In my random musings of mysterious origins, whether from a thoughtful mind, or due to the nice weather, or even because of my lack of sleep this weekend, I started thinking about what makes someone open-minded, and what characterizes closed-mindedness. How risky, daring, conservative, flexible, or stubborn someone is may all be linked. The link is how open-minded a person is. Being open-minded itself is something that is not easily defined. Now, if this were a scholarly research paper, at this point I would give a definition from an authoritative source for what open-mindedness is. But, this is not a research paper. So I will not do that. I will only define it loosely, as follows: it is often labelled (mostly by critics) as being liberal, radical, irresponsible, reckless, or foolish. As we shall see in my equation later, these labels are not necessarily mistaken.
Some things need to first be made clear. This is my personal approximation, based only on my thoughts. So, there is no hard science currently, as far as I know, which support what I am about to say. But, it should make enough sense to not need justification. I like to look at it this way: I'm not saying something new in uncharted territory; I am just viewing the existing map from a different angle.
Open-mindedness is the ratio between two numbers: the value associated with expectations being exceeded and the value of expectations not being met. This is based off of an economic standpoint, where a value is associated with everything. With your expectations as a reference (which everyone has, more or less), then an open-minded person values his expectations being exceeded higher than his expectations not being met, whereas a closed-minded person values his expectations being met higher than his expectations being exceeded. So, put simply, someone who would rather risk losing what he knows he can definitely gain to gain what he does not know he can gain is more open-minded than someone who would rather gain what he knows he can definitely gain than to risk either gaining more than what he knows he can gain, or to lose what he knows he can gain.
If you understand things up to this point, then that is all I got for you. If you didn't, then... maybe re-read this again?
I suppose as a conclusion, a question may be raised: how do you assign value to your expectations being exceeded or to your expectations not being met. It would seem like I am only deferring the problem; kicking the can down the street, so to speak. But, I would say that we are dealing with ratios here, which do not require any hard numbers, so long as one of the two values is higher than the other. As a bonus, this theory also takes care of the full range of open-mindedness, and not just two binary extremes.
Speaking of being open-minded, this weekend, I went to the Bay Area, learned how to drive manual transmission, and subsequently drove a racecar (Mazda Miata) around Laguna Seca, experienced drifting, oversteering, driving a rear-wheel drive car, turning a corner at more than 60mph, experiencing more than 1g sideways, spinning out three times, and learning how to recover from spinning out. It felt unreal, to say the least, compared to my usually mundane life. Maybe that was the source of my random musings?
Written on September 6, 2011