# Teenage Rationalists and Changing Your Mind

I remember the moment when I became an atheist.

I was reading [Religion's Claim to Be Non-Disprovable](/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable)), an uneasy feeling growing in my head, and then I reached the bottom of the article, stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, and _got_ it.

"There is no God," I whispered. (Then I braced myself to be hit by a thunderbolt from the sky, so the belief was still paying rent, right to the very end).

No thunderbolt came. I tried again, a little louder. "There is no God."

It was...

kinda obvious, actually. I mostly felt disappointed in myself for needing someone to explain it to me, like I'd failed a test and hadn't even realized it was a test until it was too late. Friendly AI? Never would have figured that one out myself. But it shouldn't have taken Eliezer-level intelligence to point out that there's no one sensible in charge of the universe. And so - without a crisis of faith, without worry, without further drama - I changed my mind.

Over the last 6 months, I've changed my beliefs about a lot of things. I get the impression that's pretty standard, for a first read-through of the sequences. The interesting part is that it _wasn't_ hard. After reading everything on [How to Actually Change Your Mind](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind), I'd expected letting go of beliefs I'd held my entire life to be a bit of an ordeal. It really wasn't. I didn't agree with the LessWrong consensus on every issue (I still don't), but whenever I came to agree (or to modify my position in that direction) I said so, and reevaluated the appropriate assumptions, and adjusted my model of the world, and then went on to the next article. 

When I started the Sequences, I was 16. I don't think I'm generalizing from one example in terms of my ease of accepting new ideas; when I've explained these concepts to other smart teenagers, they usually also get the implications immediately and change their mind without apparent difficulty. It may be that [most people rarely change their mind](/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think), but teenagers - at least the teenagers I know - change their mind a _lot_. I've watched my friends change their mind on life-changing decisions - colleges, careers, religion - every couple of weeks. Eliezer writes in "We Change our Mind Less Often Than We Think":

> _once I could guess what my answer would be -_ once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other - then I had, in all probability, already decided. 

I haven't asked my friends to specify the probability they'll make a given decision (typical people find this annoying for some reason), but I've routinely heard them express high levels of confidence in a choice, only to have made a totally different decision the next day.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to changing your mind easily, but I think it's worth looking at the reasons it's easier for younger people to change their mind, and whether they have any implications for changing your mind in general. I've identified a couple reasons why it seems to be easier for teenagers to change their mind:

*   There is less social pressure to be consistent when you're younger.  Most adults I know remember switching their major four times in college, and switching which college they wanted to go to more often than that. Adults who change their career 4 times in 4 years are undesirable employees, indecisive, and probably untrustworthy; kids who do the same are taking advantage of all the opportunities available to them. 

**Lessons for Rationalists:** Social pressure to be consistent is one of the big reasons why people don't change their minds. Don't state opinions publicly if you'll later feel pressured to stick by them; ask yourself how much of your attachment to a belief is related to what other people will think of you; foster a community where changing your mind is expected and encouraged. I think LessWrong does really well at all of these.

*   Kids have less invested in their beliefs. If you're married to a theist and raising your kids in the tradition of a particular religion, it's a lot harder to suddenly change your mind about the foundations of your life. Similarly, people who've already experienced the loss of people close to them seem to have a lot more invested in the idea that death is the natural cycle of life.

**Lessons for Rationalists:** It's been suggested before (as a way of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy) that you imagine you've been teleported into this life, and have to decide what paths to take (independent of what the person-who-used-to-be-here was doing with their life). Ask yourself what you have invested in your current beliefs and what you would give up if you changed your mind. Try to find a third alternative between rejecting everything you once believed and clinging stubbornly to a lie; those are rarely _really_ the only options.

*   The fewer Fully General Counterarguments you know, the harder it is to maintain a belief in the face of opposing evidence. It's easier to convince a regular religious person of atheism than a theistic philosopher; if you haven't heard all the arguments for atheism before, they seem pretty devastating; if you have already heard them, and built up an elaborate mental defense system, it's easier to ignore them. [Knowing about biases can hurt people](/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think); knowing more in general seems to also hurt people, unless they first learn how to avoid motivated skepticism.

**Lessons for Rationalists:** We really should start teaching this stuff in elementary schools. The more people learn about rationality before they get good at clever arguments, the better the odds they'll internalize it. LessWrong [has](/lw/25/on_the_care_and_feeding_of_young_rationalists) [discussed](/lw/63f/rational_parenting/) [this](/lw/2q/on_juvenile_fiction/) [a](/lw/yu/formative_youth/) [fair](/lw/yu/formative_youth/) [bit](/lw/3c/rationalist_storybooks_a_challenge/), but not done a ton about it. If people agree this is important, I'm planning a couple more posts on outreach to teenagers.

What other explanations are there?

_tl/dr: Changing your mind is easier when you're younger. When you want to change your mind, try thinking like a teenager; if you want to be involved in rationality outreach, teach kids._