I had remembered a Bible verse incorrectly.
In my head, James said that maturity meant no longer being tossed around by every wind of doctrine.
That sentence does not exist.
Or rather, all its parts exist. I had compressed two passages into one—apparently my memory had trained its own small language model.
In the opening of James, perseverance is allowed to finish its work so that a person may become mature. Two verses later, the doubter is compared to a wave driven and tossed by wind. (James 1:2–8)
In Ephesians, maturity is followed by the image of no longer being children, tossed by waves and carried by every wind of doctrine. The next movement is toward truth spoken in love. (Ephesians 4:13–15)
My memory had merged them because they were orbiting the same question:
What does it mean to become stable without becoming immovable?
A ship that never turns is not necessarily mature
The ship metaphor initially seems obvious.
An immature person is tossed around by every wave.
A mature person remains steady.
But remain steady in what sense?
A ship completely protected from wind belongs in dry dock.
It is very stable.
It is also not going anywhere.
A useful ship has to be affected by the wind without surrendering its destination to every gust.
It needs ballast so that every wave does not overturn it.
It needs a sail because refusing all external force is not strength.
It needs a rudder because movement and direction are different things.
And it needs somewhere it is trying to go.
Perhaps maturity is less like becoming a rock and more like becoming a sailor.
Children have a different job
This question emerged while I was thinking about whether humans are prediction machines or reward machines.
Children seem to explore constantly.
They touch, taste, shake and repeatedly press things that an adult has already classified as obviously not a button.
Adults rely more heavily on what has worked before.
In machine learning, this resembles the explore–exploit tradeoff.
Exploration gathers information. It tries the unfamiliar restaurant, tests the strange explanation and presses the suspicious red object.
Exploitation uses information already gathered. It orders the meal that was good last time and leaves the red object alone.
Some developmental research supports the broad observation that young children explore more than adults, even when exploration costs immediate rewards. In certain tasks, that wider search helps them learn the structure of the environment more accurately. (Liquin & Gopnik, 2022)
That does not mean children are secretly running optimal experiments.
Sometimes a child is licking the window because the window is there.
But childhood may provide a protected period in which broad exploration makes sense. A child has little data, an enormous world and adults absorbing some of the cost of being inefficient. (Gopnik, 2020)
An adult usually has a different problem.
The world is less unknown, time is more expensive, and touching every available surface begins to affect employability.
So exploring less can be sensible.
But it is not automatically maturity.
It may simply mean the model has stopped asking for new data.
Perhaps maturity is control over the learning rate
When something violates a prediction, there is another decision hiding underneath:
How much should this surprise change me?
Imagine a learning rate from almost zero to almost one.
At one extreme, nothing gets through.
Every contradiction is an exception. Every criticism comes from a biased person. Every failure was caused by the weather, the market, the children, Mercury or somebody in another department.
The model was last updated in 2007 and has declined the terms and conditions ever since.
At the other extreme, the newest event becomes the whole truth.
One difficult conversation means the relationship is broken.
One charismatic speaker replaces a worldview.
One viral health video reorganizes the contents of the refrigerator.
One person from a group confirms everything we had vaguely heard about the group.
A model with no learning cannot adapt.
A model that gives the latest observation total authority has no memory.
In a laboratory decision task, people adjusted how much weight they gave new outcomes according to how volatile they believed the environment had become. When the underlying pattern seemed to be changing quickly, recent evidence received more influence. (Behrens et al., 2007)
That feels closer to maturity than simply lowering the learning rate.
The mature response to noise may be:
I have seen this variation before. Stay the course.
The mature response to a changed environment may be:
My old experience was real, but it no longer predicts this world. Reopen the model.
Same person.
Different weight given to surprise.
Stability has rewards too
I first thought the danger was obvious: immature people chase immediate rewards, while mature people resist them.
There is truth in that.
Novelty is rewarding. Approval is rewarding. Outrage can be rewarding because it turns a complicated event into a clean story with a villain before breakfast.
Maturity may involve allowing a distant value to overrule an immediate impulse.
But stability also pays.
Being the person who is certain can produce status.
Never changing your mind protects you from embarrassment.
A familiar doctrine preserves community, identity and the comfortable feeling that the difficult questions were settled by someone responsible several centuries ago.
In other words, refusing to update can also be reward-seeking.
What looks like conviction may sometimes be a strategy for avoiding the social and psychological cost of reconsideration.
That is what makes this hard.
Both the restless person and the rigid person can tell a flattering story about themselves.
One calls every impulse openness.
The other calls every defence wisdom.
Not every wind deserves a voyage
The phrase “every wind of doctrine” feels unusually modern.
We now carry a small weather system in our pockets.
Every few minutes, a new gust arrives with an explanation of nutrition, masculinity, parenting, politics, productivity, faith or the hidden personality type apparently responsible for all our emails.
Some of these ideas are useful.
Some are old ideas wearing a new thumbnail.
Some are advertisements that discovered philosophy converts better.
It would be exhausting to investigate every claim from first principles. A mature mind needs filters, trusted sources and convictions that do not require emergency reconstruction after each podcast.
But a filter can become a wall.
If a belief survives only because all opposing evidence is classified as corruption, deception or ignorance, its stability tells us very little about its truth.
So I am left with questions rather than a formula:
- Is this one surprising event, or part of a repeated pattern?
- Did several independent sources find it, or did one claim travel widely?
- Has the environment changed since my current belief was formed?
- Am I protecting the truth—or protecting the rewards attached to being the person who believes it?
- What evidence did I previously say would change my mind?
These questions do not tell us when to turn the ship.
They may reveal whether anybody is still holding the rudder.
Conviction should have a history
Perhaps a mature conviction is not merely a belief held strongly.
It is a belief with a history.
It has been tested against alternatives.
It knows which evidence shaped it.
It can explain what would count against it.
It has survived more than repetition inside one community.
And when it changes, it can say why.
This does not mean every belief must remain permanently provisional. Life would become impossible if we reopened the existence of gravity before using the stairs.
Exploration is expensive.
At some point, we have to live from what we currently know.
But “currently” matters.
The goal is not to become difficult to move.
The goal is to become difficult to move without reason.
What I currently think
Maturity may be the ability to control what receives steering authority.
Not every impulse.
Not every reward.
Not every fear.
Not every old commitment either.
The mature person is not untouched by the world. They are responsive to it without being owned by its latest signal.
They can say:
I have considered this before, and I am staying.
They can also say:
I was wrong, and I am turning.
Perhaps that is why the ship is a better image than the rock.
The rock cannot be tossed.
It also cannot navigate.
What I still do not know is how we reliably distinguish conviction from rigidity while we are inside it.
From the deck, both can feel like holding the course.
Until the next strange question,
Osagie