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❌🤔💡 On being wrong | Kathryn Schulz

🤖 AI Summary

  • 🚫 The Feeling of Rightness is Misleading
    • 🧠 Most people do everything possible to avoid thinking about the possibility that one is wrong [02:25].
    • ❓ One cannot actually think of anything one is wrong about in the present tense [02:46].
    • 💡 Being wrong does not feel like anything before the realization [04:49].
    • 🛣️ When one is wrong, the feeling is like being on solid ground [05:49].
    • 👀 Error blindness is the structural reason for getting stuck inside this feeling of rightness [06:06].
  • 🏆 The Cultural Problem with Mistakes
    • 🍎 Children learn that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits [06:58].
    • ❌ The way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes [07:04].
    • 🛡️ Insistence on being right makes one feel smart, responsible, virtuous, and safe [08:03].
    • ⚠️ Trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side can be very dangerous, citing an instance of wrong-site surgery [09:18].
    • 🌎 The internal sense of rightness is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world [09:29].
  • 👥 Assumptions When Others Disagree
    • 🛑 When someone disagrees, the first assumption is that they are ignorant and do not have access to the same information [10:25].
    • 🤯 When sharing information fails, the second assumption is that they are idiots, too moronic to put the pieces of the puzzle together correctly [10:42].
    • 😈 If they are smart, the third assumption is they know the truth and are deliberately distorting it for malevolent purposes [11:01].
    • 💔 This attachment to rightness prevents preventing mistakes and causes people to treat each other terribly [11:21].
  • 🌟 The Value of Human Fallibility
    • 🖼️ The miracle of the mind is that one can see the world as it isn’t [11:55].
    • ✝️ The capacity to screw up is totally fundamental to who people are [12:40].
    • 📚 Saint Augustine wrote Ferreo ergo sum (I err, therefore I am), recognizing the fundamental nature of error [12:40].
    • 🌱 The obsession with trying to figure things out is the source and root of all productivity and creativity [13:08].
    • 🎭 Moments of surprise, reversal, and wrongness are needed to make stories work and are consumed with pleasure by audiences [14:10].
    • 😮 To truly rediscover wonder, one needs to step outside of the tiny, terrified space of rightness [16:59].

🤔 Evaluation

  • ⚖️ This perspective contrasts sharply with professional and academic cultures that often equate certainty with competence. 📈 While the video addresses the individual and social costs of error blindness, high-stakes fields—like finance or engineering—often demand a façade of infallibility, inadvertently reinforcing the lessons learned in elementary school.
  • 🧐 The core argument—that being wrong feels like being right—offers a deeper, more neurological critique than the Socratic approach, which merely suggests recognizing one’s own ignorance is the first step to wisdom. 🧠 The video argues the feeling of ignorance is absent until the mistake has already done its damage.
  • 🔎 Topics for a better understanding include exploring the specific cognitive biases, such as Confirmation Bias and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which actively reinforce the internal sense of rightness. 🛠️ Research into institutional safeguards, like Checklists and Blameless Post-Mortems used in aviation or high-reliability organizations, could provide practical frameworks for cultivating intellectual humility where the stakes are highest. 🗣️ The transition from “ignorance” to “malevolent purpose” also warrants ethical examination regarding the rhetoric of persuasion and debate.

📚 Book Recommendations

  • ❌ Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz. 📖 This is a direct expansion of the video’s arguments, delving into the philosophy, psychology, and practical reality of human error.
  • ⚫🦢🎲 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. 📉 Though from a probabilistic and statistical angle, this book reinforces the video’s point about the unreliability of perceived “solid ground” by focusing on human blindness to high-impact, rare events (Black Swans).
  • 🏍️🧘❓ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig. 💡 A philosophical novel that explores the concept of Quality and the need to reconcile subjective experience with objective reality, touching on the idea of being trapped in one’s own narrow, “right” perspective.
  • 🚑 The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. ✅ Provides a concrete, practical counterpoint to the “being right” problem, showing how a culture of humility and simple, verifiable procedures can drastically reduce error in complex, high-stakes environments like medicine.

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