What does it take for you (the listener, on a personal basis) to change your position?
Great interview: one I really enjoyed, but maybe more on that later if the forum manages to behave itself.
Personally, I've rarely found that I have sudden conversions on the road to Damascus except perhaps in simple, readily verifiable matters of fact. What I tend to find is that one day I register that my position is, to some degree or other, different than it once was. For example, after my adolescent rejection of religion, nothing remarkable happened to switch me to being more open, if not to religion, at least to spirituality. I just sort of found myself gravitating more that way, and maybe to some extent that was due to the inevitable onset of life's ordinary realities and disappointments. As the invincible optimism and confidence of youth is increasingly dented, I think the cast of many people's minds gradually and naturally turns more reflective and philosophical. In my case, I rediscovered inbuilt curiosity about, and amazement at, the simple and inexplicable fact of being here as a sentient being: something that had engaged me as a very young boy before the educational system, coupled with religious indoctrination, had enforced a hiatus.
In the end, what has changed my mind (almost always gradually) is the steady grind of experience. There have been a few "peak"-type experiences, but they have led more to retrospective confirmation than conversion. At no point have I ever been able to say to myself that I possess certainty. I'm still open to change should some compelling piece of evidence be uncovered. For instance, my current opinion is that Darwinism is a crock and can't explain how macroevolution has occurred: but should, for example, some new rock stratum be uncovered that shows incontrovertible gradualism in the development of new species, then I'd have to modify my opinion; likewise if neuroscientific study should uncover exactly how mind emerges from matter. But let's face it, one can't rely on the likelihood of such discoveries: science doesn't often (if ever) come up with black-and-white evidence of this kind. Indeed, much that is often quoted as such evidence, on closer examination, turns out to be much more tenuous than supposed.
I mean, really, what could ever change one's mind about an opinion other than a stark and undeniable discovery of countervailing fact? Some people seem to fail to distinguish between fact and opinion: seem to think that opinion is fact, whichever side of an issue they might be on. Hence the most useful change of mind anyone so afflicted could have would be the discovery that there's very little certainty about anything whatsoever. Which, in the end, is true scepticism. The people most likely to be correct are those who know they know nothing for sure: but sadly, there's little comfort for many people in accepting that. It can be intolerable for many to face up to their own ignorance, and all their arguments against others are, in practice, designed to keep themselves convinced rather than to persuade those others to change their minds.
I see science as being rather like a road which it can be useful to take at times, but which doesn't necessarily lead to the desired destination, nor take the most efficient and effective route. Look at how the historical scientific roadmap has developed, and you will see some roads led nowhere, some were temporarily blocked, some are currently wide open and apparently leading somewhere, some that have fallen into disuse are being rediscovered, rebuilt and extended, etc. The map is constantly being revised and updated, and yet in the end, we still don't know what the destination is. The moment we think we do know is when science ceases to be productive, so that we end up going nowhere or round in circles.