RE: Off-topic (or maybe not)...24 Sep 2020 13:22
This from the FT: ...there are still some who valiantly struggle to form their own opinions on the basis
of evidence. John Maynard Keynes is often quoted as saying: “When the facts change,
I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” This seems a rather minimal standard of
intellectual honesty, even if one no longer widely aspired to. As with many remarks
attributed to the British economist, however, it does not appear to be what he actually
said: the original source is Paul Samuelson (an American Nobel laureate, who cannot
himself have heard it) and the reported remark is: “When my information changes, I
alter my conclusions.”
There is a subtle, but important, difference between “the facts” and “my information”.
The former refers to some objective change that is, or should be, apparent to all: the
latter to the speaker’s knowledge of relevant facts. It requires greater intellectual
magnanimity to acknowledge that additional information might imply a different
conclusion to the same problem, than it does to acknowledge that different problems
have different solutions.
But Keynes might have done better to say: “Even when the facts don’t change, I
(sometimes) change my mind.” The history of his evolving thought reveals that, with
the self-confidence appropriate to his polymathic intellect, he evidently felt no shame
in doing so. As he really did say (in his obituary of another great economist, Alfred
Marshall", whom he suggests was reluctant to acknowledge error): “There is no
harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.”
To admit doubt, to recognise that one may sometimes be wrong, is a mark not of
stupidity but of intelligence. A higher form of intellectual achievement still is that
described by F Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” he wrote, “is
the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the
ability to function.’
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