Eleanor Gordon Smith
speaker
300 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 24 May
Eleanor Gordon Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it was the situation where his trust in his wife was so great that
that it meant that he could realize that people who didn't like her must be capable of making mistakes and so ultimately what he lost was trust in his elders and it's so interesting to me and so I think like personal and kind of beautiful like it's a it's a it's a weird love story but I think in many ways it's a love story that the thing that saves him the thing that made him see the truth
had so much more to do with who he believed than what he believed. And that really stands out to me as a lesson about how we can set out changing people's minds, is that if we find ourselves trying to change someone's mind like Dylan's, often our best bet is to disrupt the trust allocations that people have rather than to try to present them with an argument.
It is a really, it's a really daunting task. When people change their minds and... have to forfeit the part of themselves that was connected to the old belief. It's almost like a period of grieving. It's a kind of loss. They realize that they have to let go of the way that they've been seeing themselves. And a whole bunch of other things can tumble down with that.
Things like the friends that you're keeping company or the ways that you structure your time. A lot of that changes when you forfeit a belief, particularly a belief of the kind that you just mentioned, something as foundational to your identity as your politics or your religion. You sort of almost have to help someone find their way to what life will look like after they've changed their mind.
And that can feel really hard because you don't want to help everyone to a new particular sense of self. You don't want to be the one to smooth the transition for every particular person. But I think it's often pragmatically the case that if people have other sources of self to draw on, then they don't need to rely so heavily on this particular belief.
for me anyway, once I'd done all this research and spoken to all these people who changed their minds and realized just how astonishingly complicated and personal and long the process of changing a mind really is, it generates exactly this question. And I'm like, well, can I be bothered to do that for every person who has a bad belief? And the answer is obviously no.
I mean, like we just don't have the time, nevermind the patience to do that. I do think though, that that's kind of a useful thing to realize in itself. You know, I mean, we have this
climate of public debate at the moment which tells us over and over again that if we only speak to each other more we'll be able to change people's minds and we see this played out over and over again in the political arena where we put people on stage you know one against the other and think that in a certain amount of allotted time we're going to be able to change the audience members minds in anything like a productive way I think it's
really valuable for us to reflect on just how difficult it is to really change a mind. And there may be cases where that's worth our patience and there may be cases where that's worth our time.
But I hope that one thing that the final chapter of the book does is to make us consider that there may be cases where it's not worth our time and where our energy would be better spent dealing with the behavioral problems that result from beliefs rather than trying to deal with the beliefs themselves.
I think that is the takeaway. And I think what's weird about that is that's something kind of we all already know that deep down. You know, we all already are well aware of just how peculiar it is to change a person's mind. I mean, we know it from when we've changed our own minds.
Yeah, I mean, I think this comes back to the thing that we started talking about, like, way, way back at the beginning, which is that we are so convinced that we are the ones who are being reasonable. And when you think that, then every divergent belief strikes you as an affront. You know, everyone who believes something that you don't seems to you to be making a mistake.
And it's very difficult to have the patience to just watch someone make a mistake and think that that's fine. But as you say, you know, very often these things can be nothing more than futile exercises in mutual frustration. And if that's the case, well, then, like, maybe we should give up and watch TV together instead.
You know, I have close friends who have, like, weird conspiratorial beliefs, and otherwise they're completely rational and ordinary people. And yet they have these very strange beliefs about like the truth of the moon landing.
And it's the kind of thing where you can either descend into the quicksand of trying to get them to see reason, or you can think that this is something which is a strange blip in an otherwise coherent person, and it will waste both of our time to try to unpick it.
I age so much slower and you'll sleep better at night. Exactly.
Right. I think it's really hard for us to see this because we live in this climate which encourages us so often to be pursuing debate and to be thinking that debate will be effective, i.e. that every time we try to debate someone and we fail, it's our fault. And it means that if only we did something slightly differently, we would have been able to get through them.
And that means you can kind of spend your life sinking effort after effort. trying to persuade someone and we live in like a very combative time where so much of our political media is structured around argument as entertainment and I think it's really easy to forget in that climate that argument is not entertaining. It's catastrophically boring and it's very often a waste of time.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
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