Without firmness of belief, it’s difficult to take decisive action. But without humility and willingness to change your mind, you risk calcifying your means of viewing the world. What is the optimal position on this belief continuum? I posit the best ratio is 85% firmness / 15% flexibility.
How this is derived:
If we’re assessing whether to update our beliefs, it’s likely that we received evidence that our mental model is not completely accurate. In a perfect world, we systematically reassess our beliefs each time, and then proceed with complete confidence. As such, the ideal is to maximize flexibility of belief.
However, our resources are limited and our biology is not so sophisticated. If you update a prior belief and are wrong, the negativity bias will cause stress and bias future decision-making, likely towards calcification (“last time I changed my beliefs, and got burned”). The flexibility of belief should thus be constrained against our own negativity bias.
According to Kahneman et al, you need ~5x positive interactions to offset 1x negative interaction. Therefore an ~83.3% firmness ratio (5x positive instances/6x total instances) seems to be the optimum number to balance on. Given the lack of precision in these numbers, I fudge to 85/15.
You could argue fudging to 85% is still too precise, I agree. A reductionist (but functionally equivalent) approach would be “be willing to change your mind, but not too frequently.” However, I find that by using seemingly precise numbers, the illusion of precision builds confidence in my course of action. And since my goal is to be able to live with myself, while also taking on as sensible a path as my limited faculties permit, 85/15 feels about right.
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**An aside: the applicability of this idea is extensive:
When driving, mindless adherence to GPS directions might land your car in the Kona Harbor. If you have >85% confidence following that GPS will land you in the ocean, maybe ignore the GPS.
Alternatively, if given an SOP at work, you probably should adhere to it. But adherence to SOP is generally not the most important metric at work, but rather building the widget, increasing the profit, whatever. The best employees tend to figure out how to enable the important metrics, while if necessary bending the less-important ones :)