The Thinking Meat Project

OK to be wrong

Being wrong is unpleasant, in my experience, but the fear of being wrong is even worse. Kathryn Schulz (who recently wrote Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error) has written an article for the Boston Globe about what’s wrong with how we view being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, especially a visible one, can be crippling, and it doesn’t necessarily help prevent mistakes; in fact, it can make it harder to analyze and understand what’s going on in order to rectify it.

Schulz notes that it is our capacity for inductive reasoning that makes us prone to mistakes; our ability to quickly generate likely answers sometimes leads us to accept the wrong one as true. Looked at this way, making mistakes goes hand in hand with being able to eliminate a confusing clutter of possibilities in favor of homing in on probable solutions. As in many other situations in life as thinking meat, we’re looking at a trade-off.

This essentially allows a reframing of the discussion of error. Rather than seeing it as revealing our deepest flaws and inadequacies, Schulz suggests that we accept it as part of the cost of doing business as a cogitating being and move on to understanding it. Only by understanding when and why we’re likely to commit errors are we going to be able to figure out workarounds. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we embrace our fallibility so as to better understand our mistakes and learn how to recover from them or avoid them in the first place. Intuitively this makes a lot of sense. When have you ever improved at anything by shaming yourself or trying to hide your inadequacies? (For that matter, when’s the last time this worked when you tried to change someone else’s behavior?) I haven’t read the book yet, but the article may give you a new take on being an error-prone thinker. (H/t Greg for the link to the article.)