When was the last time you changed your mind about something?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

The exact question was part of every retrieved Vox 9 Questions installment.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Ernst Mayr said elsewhere, not written here
Well, I’ve completely reneged on that one and within a very short time, I think within three or four years.…Well, it has now been shown that it occurs very commonly in fishes, particularly cichlid fishes. So here’s another thing where my intuition was wrong.

Academy of Achievement interview, 5 April 2001 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 42 →
Richard Ford Novelist and short-story writer
Based on how the scene felt I completely switched the dynamics.
Recorded Bonnie Lyons, Interview, The Paris Review, 1996 source ↗
David Vélez Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank
In the first few months of Nubank, I asked everybody to be here by 8:00 a.m. every day. I saw it as a test of people's commitment, and I was pretty rigid about it.
Recorded questionnaire, Sequoia Capital, 15 August 2018 source ↗
Desmond Tutu Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town; chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Nobel Peace Prize, 1984
I used to be “Mister Disinvestment.” Now I would like to be Mister Investment and say, “Come! Come and be part of an exciting, exhilarating process. Come in! Come in on the ground floor and see a people do something that’s probably never happened before, people seeking to become something radically different from what their antecedents would have made us believe they were likely to become.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview source ↗

More from Ernst Mayr

View profile →
Question What problem are you still trying to solve? Craft & work
Well, you know, the genotype. I'll mention something that nobody ever mentions. Let's say you have now a genotype that makes a certain protein. And that protein, and you can see this in every issue of Science practically, that protein is a very complex structure, incredibly complex. Now how that step from a group of amino acids to that polypeptide [happens] is an enormous jump. I think right now everybody leaves it alone because nobody yet has figured out just exactly how to attack this problem.
Recorded Steve Mirsky, Scientific American interview, 6 July 2004 source ↗
Question What would you like to be remembered for? Death & what remains
Well, this has changed in the course of my life. In my early career, my development of the so-called new systematics was the thing I was very proud of, and at the species level everybody followed my idea. The latest thing I’m most proud of that has not yet been fully appreciated by the philosophers is my development of the philosophy of biology.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, 5 April 2001 source ↗

Also answered this

Henry Marsh, Clare Bailey Mosley, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Isabel Allende, Ursula K. Le Guin

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer