Changing your mind

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic

Their wordsI love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic

Their wordsWhen there’s new data, you have to update your priors.

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer

Their wordsIDK why anyone has a problem with having strong opinions, weakly held.

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs his internet startups alone

Their wordsThe smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals

Their wordsI'd rather celebrate people updating their priors than dunking on them for being late. Make it cool to change your mind when you realize the facts have changed!

Obesity researcher with a PhD in neuroscience

Their wordsInability to change one’s mind is a hallmark of an irrational belief system.

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs his internet startups alone

Their wordsThe smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer

Their wordsEspecially in technology - one of the fastest changing industries - anyone keeping up with developments WILL change their minds when those developments happen!!

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer

Their wordsThis is, by the way, also why the category of “an AI trained on person X” is absolutely BS. People change their minds in light of new information, the “AI trained on X’s writing/videos/tweets” does not

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic

Their wordsAnd it's really about being empirical. So forget all of the things that you learned about past models. Forget everything that you've learned about computer science theory in class. Look at the model, try to do a task, see where it struggles, and then based on that adjust. So it's just like very much become it's not a theoretical science, it's become an empirical science.

Co-founder of the AI agent company Sierra

Their wordsso it's not a simple matter of programming it's not you know typing into a keyboard until or or I guess asking cursor to do something until a piece of software emerges, it's exploration, it's discovery, it's posing hypotheses and validating or invalidating those again and again and again.

Geneticist at Harvard Medical School

Their wordsThe work that I've been involved in is consistently shown that I was wrong in my biases coming into the work and I've really been almost traumatized by this. Like again and again I've come into a project with some kind of guess about what the data was showing and then the data doesn't show that.

Creator of extreme programming and test-driven development

Their wordsAlways try your stupid ideas if you can do it cheaply and reversibly. Jumping off a bridge is not a reversible decision. Not talking about that. I'm talking about stuff like this where you're just like, "Here's a stupid idea." 99 times out of a 100 it'll fail. But that one time you won't have any competition cuz nobody else is stupid enough to try this idea.

Researcher of software delivery performance

Their wordsOh, I agree. You know, one is being able to clearly articulate the problem or the thesis or the idea. Without trying, I don't get there.

Physicist, writer and researcher

Their wordsUm and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten

Their wordsThis wasn't exactly a mistake, since it's not wrong to give 60-40 odds on a false thing, but it seems worth acknowledging here.

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten

Their wordsThis was not a mistake, and it was a mistake to categorize it as a mistake.

Programmer who has worked on hardware verification at Centaur

Their wordsMaybe, but if the strongest statement you can make for your position is that there's no empirical evidence against the position, that's not much of a position.

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz

Their wordsMy response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?

Research psychologist who founded naturalistic decision making

Their wordsI may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.

Physician and founder of Early Medical

Their wordsEvery study deserves to be interpreted at exactly the level of certainty its design can support.

Criminal defence and First Amendment lawyer in Los Angeles

Their wordsBe skeptical of absolute certainty not backed up with proof. Be skeptical of pronouncements that there’s only one way a court will ever possibly interpret something.

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind

Their wordsMathematicians get feedback re whether there proofs work in a way that, as far as I can tell, moral philosophy doesn't

Game and engine programmer

Their wordsI find there's a lot of like received programming wisdom that's just nonsense. Like clearly no one's ever tested it and if they did they would have found out that it's that there's no actual basis for it.

Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026

Their wordswe say we want disagreement, but every disagreement costs the person making it a little social/political capital. do it often enough and you become the negative person. people stop evaluating the argument and start evaluating the source.

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School

Their wordsWe know from decades of research that blaming and shaming only leads people to get defensive, dig in their heels, or tune you out altogether.

Theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University

Their wordsYeah, it is interesting because, when people react against you by saying you are being arrogant about this, 99.999% of the time, all they mean is I disagree. That’s all they really mean, right?

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School

Their wordsPeople are more drawn to arrogant leaders in an uncertain world, because they mistake swagger for strength and skill.

Research psychologist who founded naturalistic decision making

Their wordsSo we we want people, that's the way we break out of fixation, is we notice the anomalies. The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.

Founder of OpenStreetMap

Their wordsThe problem with talking to the customer for anything you are making is that you might be wrong.

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold…

Their wordsYour assumptions will constantly clash with reality, and they will be refined slightly every single time you have a conversation.

Member of technical staff at Anthropic

Their wordsBeing right is less than half the battle. You also have to convince others that you're right, and more importantly, convince them to care enough to act on it.

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute

Their wordsMore broadly, nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview.

Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Their wordsAnd then the top down belief is the thing that sustains you when the experiments contradict you. Because if you just trust the data all the time, well, sometimes you can be doing a correct thing, but there's a bug.

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025

Their wordsI think the the key thing is you need to develop conviction in a set of beliefs that nobody else um agrees with. Like, I think if you look at all the most successful companies in the world, um they were started at a time long before the sort of like core idea was popular.

Computer scientist who founded the field of reinforcement learning

Their wordsI I really view myself as a classicist rather than as a contrarian. I go to what what the larger community of of thinkers about the mind have always thought.

Retired NASA engineer and manager

Their wordsThe engineers will always always always ask for more tests, more analysis, more time to get more information to be more certain of their conclusions.

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems

Their wordsIn the face of uncertainty, I lean towards the decision that would give me the most future options.

American short-story writer and novelist

Their wordsThe more we know – the more we insist on being sure – the more doors we close.