Never Mind

Every year Edge asks the Dyson family and a few dozen notable others some philosophically tinged scientific question. This year the question was: "What have you changed your mind about?"

Your humble correspondent is much too humble to be among those interrogated, but I have heard of many of them, and one or two have even deigned to address me on occasion. Some of the notables have blogs: PZ Myers, Sean Carroll (the Caltech astrophysicist Sean Carroll, that is), and John Baez.

It turns out that most of the things these people change their minds about are pretty boring. Richard Dawkins used to think some theory of peacocks tails was wrong, but now he doesn't. PZ Myers works on problems slightly different from those he started with. Lots of others claim to have changed their minds about things quite some time ago, but I suspect that they were always heretics - I'm thinking Rovelli and Smolin for example.

Emboldened by these bits of mundania, I started thinking about questions that I might have changed my mind about. Boxers or briefs, for example? Or should I have invited Linda T to the high school senior prom? Chocolate or vanilla? As far as I can tell, I haven't really changed my mind about any of these.

Sometimes evidence can help. I guess I've changed my mind a few times about whether Snape is evil. Freeman Dyson's mind change on nuclear war seems to have changed for similar reasons. Ditto Roger Schank on Artificial Intelligence.

A few have something to say. I liked and agreed with Frank Wilczek for example. Check them out - you might find something interesting.

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