Gahy, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And it may be one of the most

dangerous ideas to consider. That is, the idea that the other ideas which you hold in your

noggin are not really pervious to change. They're not really open to reconsideration. You like to tell yourself

that they are. We all like to walk around thinking that we're rational human beings who are

adjudicating the available evidence and judiciously arriving at all the conclusions which we

hold in our head, but that in reality, we're just fallible mammals who arrive at conclusions through

some accident of history, a consequence of the communities that we're in, and perhaps the

cognitive errors that we have inherited. And then we retroactively find fancy sounding reasons

to justify why we believe the things that deep down we would believe anyway.

It's a popular idea in psychology. It's a very confronting idea. It's something that we think that

we can see in others. So why wouldn't it apply to ourselves? But it's something that I suspect

gets overplayed. Certainly to people who like me regard themselves to be

in the radical centre of things, open and amenable to changing our minds and trying to make

a practice of changing our minds on big issues when the evidence draws us towards doing so.

That is what this conversation is about.

I was kindly invited on a new podcast, which is called

Changed My Mind. It's hosted by two very smart gentlemen named Aidan Alexander and Tom Norman.

And they wanted to ask me about my thoughts about whether people can change their mind.

They basically go around to intellectuals and they have conversations with people who've changed their mind about one big issue. And in my case,

they wanted to ask, not so much, what have I changed my mind about? But what am I up to in this

project of mine in uncomfortable conversations if I don't believe that minds are changeable?

This conversation goes all over the place into some of the areas where I'm most

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