One thing I discovered about myself and many others is that: truth
is often just
in front of us; we just need to not try so hard to
avoid seeing it.
I found that our prejudice, aka prior, is often our greatest enemy
to making
progress. I found myself used to believing something so
false yet so firmly. And
progress happened at times when I held my
beliefs slightly loosely and asked
myself: "What if the alternative
is true?" Then I tried to act based on that
alternative premise for
a while and found out that it's actually much more
effective.
This is why I think being open-minded is far more important than
being
knowledgeable or being an expert. Most of what we know is
false to a degree;
it's just a matter of how long it takes for us
to realize and be willing to accept
that.
Paradigm shifts in the scientific realm happen in similar ways. A
person points
out a completely new framework to understand the
world based on some
anomaly that the current theory cannot explain.
Most times, people's reaction to
anomalies is to ignore or deny
them. In fact, people would rather creatively
reinterpret data to
fit existing beliefs than adopt new paradigms.
Being open-minded is also what Dario Amodei said that drove the LLM
breakthrough: "I was seeing the same data others were seeing. I don't think I
was a better programmer or better at coming up with research ideas than
any of the hundreds of people that I worked with. In some ways, I was worse.
This open-mindedness and this willingness to see
with new eyes... that is the
most important thing."
This is increasingly how I value a great engineer: not only by
their current
expertise but also by how likely they would change
their mind, sometimes just
for the sake of trying. The best
engineers I have met are those willing to accept
they were wrong
when seeing the evidence.