﻿- All right. If you've made it this far, congratulations. You've made it this far
and haven't thrown your computer across the room, or sent me an angry email or canceled
your subscription and told me I was a fuck face on Twitter, thank you by the way, for not
doing that. If you've made it this far, you have successfully challenged your belief, investigated
counterarguments, looked at opposing data, you've thought of it in terms of probabilities and
trade-offs, which is just honestly a better way to look at everything in my opinion,
and you've thought very hard about the identity and validation and emotional stability you derive
from the belief and questioned whether it was worth it or not. So, that's it. That's the course.
Did you change your mind? I don't fucking care. Did you not change your mind? I don't fucking
care. Was it useful? I mean, it should have been useful. I do care about that. But that's it. I
mean, you probably should have figured out by now that pretty much every course in this school is
like improperly named. This is not about changing your beliefs, it's about updating, improving your
beliefs, having better beliefs, having higher resolution beliefs, having more nuanced beliefs,
having a better understanding of your beliefs and why you have those beliefs. This is how
changing beliefs actually happens. It's very, very rare to like come across an experience or a
piece of information in your life that completely makes you do a 180 on one of your beliefs. It's
very rare. It almost never happens. And if it does happen, it's usually an extreme event,
like 911 or the pandemic or something like that, needs to be something very, very major
to change your worldview in a significant way. Most of the time, the way our beliefs change
is that they are gradually altered, opened up, you know, little holes poked here. Your mind
is changed by little detail there. You read a book that makes you consider something you didn't quite
consider before, so you update your prior belief a little bit and you kind of pivot a little bit,
maybe it's 10% more in this direction instead of that direction, and things just gradually open up
more and more, and then you suddenly find yourself not only being open to counterarguments, but
actually kind of empathizing and understanding counterarguments in a way that you never did
before. And boom, one day you just realize you're like, oh, I don't believe that old thing anymore,
or at least not as much as I used to. I'm not like a zealot about it like I used to be.
Belief changes are gradual, they tend to be long-term and they tend to be nuanced. It tends
to be, it's not that you go from like hardcore socialists to hardcore capitalists in a week,
and you go like a hundred percent to a hundred percent, there's like a very gradual process
that happens and you start to understand like, "Okay, well maybe in those sectors of the economy,
a market system makes more sense. And maybe if these certain conditions are true,
then socialism would fail. And yeah, maybe I'm only partially on board with this because now
I believe that. And you know, I never understood that before." It's a very open-ended messy process
that happens. And the problem is is that our short dialogues online, you don't get to express
all that nuance and messiness that is going on inside of our heads. Because look like the better
you get at this, the better you get at poking out beliefs, questioning beliefs, thinking of beliefs
in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes, the better you get at thinking of things in terms
of trade-offs, you start to notice something, which is that pretty much all your beliefs are
held pretty lightly. It's interesting. I started blogging in 2008, and originally,
I was just blogging about my own life. Like I wasn't really giving any advice or telling
people what to do or anything, but because I was writing about my own life, people started emailing
me asking me questions, asking me, you know, what would I do in this situation? What would
I do in that situation? And that's when I really started to study psychology and relationships and
emotions and all these things, just so that like, I could fucking answer these people,
that I would like actually know what I was talking about. And it's funny because very early in my
career, I used to make extremely bold statements. You know, like I go read one book about emotional
attachment and then I would come back to my blog and I would write this like super strong
fisted declaration of like how relationships are supposed to be. And then a couple of years go by
and I started interacting with more and more people and I hear different stories and I'm
exposed to different cultures, people all over the world. Start talking to people older than me,
and I started having more experiences myself and suddenly I start realizing like,
okay, maybe I should like lighten up a little bit on that statement. Maybe we revise that one,
cut out a couple of those sentences and write in some caveats, put in some parentheticals,
make it clear that, you know, sometimes this stuff is personal and you can't just make
one grand declaration. Then a couple more years went by and I started to really understand that
most of this stuff is so individual, it's almost impossible to make single grand declarations
that are not highly abstract and philosophical. And then these days, I've basically come to accept
that I have no fucking clue what's going on. And it's funny because I've been studying the subject
for 13 years, and the more I study, the more lightly I hold my beliefs, the more easily my
beliefs change when new data and evidence arises, or actually let's be honest when we find out that
that study everybody referenced from 20 years ago was bullshit. These days, I actually,
it's very difficult for me to come out and make a really strong declaration. And what you
have probably noticed in this school is that each course is very much about a fundamental
principle, either psychological principle or philosophical principle that is quite timeless,
that's been around for hundreds or thousands of years and is widely applicable. There's no course
here on the 10 best things to text somebody you think is cute. We're talking about resilience,
we're talking about boundaries and relationships, we're talking about managing emotions. Like these
things have not changed over thousands of years, and so it's kind of the only things that I've
found that I can rely upon. You know, it's like, okay, this rug is not gonna get pulled out from
under me like a lot of the recent psych research has been having. So all of this is the say is that
the more you understand things, the more you go use these tools and go through these processes and
reevaluate the things that you believe, you're gonna find that you're gonna have fewer and fewer
beliefs, you're gonna have fewer and fewer strong opinions, and that's great. That just opens you up
even more and creates even more space for you to learn and grow and understand people. I don't see
anything wrong with that at all. It's basically training yourself to become comfortable with
uncertainty. There's a famous quote from Socrates where he says, "The wise man knows that the only
thing he knows is nothing." I think what he's kind of describing there is this process, is that like
the more you learn and the more experienced you get, the less willing you are to make strong
statements about anything. And I think that's great. I think we need more of that in this world.
I think we need more uncertainty, I think we need more comfort with that uncertainty and
more comfort with being uncertain with our own beliefs. So hopefully you've loosened yourself up
throughout this course, you're experiencing more mental flexibility. And I will say if some strong
emotional reactions came up or if you suddenly find yourself very, very nervous to talk about
these things with other people in your life, I would check out the Healthy Relationships course,
I would check out the Managing Emotions course, because again, beliefs often get tied up into
aspects of our identity that affect self-esteem and relationships. So the last exercise
is I simply want you to write down, has your belief shifted at all? I want you to look back
at the beginning of the workbook, look at the belief you wrote down and then write down what
you believe now and just compare the two. See has it shifted, has it changed? Has it opened up more?
Has it become more nuanced, more detailed? Or are you more certain than ever before?
In which case, great. At least now you've exposed yourself to the counterarguments.
Hopefully you've gotten a lot from the course. This is absolutely a course to do again and again,
because we all have no shortage of dumb beliefs that we struggle to let go of or to reconsider,
so I hope to see you here again. And until next time, this is Manson and I'm outta here.