Who To Read

f you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. 

This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.”

- Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Like everyone else, my time on this planet is ticking towards its end. 

In my 20's and 30's, I have done good amount of exploitation vs exploration strategies (search algorithms use these strategy) on what to learn and from who to learn. Obviously, I have to encountered more than my allotted quota of dead ends (books on consciousness, blue brain project to Aristotle sans the humility of Socrates)

Maria Popova has a beautiful piece on The Value of Being Wrong: Lewis Thomas on Generative Mistakes

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.

 And for those who have nihilistic tendencies; he lays out more reality of our lives: 

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

- Richard Feynman