It is easier to adhere to preconceived ideas than to follow wherever the evidence may lead. Intellectual honesty is more often praised than practised, and more people read to confirm what they already think to be the case than read to expand their mental horizons.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if, instead of making new year’s resolutions, we reflected upon how many ideas or opinions we had abandoned in the previous twelve months in the light of evidence. I suspect that in most cases it would not be many, or even a single one. I do not exclude myself from this generalization.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, including Out into the Beautiful World and the recently published False Positive: A Year of Error Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine (Encounter Books).
This piece originally appeared in The Epoch Times