In my opinion, it's best to hold your views along a gradient of strength/importance.
It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."
It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."
Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.
Ideally, one would have a meta cognitive toolkit and regularly retest their beliefs, sincerely. But that's unfortunately advanced technique, and likely requires the better part of a decade of reading and practicing.
What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...
No because “strong opinions” mark you as “aggressively conventional”: Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”, and most people won’t try and find out.
Instead you need to find like-minded people who are willing to challenge their thinking.
>Nobody can tell if your opinions are “weakly held”
It’s pretty easy to tell if your opinions are weakly held. Do you change them in the face of new evidence? If so, they’re weakly held. And this applies to not just the big opinions of the day, but all the way down to the mundane. Do you admit that your partner was right when they suggested you do more stretching before exercising? Or do you tell your coworker that they were right and you were wrong when you had an argument over documentation?
It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."
It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."
Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.