Soon

Who would have thought. Me, the enduring humanist, the useless thinker, the eternal social analyst, is going to shed this soul-searching suit. It hampers progress in the real world, you see. You close yourself up and twiddle things over within the boundaries of your own mind, hardly letting reality have a say. Indeed, I wonder how many memories I've bent, just to fit theories contrived from whims. And then how adamantly I've stuck to them irrespective of actuality.

When you model hypotheses on pure introspection, you often draw very far-fetched conclusions out of pure excitement, and in the process assume more than you know - making bias highly likely. And what doesn't fit is rejected automatically. It's classic. Everything thereafter is all interpreted to fit the theory, and contradicting information may simply be blotted out. You develop blind spots and live on, unwilling to change this nifty personal worldview of yours.

Good heavens. Your private life becomes a spiral of confirmation bias, your public convictions stiffen like Superglue because tunnel vision is activated, and the natural choices you make only lead you further down the same path. And it's so difficult to change something you've modelled all by yourself! And it appears to be working, see everything that fits? See?

No, this isn't how it should be. This is the recipe for stagnation. I want progress.

But the pain of trying to extricate yourself from ideas that have kept you going! And the frightening freedom of the loss of mental blockage, the freshness of a new domain and the absolutely crushing volume of things unknown! There is so much that is interesting outside of the familiar, so much that is yet to be understood, so much to be gained by being open-minded and curious enough to learn. Nothing should bereave man of his ability to grow.

Soon I shall be on my way. I shall be challenged, be pushed in a different direction and I shall engage faculties that have been left unused for years. Preconceived notions must be rooted out like weeds from a prized garden, must be swept away like cobwebs from a once-cherished attic, for this to succeed.

Yes, the natural sciences are going to open their doors to me. Who would have thought.