why i love u-turns
and other things i discussed on The Great Antidote podcast
I really enjoyed appearing on Juliette Sellgren’s excellent podcast, The Great Antidote. The episode was just published the other day, so I thought I’d share it with you here.
Juliette started by asking me, “What is the most important thing that young people should know that we don’t?”. After couching a bit about my scepticism about knowledge claims and my strong belief that there are many ways to live a good life, I passed on the following bit of advice I’d once been given:
“I was a teenager and I was reading some complicated book. I actually remember who it was by; I don’t remember which book it was. It was by Edward Said, who’s this very complicated thinker. And I was getting very frustrated because I was trying really hard and I just couldn’t work out what the argument was. I couldn’t work out, really, how he got to his conclusions. I was getting very frustrated.
It happened my dad was there, and I said, “Look, I just can’t work this out. Have you read this? Do you know what the answers are?” And he said, “I’ll talk with you about it. But just remember, sometimes when you’ve worked really hard on something, and you’ve tried to work it out, maybe it’s not you. Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense.”
And I think we all know that, as kids, about certain things. We know when someone’s talking complete nonsense. But it can be harder when you’re a kid to feel you’ve got the authority when you’re reading something, particularly some scholarly tome. You are happy to say the novel is rubbish. But the scholarly tome, when you’re a teenager, oftentimes if you can’t get anywhere with it, you think I’m not smart enough. I haven’t worked hard enough. No!
Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. I think that’s really, really important advice.”
Juliette and I talked about many other things, including: which kinds of arguments count as philosophical, the importance of treating your interlocutors’ arguments charitably, differences and similarities between philosophy and economics, what freedom is, the human capacity for discernment, and my conditional love of u-turns:
“Nonetheless, we do change our beliefs about things, and it’s partly through that process of deliberation. There are interesting questions about how this works. I believe strongly that people don’t value sufficiently things like u-turns. So oftentimes people say, I don’t like such and such a politician because they’re always making u-turns.
I would far rather that they u-turned, if the thing that they had previously been committed to was wrong. So it’s, again, a conditional or a contingent thing. You should u-turn if the thing is wrong. I’d rather change my mind and be right than continue being wrong.”
You can find the whole episode here, and all the episodes of The Great Antidote here. You should listen to them: Juliette is great!
