Edge's World Question Center asks "What have you changed your mind about?" One of my favorite responders is Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog and, more recently, How Buildings Learn, who writes:
As a landlocked youth in Illinois I mooned over the yacht sales pictures in the back of sailboat books. I knew what I wanted — a gaff-rigged ketch! Wood, of course.... Well, I bought a sequence of wooden sailboats. Their gaff rigs couldn't sail to windward. Their leaky wood hulls and decks were a maintenance nightmare. I learned that the fiberglass hulls we'd all sneered at were superior in every way to wood....
The message finally got through. Good old stuff sucks....
The Precautionary Principle tells me I should worry about everything new because it might have hidden dangers. The handwringers should worry more about the old stuff. It's mostly crap. (New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)
I was going to say that I'm in the process of changing my mind about snow (here in northwest Indiana we're well into our second foot and it's still coming), but I think that's just aging, not mind-changing.
