Araz Gholami

I ran an experiment on myself last week.

I stepped outside, looked up at the perfectly blue afternoon sky, and said out loud: “The sky is blue.”

Then I spent 20 minutes trying to convince myself it was green.

What happened next scared me.

Within minutes, I found myself doubting something I could literally see with my own eyes. My certainty wobbled. My brain started manufacturing reasons why maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about something as basic as the color above my head.

Here’s the thing: The sky was definitely blue. But my brain didn’t care.

The certainty trap

We think perception is simple. Look up, see blue, case closed.

We’re wrong about that too.

We’re not cameras recording objective reality. We’re interpretation machines, constantly filtering, adjusting, and second-guessing what our senses tell us. And that process? It’s surprisingly easy to hack.

During my experiment, I started simple: “What if I’m colorblind?” Then I got creative: “What if the atmosphere is just reflecting the ocean, and if the ocean were green, the sky would be green too?” Before long, I was questioning whether “blue” and “green” were just arbitrary labels we assigned to wavelengths of light.

I wasn’t trying to change physics. I was hacking my own perception.

And it worked. For a brief, unsettling moment, I genuinely wasn’t sure what color the sky was.

Why smart people fall harder

Intelligence doesn’t protect you from this. It makes you worse at it.

The smarter you are, the better you get at building elaborate justifications for whatever you want to believe. You become a master architect of rationalization, constructing beautiful logical buildings on completely rotten foundations.

I’ve watched brilliant scientists dismiss clear evidence because it threatened their pet theories. I’ve seen successful entrepreneurs ignore obvious market signals because accepting them would mean admitting their strategy was wrong. I’ve caught myself doing the same thing more times than I care to admit.

The tragedy isn’t that we’re sometimes wrong. It’s that we’re so good at being wrong confidently, eloquently, and with perfect internal consistency.

The manipulation playbook

Here’s what my research taught me about changing minds—including my own:

Question the frame, not the fact. Don’t argue the sky isn’t blue. Argue about what “blue” means, what we’re really seeing, what assumptions we’re making about color itself.

Introduce technical doubt. “Well, technically, the sky appears blue due to Rayleigh scattering, but if atmospheric conditions were different…” Suddenly, your rock-solid observation becomes contingent on variables you hadn’t considered.

Use definitional flexibility. “Blue and green are both just frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. The boundary between them is arbitrary. What you call blue, another culture might call green.”

Plant gradual uncertainty. Don’t demolish certainty all at once. Just scratch it a little. Let the person’s own mind expand that tiny crack into a canyon.

Appeal to sophistication. Make questioning obvious truths seem intellectual, nuanced, evolved. Nobody wants to be the simple-minded person who can’t see past surface appearances.

Leverage social proof. “Actually, many cultures don’t distinguish between blue and green. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue. Maybe what you’re seeing is…”

This isn’t just an academic exercise. This is how conspiracy theories spread. How political beliefs crystallize. How marketing works. How we gaslight ourselves daily.

The real-world stakes

Think I’m exaggerating? Consider how often you’ve seen people convince themselves of obviously false things:

That clearly manipulated photo is real evidence. That biased news source is objective reporting. That person who treats them poorly actually loves them. That investment scheme that sounds too good to be true is actually a sure thing.

We do this constantly, about big things and small things, because questioning our own perceptions feels dangerous. It’s easier to bend reality than to admit we might be wrong about something we “know” for certain.

The scary part? Once you start questioning one obvious thing, everything becomes questionable. If the sky might not be blue, what else might you be wrong about?

The uncomfortable solution

So what do we do with this knowledge?

First, assume you’re wrong about something obvious right now. You are. We all are. The question isn’t whether you have blind spots—it’s where they are.

Second, practice intellectual humility. When someone challenges something you “know” for certain, resist the urge to defend immediately. Ask yourself: “What if they’re right? What would that mean?”

Third, notice when someone is playing with your certainty. Are they questioning facts or questioning frames? Are they using social pressure? Are they making you feel naive for trusting your own perceptions?

Fourth, get comfortable with “I might be wrong.” It’s the smartest thing you can say in an uncertain world.

Fifth, distinguish between useful doubt and paralyzing skepticism. Some certainties are worth holding onto, even if they’re not perfect. The goal isn’t to doubt everything—it’s to doubt the right things.

The deeper lesson

Here’s what I really learned from my sky experiment: The color of the sky doesn’t matter. What matters is how easily I convinced myself to doubt my own eyes.

If I can manipulate myself about something I can directly observe, imagine how vulnerable I am to manipulation about things I can’t verify—complex political issues, scientific claims, other people’s motivations, my own memories.

The experiment didn’t change meteorology. It changed my relationship to certainty itself.

And that’s both terrifying and liberating.

Terrifying because it reveals how little we can trust our own minds. Liberating because understanding this makes us harder to fool—by others and by ourselves.

The real color

For the record, the sky was blue that day. Still is, as I write this.

But now I understand that “blue” is shorthand for a complex interaction of light, atmosphere, perception, language, and belief. It’s not just a color—it’s a story we tell ourselves about what we see.

And that story? It’s more fragile than we think.

Which might be the most important thing to know about anything we’re certain of.

Your brain is not your friend when it comes to truth. But understanding its bugs might be the closest thing to wisdom we get.