Aging Capriciously

Do you hate to admit when you are wrong?  Do you try to defend your position even when it is indefensible?  If so, do not feel too bad.   You are in great company.   Throughout history, some of the greatest thinkers and most intelligent people in the world have refused to admit when they were dead wrong.   We are going to look at some of the most egregious examples of some very smart people who had some deeply mistaken ideas that they clung to despite  overwhelming evidence that they were dead wrong.   

Lord Kelvin: When Great Certainty Meets New Evidence

Lord Kelvin was one of the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century.  His contributions to thermodynamics, electricity, and engineering transformed modern science.  Yet even Kelvin demonstrated that genius is no guarantee against error.

Kelvin argued that the Earth was only about 20 to 40 million years old.  Using the best physics available at the time, he calculated how long a molten Earth would take to cool to its present temperature.  Geologists and Charles Darwin objected that such a young Earth left far too little time for the slow processes of evolution and geological change, but Kelvin remained convinced that his calculations were correct.

The missing piece of evidence was unknown to everyone at the time: radioactivity.  After the discovery of radioactive decay in the late 1890s, scientists realized that radioactive elements inside the Earth continually generate heat, dramatically slowing the planet’s cooling.  Modern dating methods now show the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old.  Kelvin’s mathematics had been sound—but his assumptions were incomplete.  His refusal to reconsider those assumptions delayed acceptance of the overwhelming evidence.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: When Belief Overrules Evidence

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the supremely logical detective Sherlock Holmes, spent the final decades of his life passionately defending spiritualism.  He became convinced that séances, mediums, ghosts, and communication with the dead were genuine phenomena.

Despite repeated investigations exposing many famous mediums as frauds, Doyle continued to defend them.  Perhaps the most famous example was his unwavering belief in the Cottingley Fairies photographs, which appeared to show two young girls playing with fairies.  Even after experts questioned the images and evidence accumulated that the photographs had been staged using paper cutouts, Doyle insisted they were authentic.  Decades later, the women involved admitted they had fabricated the photographs.

Doyle’s story is a powerful reminder that intelligence alone does not protect us from self-deception.  A person may apply rigorous logic in one area of life while allowing hope, emotion, or deeply held beliefs to override evidence in another.  His willingness to believe extraordinary claims despite repeated contrary evidence stands as one of history’s most striking examples of confirmation bias.

Albert Einstein: The Genius Who Resisted Quantum Reality

Albert Einstein revolutionized physics through the theories of relativity and helped lay the foundation for quantum theory itself by explaining the photoelectric effect.  Ironically, he spent much of the latter half of his career resisting one of the central conclusions of quantum mechanics.

Einstein believed that nature had to operate according to precise, deterministic laws.  He rejected the idea that events at the atomic level were fundamentally probabilistic, famously remarking, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Throughout his life he searched for hidden variables that would restore certainty to physics.

Over the decades, experiment after experiment supported the predictions of quantum mechanics.  The strongest evidence came long after Einstein’s death through tests of Bell’s inequalities, which consistently confirmed quantum entanglement and ruled out the kind of local hidden-variable theories Einstein had hoped would exist.  Today quantum mechanics stands as one of the most thoroughly tested and successful scientific theories ever developed.  Einstein’s skepticism helped sharpen the science, but in the end the evidence proved stronger than his intuition.  Nevertheless, Einstein’s objections helped force physicists to sharpen the theory and design better experiments.  In that sense, he was “wrong about the interpretation he favored,” but immensely valuable in advancing the science.

Now most of us probably know someone, perhaps not as famous as my three examples, but someone close or dear to our hearts that will never accept that they are wrong about anything.  You can argue with them until you are “blue in the face” and they will never change their mind.  These friends can be infuriating.  But have you ever stopped to think why they refuse to change their minds in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence?  Psychologists have coined a term for such intransigence and call it “Belief Perseverance.”

This is the tendency to maintain a belief even after the evidence supporting it has been discredited or disproven.

Psychologists use this term when people continue believing something despite overwhelming contradictory evidence.

Example: A person continues to believe a conspiracy theory after every claim has been independently debunked.

Sometimes Belief Perseverance is confused with a close phenomenon called Confirmation Bias.  They are closely related but not the same. 

Confirmation Bias is the tendency to seek, notice, and remember only evidence that supports one’s existing beliefs while ignoring contradictory evidence.

Unlike Belief Perseverance, Confirmation Bias is about how people process information, not necessarily refusing to change after being proven wrong.

Before we leave the cognitive realm there is one more relevant term that we need to look at.  It is called Cognitive Dissonance.  This is one of my favorites since I have seen so many examples of this in my years on this earth that I have lost track.

Cognitive Dissonance is the psychological discomfort people experience when facts conflict with what they believe about themselves or the world.  When people are faced with a set of facts that cause them discomfort they will use a variety of ways to rationalize the evidence that ignores the reality in favor of a reality that they are comfortable with.  Like making excuses for someone’s behavior that is clearly immoral or unethical because they want to admire the person.

Now in today’s world of misinformation, disinformation, lies, distortions, fake ads, false messages, propaganda news, you can be pardoned if you cannot tell the difference between Perseverance Bias, Confirmation Bias and Cognitive Dissonance.  Truth be told, even Einstein could probably not tell the difference.  However, the bottom line here is clear. 

People, your friends and mine, and even those who are not our friends will continually use distorted logic and distorted facts to cling to ideas and perceptions that are false. 

And you may never be able to change their minds.  Nothing you say.  Nothing you do.  No experts you call on.  No preachers, teachers, ministers or nightly newscasters will ever make one dint in their belief systems.  Their minds are made up.  They are more than made up.  They are cast in stone, or iron.  You can take a sledgehammer, and you will not make a single dint in their ideas of what is true or not true. 

So why are we all so stupid that we waste our precious time trying?  Is it truly an impossible task to change anyone’s mind?  If Lord Kelvin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Albert Einstein would not change their minds, what makes you think that your Aunt or best friend will?  Is the effort to convince them otherwise truly useless?  Perhaps we need to look as some examples in history where people did change their minds.  The most famous example may be Charles Darwin, the founder of “Evolution Theory by Natural Selection.” 

Charles Darwin provides a striking contrast to those who refused to abandon deeply held beliefs.  Throughout the more than twenty years he spent developing his theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin deliberately searched for evidence that might prove him wrong.

Darwin believed that no theory should be protected from evidence.  As he gathered new observations from geology, fossils, animal breeding, and the natural world, he continually refined and revised his thinking.  His willingness to let facts, rather than pride, determine his conclusions exemplifies what we now call Intellectual Humility—the recognition that being wrong is not a personal failure, but refusing to change in the face of convincing evidence demonstrates a lack of Intellectual Humility .

Darwin’s legacy reminds us that progress, whether in science or in life, belongs not to those who are always right, but to those who are willing to admit when they are wrong.  This brings us face to face with the concept of Intellectual Humility.  This is a willingness to question any concept or belief we hold in the face of new evidence or facts or logic which might question the assumptions upon which we hold said beliefs.  One might readily ask “How in the face of so much misinformation and lies can we tell facts and evidence from lies and fake facts?”  This is not an easy question to answer. 

Unfortunately, our schools and education systems seem to place more value on providing answers rather than asking questions.  The whole idea of critical thinking comes down to the willingness to ask and consider questions rather than blindly accepting facts.  Socrates was considered the smartest man in Greece because the Oracle said he was the only man who recognized how little he really knew.  The Socratic method is one of deducing truth and understanding by asking questions. 

Plato in his “Socratic Dialogues” described many of the stories wherein Socrates educated his students by asking questions and not by providing answers.  Ironically, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created perhaps the greatest detective of all time whose main modus operandi was asking questions and keeping an open mind.  Something his creator did not seem to have the ability to do himself.    

My father gave me a bit of advice which I still adhere to today when I was a child.  He said, “Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.”  Lawyers know this truth when it comes to witnesses.  It has been said by the legal profession that “Nothing is as unreliable as an eyewitness.”  These thoughts mark a boundary for my intellectual humility.  It seems to be almost a curse that the smarter someone is, the more intransigent their humility can be. 

Living here in Arizona, we come into the summer season when temperatures soar into the triple digits.  We have heat warnings in the parks and posted in many public places.  Nevertheless, frequently people ignore these warnings and run or hike down a trail only to come back in a body bag.  Regardless of how many warnings they receive, some people insist that they know better.  They regard the park rangers or DNR people who are trying to warn them as stupid unthinking clods who really don’t know how much experience they have or how tough they are. 

Belief Perseverance not only affects science and politics, but it also sometimes kills people.

Go to YouTube and you can find countless examples of people who were so blinded by their own intellectual perceptions of their physical prowess and abilities that they thought they could ignore the advice of others.  There have already been four deaths on park trails in the Grand Canyon this year.  More will come. 

Many people do not realize that Arizona loses far more people to heat than to lightning, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, mountain lions, bears, rattlesnakes, and scorpions combined.  Heat is, by a wide margin, the state’s deadliest natural hazard. 

Last year (2025) in Arizona, a total of 680 people died from heat related deaths.  Most were:

• Over age 50,
• Had underlying medical conditions,
• Were outdoors for extended periods or lacked reliable air conditioning,
• Were experiencing homelessness.

What does Intellectual Humility have to do with any of these facts?  I think it all comes down to recognizing our own limitations.  Sometimes this is made harder because we “used to be” good at something that we are no longer so good at.  My best time running a 10k was 38”48 seconds.  That is roughly six fifteen per mile.  If I ran one today, my mile times would be about 14 minutes per mile.  I could almost walk faster than I now run.   Our perceptions of ourselves as we used to be can blind us to a reality that we need to face today. 

Two sayings I like a lot are: 

• “You got to know when to hold them and when to fold em.”
• “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change ,the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Growing old is never easy.  Letting go of ideas is perhaps even harder.  Intellectual Humility is a path to growing older longer and with less pain.  Without Intellectual Humility, your images of what you once were and what you once did can blind you to the reality that you are today.

The courage to change your mind is not a sign of weakness—it is one of the highest forms of wisdom.   Many good people would be alive today if they had developed more Intellectual Humility.