On Being Wrong

Your brain is a probability machine and every decision you make is a roll of the dice. Decisions that are common and have been “rolled” by humanity for millennia, have a high probability of being correct. So much so that the most crucial decisions human beings make begin to show signs of emergence in infancy. For instances, one study showed that 21-month-old infants indicated signs of surprise when two people were rewarded for work that only one person did.

The distillation of this, of course, is a fundamental aspect to the equanimous functioning of our society, and might likely be one of the guiding functions of the human mind that brought about civilization as we know it, i.e. ‘give credit where credit is due’. Often times these ‘ideals’ in our day to day lives are distilled in common sense or conventional wisdom and help guide us through our relationships, friendships, jobs, etc. just as much today as they always have.

I don’t need to make a detailed list because the vast majority of people know intuitively what I am and am not referring to. But many of our decisions, those in particular that escape the confines of our daily lives, verge toward an ever-increasing uncertainty and, thus, tend increasingly toward risk, inaccuracy, or failure, though we venture into the unknown nonetheless.

Because, this endeavor into the unknown and the uncertain is also what has brought humanity out of a world that was, as Thomas Hobbes remarked of pre-civilization, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ and into the technological era, securely embedded in modern civilization, where social issues such as racism and sexism can be discussed and dismantled so that we can continue moving our civilization toward health and well-being and ever-deeper glimpses into that great unknown.

Of course, in the building of our civilization there has been many many mistakes and many innocent people have lost their lives because of them. As we continue to endeavor into the unknown, we will inevitably make more mistakes, as we surely are right at this very moment. We will accuse innocent people of terrible things, we will accuse terrible people of wonderful things, our good intentions will result in tragedy, and that which we thought would result in tragedy may result in the unexpected. In many cases, we will never know the difference, and, in others still, we will roundly refuse to accept at all that we have, in fact, contributed to the very suffering we had intended to alleviate.

If the past is any indication of the future, these difficulties will continue to plague us, just as they always have. But hopefully, more often than not, our intentions will actually result in what we had intended, that being to improve the health and well-being of everyone we’ve ever known or will ever meet. And, again, if the past is any indication of the future, we will continue to thrive and well-being will continue to rise, as it has for millennia.

It is unclear what the correct path forward might be, but if there’s one thing that can be said for certain, it is that an unwillingness to discuss the possibility that we are wrong, increases the likelihood that our mistakes will go unnoticed and that those mistakes will be implemented whether we realize they have caused the harm we intended to alleviate or not.

If our goal is truly to bring about more good and decency in the world, we most acknowledge this pitfall, which every human that has ever lived or will ever live has been subject to, to bring a little more certainty into a world that is so very uncertain. In a universe of apparently infinite complexity, we must learn to deal maturely with the fact that we as individuals will never be able to account for every nuance of a world that we are no nearer to understanding now than we were at the dawning of civilization — despite the astounding leaps in well-being we have made even since the time of Thomas Hobbes, let alone since our hunter-gatherer days.

We will never learn what it means to be right, if we, as individuals, have not first learned what it means to be wrong.

Books on learning how to deal with statistical reasoning and understanding how to work logically with this fundamental difficulty of human nature:

The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (for her Ted Talk, see the YouTube link above)