I think I’m pretty open-minded. Lots of people I know pride themselves on being high openness, and there are definitely lots of advantages. My open-mindedness helps me to believe true things: I’m less likely to reject ideas out of hand because my ideological adversaries believe them, or because they’re weird and counter-intuitive. Being open-minded has also made me more comfortable with trying out unusual lifestyle choices that have ended up suiting me well, such as veganism and polyamory.
But I think there are under-acknowledged disadvantages to open-mindedness too. Open-mindedness means that you are more open to everything: the good and the bad! Imagine a person who’s gregarious and extroverted, but housebound due to chronic illness. Feeling lonely, she puts a sign on her door saying “this is an open house - welcome! Come in and I’ll give you tea :)”. And let’s imagine she lives in a friendly, trusting part of the world, and many people take her up on the offer.
I imagine that she’d meet lots of fascinating people this way: warm, caring people who make her happy to be part of humanity. Unusual, exotic people who belong to cultures she knows nothing about.
But I imagine, sometimes the people who visited her wouldn’t be great. Sometimes they’d be merely boring. Other times they’d be crackpots. They might be critical, mean, aggressive, toxic or bigoted. And there’s a risk that it could be even worse - someone might come in and rob her.
It’s not that she has to be friends with these people. She can even ask them to leave. But still; her open-door policy means that they’re now in her house, and she has to deal with them.
I think open-mindedness is like this for me: I’m very susceptible to almost all ideas, which includes those that are good, true, righteous, helpful, and weird in a good way …but which also includes false, muddled and toxic notions.
Some studies seem to demonstrate that when we hear new information, we don’t suspend judgement, assess the information, then decide to accept or reject it. Rather, we have a ‘truth bias’ - we accept the information by default and have to actively decide to reject it.1
I’m not sure how the replication crisis has treated this finding,2 but it fits my experience. I often react emotionally to ideas before my analytical parts have had a chance to be like “waaaaiiittt a minute —”. This is particularly true for ideas that are presented emotively. For example:
If I read a post that says ‘join our protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza’, my emotions go ‘oh my goodness, I should definitely do that and I’m probably a bad person for not having done so already’, before my analytical parts have assessed whether I think calling a ceasefire would be the right move, whether taking action on that is my top priority, whether protesting is the most effective action to take if so, and whether I’m morally required to fight for every good cause.
If I read a tweet saying ‘my Niche Complicated Diet completely cured my fatigue and made me twenty times more productive’, my emotions go ‘I guess I’d better try Complicated Diet, and basically, all of my problems are my own fault for not havng tried it yet’ - before my analytic parts have had a chance to consider whether the source is trustworthy, whether there might be lower-hanging fruit for me to try if I want to have more energy, and the fact that diets affect everyone differently.
I have inner versions of ideologies I don’t hold, and shoulder versions of people I never wanted to promote to that position. I know what ‘an evolutionary psychologist might say’, even though I’m sceptical of evopsych. This is… mostly good: it’s good to be able to model accurately how people with different worldviews think. But it does mean that a bunch of random stuff just lives rent-free, unasked-for, in my brain. ‘Having an inner X’ probably also increases your risk of becoming an X, which is bad for some Xs.
This is one reason why not being on Twitter much is better for me. My Twitter bubble was very esoteric ideas-heavy, which made it an interesting, stimulating and sometimes helpful place to be, but which also meant that I acquired all sorts of random notions.
Neuroticism also plays a part here: in my first two examples, it’s not just openness that causes the problem, but the intersection of openness and neuroticism. If I was less neurotic, I’d be less likely to react with stress and self-criticism to new ideas related to moral obligation or self-improvement. But openness does play a role, because if I was very closed-minded, I’d reject a good number of these ideas out of hand, and wouldn’t need to emotionally react to them.
Maybe we should see closed- and open-mindedness through the lens of ‘mental defences’. We have guards that turn away ideas at the gates of our mind. Clearly, it’s bad to have over-zealous guards: they’d turn back good, useful ideas that would actually be helpful. And they’d be too unwilling to eject ideas that had been there forever, but that were bad, harmful, untrue, holding us back. But having lax guards could have its own disadvantages. Perhaps we evolved (some) closed-mindedness to guard against our automatic gullibility.
This metaphor of guardians makes me think of national borders, and conservative arguments for strict immigration control: the spectre of letting in criminals, or people who will harm “our” culture. I’ve long believed that national borders are an evil, and that open borders (or borders ceasing to exist as a concept) is the only moral state. Should I pivot findings from the vehicle back to the tenor and revise my political beliefs? If some closed-mindedness is beneficial, should I accept that some closed-bordered-ness could have value?
I think not: ideas aren’t people and we have no moral obligation to them. And even if someone is highly harmful or toxic, it doesn’t make much difference to me whether they’re in the UK or not, as long as I don’t have to interact with them.
But I think there is an analogy between the openness and closedness of our minds, and the openness and closedness of our social circles. I used to be too tolerant of people who were, in retrospect, just kinda bad, and who all my friends recognized as bad. There was a lot going on here — for example, I certainly carried the Geek Social Fallacy that ostracizing or rejecting people is evil, perhaps because of my own baggage — but my belief that openness was virtuous definitely made more more tolerant of bad weirdness, more willing to extend people the benefit of the doubt.
Similarly, despite my open-borders beliefs, I’ve become more positive about cultural homogeneity than I used to be, and than the majority of progressives seem to be. I DON’T mean national or ethnic cultures: I have no desire to only interact with fellow Brits of European heritage. I mean, there are very few people in my social bubble with strongly socially conservative beliefs, and lots of liberal vegan queer poly-friendly nerds, and… I think this fine, actually? I can see the benefit of being able to have productive and civil conversations with people with antithetical beliefs and values, but that doesn’t mean they have to be intimates.
On a wider scale, the idea of cultural separatism seems under-explored by progressives. I think lots of progressives implicitly want, and are aiming for, a majority of people to adopt progressive beliefs, which would lead to them voting for progressive political parties and/or autonomously taking actions to make society more equitable (depending on the flavour of progressivism they hold). To me, this seems nice, but increasingly both unlikely and unnecessary. Instead, what about working for progressive pockets: domains, or even regions, where we can make our own rules? It’s abstractly bad that people have bigoted beliefs, but it seems much less bad if they exist in their own bubbles: and if, crucially, people can leave the bigoted bubbles, and join the nicer ones, at will. A sillier version of this is ‘Scotland becomes independent and all the British progressives move there and make it a socialist utopia’ (London is overrated anyway).
The benefits of open-mindedness are worth it for me. I have no desire to close up my mind. But I’m now more sceptical of the value of indiscriminate openness, and wary that if I’m not vigilant, it can leave me vulnerable to the influence of people or ideas that hinder me from flourishing.
I first learnt about this idea from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s ‘Do we believe everything we’re told?’
On that note, are there good ways to check this sort of thing without intense googling/science wisdom? I want www.diditreplicate.com to exist.