Time for Some Mindcleaning?

Thinking about: Your mind

With the passage of time, your brain will acquire mistaken beliefs. This is particularly true if you spend time on intellectually seedy parts of the internet or if you are indiscriminate in your exposure to social media. This is why you need to periodically engage in mindcleaning. It is one of the components of a Thinkers’ mind optimization program, the other two being a mindcare regimen and a mind-expansion regimen.

Mindcleaning involves consciously looking for and eradicating your mistaken beliefs. Before proceeding, though, clarification is in order. Don’t confuse mindcleaning with brainwashing! Indeed, mindcleaning is the opposite of brainwashing and is therefore a wonderful way to rehabilitate someone who has been brainwashed. Because your belief set is so vast, cleaning it can sound as daunting of a task as cleaning a two-story house—with a basement. My advice is therefore to focus your mindcleaning efforts on a tiny portion of your belief set.

You doubtless have political views. You are also likely to be quite confident that those views are correct and that people who hold the opposite views are at best fools and quite possibly knaves as well. This confidence is likely the result of confirmation bias. You have sought out and listened to sources that confirm your beliefs and ignored—or even consciously avoided—sources that challenge them. Why listen to them when you are certain that you are right? Realize, though, that most of the people on the other side of the political fence feel the same about you—that you are a fool and possibly a knave. Of course, the two sides can’t both be right. What is most likely is that each point of view has some merit.

Suppose you have decided to focus your mindcleaning efforts on your beliefs about the morality of abortion. For present purposes, suppose you are on the pro-life side of the debate. As part of your mindcleaning, you will stress-test this belief by seeking out and listening carefully to what a pro-choice advocate has to say. Your object in doing this is not to refute them but to understand them. As a result, you can ask questions of clarification, but you must be careful not to let the conversation morph into a debate.

You might respond to this assignment by protesting that pro-choice advocates are not worth listening to—that they tend to be simultaneously misguided and supercilious. This indeed is likely the case with respect to many or even most of them. (Most people, after all, are Feelers rather than Thinkers.) Your job, though, is to sort through the bunch and find someone capable of giving an evidenced-based defense of their pro-choice views. Trust me, such individuals are out there. If you can have a face-to-face conversation with one of them, great, but if you can’t, you can track them down on the internet, maybe on a “Thinker podcast.”

If you are instead on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate, you will do the reverse of this. You will track down and listen carefully to a Thinker who is on the pro-life side of the debate.* Such people do exist!

On completing this stress test of your belief, you have five options:

• You can continue to hold your belief as strongly as you previously did. If this is the case, there is a good chance that either you or the person you used in your test is not a Thinker.

• You can continue to hold your belief but reduce your level of confidence in it.

• You can refine your belief by taking account of special cases that you previously ignored. Notice that by doing this, your belief will become more nuanced.

• You can switch from believing a claim to nonbelieving it. You can, in other words, put the matter “on hold” until you have time to do more research and give the matter more thought.

• You can abandon your belief and switch sides in the debate. Your ego might thereby suffer, but if you are a Thinker, there is something more important than ego protection— namely, mind optimization.

Yes, stress-testing your beliefs as part of mindcleaning will require a lot of thinking. But if your goal is to become a Thinker, it is a price worth paying.

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*Am I saying that Thinkers can disagree? Yes, I am; indeed, they often do disagree.