We all have (and often fail to acknowledge) some set of prior judgements about everything.

We lend extreme weight to a few, favorite hypotheses about any given thing. Hypotheses that are simple to comprehend, analogous to our every day life, and confirm earlier hypotheses.

When confronted with evidence about a given thing we update our judgements by either

  1. ignoring entirely
  2. selectively choosing only the evidence that confirms our priors or
  3. accepting all of the implications of the evidence.

We ignore, select, or accept based not on a platonic ideal of reason but rather on a set of motivations tied to our senses of tribal identity, because belonging is a more important human need than understanding.

The degree to which one believes as if they belong to group x has a deterministic effect on their ability to update their priors in light of new evidence.

Ironically, the people most likely to belong to exclusive groups are least likely to acknowledge the effect that belonging has on these abilities. The myth that they don’t posses an identity is a means to suggest that they are some how more enlightened and reasonable than they actually are.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but the truism I’m getting to is that whatever attempts one makes to influence someone elses behavior, they will have a far easier time and likely greater effect doing so by appealing to a person’s sense of their identity interests, not by educating or trying to update their hypothesis.

As an unfounded leap, I think this is why immersion and integration are so transformative: by forcing someone to ignore their previous hypotheses in light of their new experience, they are left with (for a time, anyway) the need to accept implications of the new evidence.

In other words: if nothing changes, nothing will change. I don’t think you can remain comfortable and learn. I think the inverse is likely true: to the extent you seek comfort, your learning abilities will atrophy.

Last idea: if your biases are that some things are incomprehensibly complex, you won’t be able to easily accept flexible rules of thumb; you will preferentially accept only clear (and thus woefully limited) rules.

In closing - acknowledge that you have priors and that you have motivated reasons for thinking what you think. Try to accept that simplistic answers are often, at best, only useful for a small range of possible scenarios. And remember that everyone you meet will have these same issues in how they think and form judgements, so meet them where they are, and not where you’re at.