When Being Open Minded Can Be Problematic
Over the years I’ve often had people tell me that I need to be more open minded when it comes religion, science and understanding the world around us. I have a huge problem with this and on the surface anyone opposing the concept of open mindedness would appear to be an authoritarian dolt. But I think invoking “open mindedness” instead creates a somewhat politically correct atmosphere where no one gets their feelings hurt even when they’re just flat out wrong. It makes sense that open mindedness is seen as a personal freedom of sorts and when the subject is one that’s entirely subjective to personal opinion, open mindedness has a place. Think about it. How can one person say “Only Modern Art is truly beautiful” when the reality is that different art forms means different things to different people. This is why philosophy is often the domain of subjective and somewhat intangible ideas and concepts.
Science is a wholly different matter. It actually thrives on open mindedness, but there are a few simple rules that must be followed. Most important is that you need evidence to support your ideas and resorting to calls for open mindedness in fact hurts the progress of ideas. If someone were to publish a scientific theory about the existence of ghosts without providing testable evidence, the idea would be tossed aside by the community. In that case it’s purely a hypothesis and not a scientific theory, yet we hear claims from folks pushing pseudo-science such as Astrology or UFOs, arguing that the scientific community is biased and needs to have an open mind to these things.
On this subject, I found the above video to be an excellent demonstration of why open mindedness is problematic when it comes to scientific knowledge.