Being Wrong (Is OK)

To err is human. It's an age old wisdom but society thrives on an illusion of perfection and that myth is propelled by each one of us. This is the theme of the new book Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, which is buzzing with raving reviews. Schulz dichotomizes wrong into incorrect and bad. Being incorrect is part of who we are where as bad is well.. very bad. Now further to accept incorrectness as part of life is divided into two parts:


1. We need to first get real and accept our innate short comings. That's what makes us human. We need to learn to go easy on ourselves and learn from mistakes not dwell or camouflage them. Inductive Reasoning explains why we are the way we are:

"Psychologists and neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition — the decisions you make every day, as well as how you learned almost everything you know about the world. To take just the most sweeping examples, you used inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect in the physical, biological, and psychological realms.
But this intelligence comes at a cost: Our entire cognitive operating system is fundamentally, unavoidably fallible. The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren’t necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false. Because we reason inductively, we will sometimes get things wrong.
For example, consider the role of inductive reasoning in learning language. If you are a native English speaker, you figured out within the first several years of your life that you should add the suffix -ed to form a past-tense verb. This was a brilliant guess. It’s largely correct, it taught you a huge number of words in one fell swoop, and it was a lot less painful than separately memorizing the past tense of every verb in the English language. But it also meant that, sooner or later, you said things like “drinked” and “thinked” and “runned.” You got a huge number of things right, at the price of getting a certain number of things wrong."

2. Learn not to look down on others mistakes. Be magnanimous of those who have the audacity to accept their were wrong. Here:

"Plenty of honest, thoughtful, intelligent and well-intentioned people have blundered into massive and costly mistakes.  Maybe you are one of them.  Or maybe, one day, you will be.  Ask yourself: if that happened, would you stand up and say, “I was wrong”?  And if so, in the fearsome moment that followed, what would you hope to hear?"