit about money or any trivial bs. You can say anything you want to me and I won't get upset." he repeats it a couple times in a weird way to the point where I feel like he's challenging me.

I ask how he knows it was the god of the bible and he just knows. I ask a few more questions and suggested ISIS could use the bible to justify most of its actions. he (apparently) got pretty upset and left when I was taking my kid to the bathroom.

People try to break free from the shackles of logic. I really would have liked to have been born in a time when the emotional amygdala reactions overriding the prefrontal cortex had been selected against a lot more.

 

 

 

I see open minded as having the ability to look at all your beliefs dispassionately and openly, and be willing to find out that they are false. Even the seemingly obvious and true ones. Humans as a rule dont like having their core beliefs challenged. This is not the same as accepting all ideas or perspectives as equally valid.

100% agree. but it's tricky when put into practice because if you validly disagree with it and voice it, people quickly say you're not open minded. It's as if you have to pretend it's a new idea to you, or that you haven't considered it many times in depth before. It's like asking an astrophysicist about your new hypothesis about the fate of the universe, and if he shuts it down in an instant (because what you're saying triggers a known violation of established theory), then it's like accusing that professor of being closed-minded.

 

So sometimes, people declare you closed-minded based on the speed of your disagreement, and other times, for disagreeing at all.

 

Also, it seems a lot of times people can't tell the difference between closed-minded declarations vs disagreeing as you cite you reasons why.

 

"It's not like that because x y z." (This means, "please evaluate my arguments x y and z")

 

But people take that to mean "it's not like that. PERIOD."

 

It is this kind of jumping to conclusions and not-listening, combined with emotional attacking that really irritates the crap out of me.

I use "open-minded" as meaning "being willing to consider other perspectives" as opposed to "not being judgmental" or "accepting all ideas or perspectives as equally valid." A better term for those would be "no-minded."

 

In one English class in high school, we had to write something in the style of a "This I Believe" piece. I wrote about the importance of being open-minded, and specifically clarified (even ranted a little) that being open-minded does not mean accepting everything you hear as true, but being willing to hear all ideas and evaluate them to see if they're true (and change your mind - or not - accordingly), as opposed to being closed-minded, being unwilling to consider perspectives other than those that you already hold.

I get where you're coming from, but the very same people who may use that definition are very closed-minded when it comes to claiming 5+5=239.

If it's a matter of social politeness, then that's a completely separate dimension from being open/closed-minded. You can be polite and open-minded, polite and closed-minded.

 

willing to consider others' perspectives. That's covered by rationality, as pointed out in the essay. If you're rational, you're willing to consider things, and don't claim something is false without working through why, and being able to validly formulate why.

 

Being willing to consider others' perspectives also doesn't preclude that you may have already considered them, worked out exactly the problems why it's not valid, and quickly being able to point out why.

 

Things like "what are stars?" We don't seriously stay "open-minded" to the notion that they're angels. no, they're giant balls of matter moving through space. You can be super quick, super adamant, super conclusive about that, and it wouldn't make you closed-minded.. The consideration you put into preserving the other person's feelings is a completely separate matter.

 

Also, when you say judgemental, do you mean socially judgemental, or logically judgemental? saying 3+3=6 is very logically judgemental. you're claiming an absolute, and implying something that contradicts that is false. But it's not socially judgmental, where you're making the other person feel bad intentionally. That's another great example of a term that has multiple meanings to people, and can cause confusion and explosions. I think being curious, and not quick to leap to emotional attacks while skipping the logic, and things you may not be aware of is key to any conversation. I'm not saying you are doing this, I just wanted to point out that general observation.

 

What really annoys me in general is how people (again, not you) try to blur the lines between politeness and truth. When you work out a truth, build the logic, and deliver it for consideration, people start trying to say it's not true because you weren't nice about it (not so transparently though).

[Jot]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI

In case you didnt see it yet.

[Carl Green]

Any time we pre-suppose things, or project our beliefs onto what someone is saying to us, it closes off our ability to fully understand what someone is saying to us.

 

As an example, (which often happens here) when someone tells you "I'm a christian". ANY pre-supposing or projection on your part as to what it means for them to be a christian, will potentially be preventing you from understanding them. It essentially, "closes off" your ability to accurately understand what they're attempting to communicate to you.

 

So maybe we should have a "clean mind", free from any projections or suppositions if we want to be able to understand people better. And by understand, I DO NOT mean agree with.

[Jer]

Any time we pre-suppose things, or project our beliefs onto what someone is saying to us, it closes off our ability to fully understand what someone is saying to us.

 

As an example, (which often happens here) when someone tells you "I'm a christian". ANY pre-supposing or projection on your part as to what it means for them to be a christian, will potentially be preventing you from understanding them. It essentially, "closes off" your ability to accurately understand what they're attempting to communicate to you.

I disagree. Words have meaning and inference is an integral part of language. When a person says "I'm a Christian" they are implicitly accepting that there are widely recognized definitions of the words they chose.

 

I'm happy to ask about his/her experience as a Christian though...

[autowagon]

open and closed minded refers to more specifically new solutions, it's about solutions.  Open people are open to new solutions even though they have one already.  It's about consideration.  Closed minded people are still rational they just aren't considerate.  They stick to what works unless it affects them personally.  It's an ego thing.

[PGP]

I tend towards equating open-mindedness with relativism in terms of how it is used today. If I am asked to be open-minded about having Sharia law or communism, I say, no thank you!!! 

To function in and adapt to an environment, learning is about knowing enough about something so that you don't have to think about it again. Like riding a bike.

To be open-minded is important if you know nothing about a subject like philosophy where there are rules that can be followed to arrive at truths.

I think open-mindedness is pushed to distract and confuse and keep people in a hyper-vigilant state that leads to nihilism. Why this is done, I cannot say.

[Pepin]

I think what is often referred to as being open minded is more about having an ability to defer gratification in argument. People are usually a little too eager to jump in and attempt to disprove an argument without hearing it in full.

 

This is a little issue I have with Stefan in listener calls sometimes because just listening to the whole argument can be more helpful to the other person, as opposed to teasing out the first couple of premises and losing sight of the argument. It isn't of course that I don't think teasing out premises to be important, but the way we often make arguments involves simplifying premises to make the process quicker.

 

In other listener calls when the caller expands too much and explains every little detail as to not engage in the premise interrogation, Stefan and everyone else gets a little annoyed because it is a slow and tedious process. The issue is that if they were to condense it, they would likely be have the focus on the first couple premises. It is a bit frustrating because finding the right middle ground is difficult.

 

The other use of open minded is more of a method of stopping an argument. In conversations about ghosts and telepathy, the other person has said to me "you should be more open minded". They don't have an argument and need a way to stop the debate because they aren't getting anywhere, so they incite self-attack through the odd wedge of open mindedness. I mean you can continue the argument after that, but it is very awkward, and that is the point. It is like talking to someone after they said "bye" and started walking off.

[Carl Green]

I disagree. Words have meaning and inference is an integral part of language. When a person says "I'm a Christian" they are implicitly accepting that there are widely recognized definitions of the words they chose.

 

I'm happy to ask about his/her experience as a Christian though...

 

I'm not seeing how you're disproving that assuming something will improve your understanding of someone.

[Jer]

I'm not seeing how you're disproving that assuming something will improve your understanding of someone.

I think you said the opposite in the post I quoted, in this example I'm saying you MUST assume that the word "Christian" has some meaning in order to use language. If I tell you "I'm a bowler" I must assume you have an idea of what bowling is. If the word "bowling" has no presuppositions that go along with it then it's a worthless statement to say "I am a bowler".

[Carl Green]

My point isn't about whether or not saying "I'm christian" means anything. Of course it does.

[Jer]

My point isn't about whether or not saying "I'm christian" means anything. Of course it does.

OK, could you give specific examples of how we project our beliefs onto what someone is saying to us, and then it closes off our ability to fully understand what someone is saying to us?

 

In my case I assume a ton of negative things about a person when I hear them profess Christianity and I think that's not a problem because it doesn't keep me from asking if they actually believe the nonsense in the bible that they are claiming is holy with the statement "I'm a Christian".

[Carl Green]

OK, could you give specific examples of how we project our beliefs onto what someone is saying to us, and then it closes off our ability to fully understand what someone is saying to us?

 

In my case I assume a ton of negative things about a person when I hear them profess Christianity and I think that's not a problem because it doesn't keep me from asking if they actually believe the nonsense in the bible that they are claiming is holy with the statement "I'm a Christian".

 

You gave a perfect example yourself. "...I assume a ton of negative..."

 

I'm not saying you should spend any time you don't want to spend on asking people questions about themselves. I'm also not arguing that you're somehow "wrong" for doing it. I'm just giving an example of how not asking questions and going with your presuppositions is an example of closed-mindedness.

[A Madman Person Guy]

"An open mind is like a fortress, with its gates unbarred and unguarded."

 

Nah, but really. For anyone vaunting the merits of open-mindedness I'd recommend reading a bit of Peter Watts. And after that I'll judge their intellectual honesty and disposition from their reaction to an introduction to the idea of truly alien perspectives of thought. At best, they'll become a bit more guarded and aware of how what appears to be independent cognition can play tricks on one, and at worst they'll just claim it as some kind of validation of their ideas, which is still a win-win because it makes me aware of their idiocy and will allow me to dismiss them while they go on having been entertained by some good literature.

 

It's true that you need to be able to integrate new ideas and thoughts to your mind, but I put it to you that the very idea that there are such things as "open-minded" or "closed-minded" in the first place is erroneous. I'd say that in order to be able to determine the validity of any concept, theory or frame of mind, you need to have a "measuring stick" or "grayscale" to measure it against, and that the only limits to breadth and depth of perception are imposed by your own intellectual capabilities.

 

 

You gave a perfect example yourself. "...I assume a ton of negative..."

 

I'm not saying you should spend any time you don't want to spend on asking people questions about themselves. I'm also not arguing that you're somehow "wrong" for doing it. I'm just giving an example of how not asking questions and going with your presuppositions is an example of closed-mindedness.

 

Depends on what those "negative things" are. If he's assuming they screech like eagles, have laser halos hidden in their pockets and burn babies and snort the ashes, that'd be silly. If he's assuming on the other hand that they tend to be more gullible, more prone to moralistic brow-beating and tabooism and, if they're a high-school or college girl, more likely to have anal sex, then I'd have to get on his side, since those ideas have the statistics and science behind them. And given the right conditions, there's nothing inherently bad with any of those traits (at least, not to the individual). It's the same as with the Bible itself; it's not bad in and of itself or taken even as a cultural artifact. It's just wrong and untrue, but then so are some other much more wholesome and literally elegant works of fiction.

 

The fact that an idea or a philosophy or whatever draws certain people doesn't necessarily say anything about the moral credentials of the thing itself, but may reflect a lot more on the nature of those people. Take eugenics, for example.