The Best Self-Help is Free: The Need for External Feedback

In endeavoring to improve your life, the manner in which you approach your own mind is vital. Caution, prudence, and a healthy dose of skepticism are in order before any self-improvement can be made. Thus, the proper approach to one's own ideas is the first issue that must be addressed.

When approaching any aspect of the world, it is essential to take nothing about it for granted at the onset - including one's own views, theories, and predispositions regarding it. Your mind, if rightly applied, can liberate you from many of the material constraints of your existence - by actually loosening those constraints and thereby making your life more prosperous and pleasant. If wrongly applied, however, your mind can become a prison - with false notions serving as its walls.

But how can you know whether your own current ideas are aiding you or harming you? Surely, you cannot rely on the ideas themselves to evaluate the soundness of those ideas. Some external indicators are necessary to make such evaluations. In other words, you need to continually challenge your own theories using evidence external to those theories. You need to look at the outside world and see whether its phenomena can actually be made consistent with the ideas in your own mind.

If you find a discrepancy between your ideas and external evidence, do not be too hasty in drawing a conclusion. It could be that some of your ideas are wrong, but it is essential to know which particular ones are in error and to go no further than eliminating the erroneous ideas. All too many people, when they find that one of their notions is false, proceed to reject a whole series of related but true and useful ideas - thereby leaving themselves on balance worse off then if they had held on to the original false idea in the first place!

Moreover, a perceived discrepancy between your ideas and the evidence might not stand up to closer scrutiny. When it was first observed that the orbit of Uranus seemed to violate the predictions that Newtonian mechanics would make regarding its course, physicists of the 19^th century did not rush to reject Newtonian mechanics. Instead, they wisely looked into multiple possible explanations and concluded that the observational evidence can indeed be explained by Newtonian mechanics - if one assumed another planet whose gravitational force affected the orbit of Uranus. It was thus that Neptune was discovered and all the useful aspects of Newtonian mechanics continued to be advantageously employed.

You need to be mentally prepared to reject an idea you hold, but to do so only under certain conditions. If a critical mass of evidence clashing with your idea amasses - and the evidence cannot be accounted for within the framework of that idea - then it is time to revise your theory. It is best for the evidence to come from multiple sources, because it is possible for any single source to be unreliable or interpreted falsely. Possible sources of evidence can include your own observations, the accounts of others who have exhibited a reputation for reliability, historical data, and other ideas you already hold in which you have a large degree of confidence. Even introspection with regard to your own faculties and mental functions can generate evidence that might question an existing idea of yours. Any or all of these can be excellent sources of feedback, if approached with due intellectual caution.

To a rational mind, no idea is beyond critical examination - and correct ideas will only be further reinforced by such examination. But to find the truth, skepticism regarding both your initial ideas and the external feedback mechanisms to which you subject them is necessary. Nothing is to be trusted unconditionally. Nothing is to be taken purely on faith. Any present understanding you hold needs to be held with the recognition that new evidence may come in to clarify, hone, revise, or invalidate it.

When you become convinced of an idea, keep questioning it nonetheless. Keep asking, "Is there any possible way in which what I think could be wrong? What possibilities have I overlooked?" As you explore each of these possibilities, you might find that your original idea does make sense in their context after all. In that case, your confidence in your idea will grow and can increasingly use it as a basis for your future choices and actions.

Moreover, when you decide to embrace an idea, ask yourself, "What would I need to be convinced of in order to reject this idea?" Different kinds of ideas entail different criteria for accepting or rejecting them. For many ideas, empirical evidence furnishes a means of evaluating them. For other ideas, however, strict logical reasoning is necessary and sufficient. The discipline of symbolic logic focuses in part on statements that can be shown by a pure deductive process to be always true (tautologies) and statements that can be shown to be always false (contradictions). The thinking of many people is filled with both tautologies and contradictions to a surprising extent. Unlike many 20th-century philosophers, I do not believe that tautologies are useless or that contradictions are so easy to avoid as to not be worthy of our consideration. In fact, eliminating the contradictions in one's thinking will by itself free one of most of the popular superstitions of one's time.

The worst possible approach to ideas is to trust oneself unconditionally in any respect. Seeing one's own theories, emotions, or worldview as immune to feedback, challenge, or criticism is the surest way to lapse into dogma and to embark on tremendously self-destructive actions. Confidence, or even certainty, may be appropriate for some ideas, but closing oneself off to challenges never is. I believe that there is objective truth, but no person knows it so well as to be legitimately able to brook no further discussion or debate on the subject. The mark of a healthy mind is its willingness to bear challenges calmly, patiently, and with the earnest intention to evaluate them on their merits.

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