Should people value consistency in their opinions and past decisions, or readily change them when the truth warrants it?

Tobi Lütke · published Apr 3, 2023

Sunk cost fallacy only exists as a problem for people optimising for logical consistency and social approval; for someone genuinely oriented to truth it is irrelevant, because the fact that you have been doing something is not an input to the decision.

You should run a function over your entire mental-model search space at every moment to pick the best next move; when variables change the output changes, so reversing course isn't 'changing your mind' — the mind stayed consistent.

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Tobi Lütke · published Apr 3, 2023

The societal premium placed on consistency of opinions is useless; changing your view because a conversation showed you were wrong is correct even though it unsettles people

If you reason from first principles you will update, and consistency for its own sake has no value

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Paul Graham · published Nov 2020

Most people let their degree of belief rush unexamined to the extremes, whereas the independent-minded insist on carefully calibrated degrees of belief on subjects they care about.

For most people the unlikely becomes impossible and the probable becomes certain; to the independent-minded this seems unpardonably sloppy.

source How to Think for Yourself

Mo Koyfman · published Aug 8, 2022

Investors should operate with strong opinions weakly held — asserting a clear point of view while remaining genuinely open to being disproven by data

The most important thing VCs do day in and day out is make decisions, and testing assumptions rather than believing your own bullshit is how you make better ones

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Paul Graham · published Jul 2023

Having published opinions biases you toward evidence supporting your earlier conclusions, acting on most people much like an ideology of quantity one.

Sufficient integrity could avoid this, but few manage it.

source Publishing opinions biases most people toward evidence supporting their earlier conclusions