（四）人们的想法不会因为事实而改变 -2019-05/20

Your beliefs are not you
你的信念不是你

In my early years in academia, I would tend to get defensive when someone challenged one of my arguments during a presentation. My heart rate would skyrocket, I would tense up, and my answer would reflect the disdain with which I viewed the antagonistic question (and the questioner).

在我早年的学术生涯中，当有人在演讲中对我的观点提出质疑时，我往往会自卫。我的心率会飙升，我会紧张起来，我的回答会反映出我对这个对立的问题(以及提问者)的不屑。

I know I’m not alone here. We all tend to identify with our beliefs and arguments.

我知道不是只有我这样。我们都倾向于认同自己的信念和观点。

This is my business.

这是我的事。

This is my article.

这是我的文章。

This is my idea.

这是我的想法。

But here’s the problem. When your beliefs are entwined with your identity, changing your mind means changing your identity. That’s a really hard sell.

但问题是，当你的信念与你的身份交织在一起时，改变你的想法就意味着改变你的身份。这真的很难实现。

A possible solution, and one that I’ve adopted in my ownlife, is to put a healthy separation between you and the products of you. I changed my vocabulary to reflect this mental shift. At conferences, instead of saying, “In this paper, I argue . . .,” I began to say “This paper argues . ..”

一个可能的解决办法，也是我在自己的生活中采用的一个办法，就是把你和你的产品健康地分开。我改变了我的词汇来反映这种精神上的转变。在会议上，我没有说，“在这篇论文中，我的观点是…”，我开始说“这篇论文的观点是…”

This subtle verbal tweak tricked my mind into thinking that my arguments and me were not one and the same. Obviously, I was the one who came up with these arguments, but once they were out of my body, they took a life of their own. They became separate, abstract objects that I could view with some objectivity.

这种微妙的语言变化让我的头脑重新意识到我的论点和我自己不是一回事。显然，我是提出这些论点的人，但一旦它们离开了我的身体，它们就有了自己的生命。它们变成了独立的抽象对象，我可以客观地看待它们。

It was no longer personal. It was simply a hypothesis proven wrong.

这不再是个人恩怨。这只是一个被证明是错误的假设。