Oh How I Love to Be Wrong

I love to be right. (Who doesn’t love to be right?) And yet I also love to be wrong, oh how I love to be wrong. But why, why on Earth would one love to be wrong?

Because being wrong (in measured doses, with people who love and respect us) is good for us!

Being wrong rejuvenates our healthy humility. It keeps our minds flexible and reinforces the truth that our beliefs and understandings are constantly changing. Being wrong also gives someone else the opportunity to be right. And I love it when other people get to be right.

By recognizing when I’m wrong I send a message to my brain that I’m always learning – and hopefully improving.

Our human minds are designed to believe what we think, even if we do not have evidence to support the belief. It is very natural for us to think a thing (to invent a thought out of thin air) and to immediately believe it to be true. This means we must be very careful not to believe everything we think. Shankar Vedantam of the Hidden Brain podcast talks about replacing certainty with curiosity as an antidote to our minds’ desire to be right, even when we’re wrong.

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I understood the importance of being wrong even before learning that our human minds believe themselves so quickly and without supporting evidence. I gained this love of being wrong years ago from one of my favorite physicists, Richard Feynman.

Mr. Feynman said that “a very fundamental part of my soul is to doubt and to ask.” He also said that he was “not absolutely sure about anything.”

I don’t feel frightened by not knowing anything, by being lost in the mysterious universe.

Richard Feynman

I love to allow myself to be wrong so that I can continue my honest exploration of the mysterious universe.

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Sources

Great Minds: Richard Feynman – The Uncertainty Of Knowledge

Hidden Brain, The Easiest Person to Fool, February 1, 2021

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