Belief updating and things to investigate in 2023 - a taste of Rarely Certain to come ...

Plus even more nuance, starting with ... it's not so much the hostility of polarisation we should worry about, as how blind it makes everyone to more subtly bad things

See that over there? That’s 2023

Zvi Mowshowitz, who writes

Don't Worry About the Vase

said this in his year-end piece.

'I am suspicious of the extent to which I continue to endorse my previous thoughts and opinions on reflection as I reread the year’s work. I worry I am not often enough changing my mind, on matters both great and small'

This anticipates one direction of Rarely Certain in 2023. More mindfulness around belief maintenance or updating.

Goodbye, frying pan, hello fire.

A curious thing happens when you prise yourself out from a bubble of like minds.

At first it feels freeing. As if the metaphorical scales fell from your eyes to reveal a more rounded view of the world.

To some extent this does happen.

Perspectives you never respected sufficiently to seriously entertain - or maybe never even noticed before - start appearing and the temptation is to think that it's mission accomplished.

Ah, some people think this and they turn out to have a point. I must now be a more rounded thinker.

If you've been long term exposed to algorithmically or ideologically selected information, you do have an artificially narrow perspective. But it's as if shifting your focus of attention has its own momentum. Before you notice it, you're suddenly immersed in the contra-perspective.

Then you see it. The new information environment is suddenly just a mirror image of the one you used to occupy.

Same old hand-wringing and anger, just about different things.

A remarkable real-life moment this Christmas illustrated this.