Active Open-Mindedness
A quality I highly admire in people.
I’ve been reading Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein and enjoying much more than I thought I would when I read the title. It’s about the importance of broad knowledge over a wide range of domains.
One very interesting section discussed research done by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) on best methods for forecasting events in the future based off current intelligence. Teams would compete to predict the probability of events happening around the world, and a scoring system would rank the teams based on their performance. Interestingly, a team (aptly) called The Good Judgement Project blew it’s competition out of the water. There was one primary difference between how this team functioned compared to its competition: its team consisted of bright, well-read, curious individuals with very varied interests rather than groups of specialists with deep knowledge in narrower domains.
Counter-intuitive, right? If I were assembling a team to craft the world’s best intelligence reports, I’d certainly look for subject matter experts in with deep knowledge in narrow fields. Wouldn’t putting those folks in a room together to pool their views and opinions lead to some insightful theories?
Perhaps not, as it turns out. One reason for this is that individuals on the team of the Good Project practiced significantly more “active open-mindedness” than the experts on other teams. This term, coined by psychologist Jonathan Baron, refers to the trait that causes one to seek out ideas that challenge their own. People who employ active open-mindedness don’t just consider contrarian viewpoints - they look for them. When embrace counterpoints and attacks on their ideas because they it will either make them stronger or reveal a justifiable weakness in them.
I enjoyed the section of Range that discussed active open-mindedness because it succinctly described a characteristic that I immensely admire but had never concisely named or defined. When you meet someone that genuinely appreciates opinions that critique their own, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
It’s easy to connect with someone when you know they value true answers and solutions more than affirmations for their ego.