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  "description": "<p>Find success by seeking to learn more, shaping one's own personal opinion, and changing one's mind.</p>",
  "path": "/how-we-learn",
  "publishedAt": "2014-02-04T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed\ntheir minds.--\nJason Fried\non Jeff BezosTonight, Bill Nye and Ken Ham put on a bit of a show in Kentucky\nand on YouTube. Those who know me\nmay know that I'm in no way religious, but I don't shun those who are. I do,\nhowever, believe religion is a necessary piece to a functioning society, but\nthat's a piece for a whole 'nother blog post.The part that struck me most about the debate, however, was listening to\nKen Ham discuss the difference between\n\"observational science\" and \"historical science\". Recalling my grade school days\n(fuck, I'm old now that I've said that), I can only ever really remember being\ntaught that some smart guy named Darwin did some studies on finches and this\nother guy named Mendel did some study on peas and in the end, it's survival of\nthe fittest... or something like that.But this isn't about me debating who was right and who was wrong. This isn't\nabout proving Nye's or Ham's opinions on evolution.What really struck me was that Ham chose to accept a belief that may not have\nbeen the popular opinion, that may not have been what was taught to him in\nschool, and chose rather to question a specific piece of science\n(radiometric dating) and\nquestion science's reliance on this method. From here, he draws his own personal\nopinions on our creations based on his beliefs in Genesis (what he sees as\nhistorical science) and what he can readily prove in a lab or on paper\n(observational science).While I may not stand for everything Ham stands for, I am all for learning by\nquestioning what already exists. I am all for digging deeper into what we think\nwe may know, with the sole purpose of learning more. And importantly, I am all\nfor listening to what others say and drawing my own personal opinion from that.Last year, I read a blurb from Jeff Bezos on\na Signal vs. Noise post\nthat really resonated with me.He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed\ntheir minds.--\nJason FriedPeople who seek to learn more, who seek to shape their own personal opinion, are\nthose who succeed.It's really tough to find malleable opinions in the tech and start-up\nindustry.People are full of opinions and hold them to a high grade when it comes to\ndiscussing programming languages or frameworks or hell, even programming\nparadigms. In the last few months, I've spent my spare time learning\nReactiveCocoa, not because I\nthink it's the best and only way to craft Objective-C bits and pieces, but\nbecause I wanted to learn.I wanted to learn why Justin Spahr-Summers,\na GitHubber I looked up to, spent a considerable amount of his time doing this.\nI wanted to learn what existed out there besides the same old OOP that my\ncollege professors raved about to my young, supple brain. I wanted to see if it\nwould change my mind and the way I think. And it did.Which brings me back to the whole reason that started this post. How do we\nenable ourselves to learn more? How can we help enable others to learn in these\nsame ways? How can we help create productive conversations between ourselves,\nrather than the relentless shitstorm that follows every opinion posted on Hacker\nNews? How can we promote drawing new opinions from a combination of observable\nand historical science?Because I will damn well follow those who will change their opinion based on\ntheir own knowledge over the immovable stump any day.",
  "title": "How We Learn"
}