12: "Time to Act"

For once I'm going to use this space the way it was meant to be used--for chicken scratches.

I just read the Howard Windsor report. There is an update on funding from the government side, but otherwise, no big surprises.

We still need to address that NSCAD is running under an unsustainable business model--not wilfully, perhaps, but given where the current economic climate, enrolment trends, and private fundraising prospects put the school at present. Initiatives like the Friends of NSCAD general assemblies are a good start at addressing deficiencies in that business model from the bottom up.

I'm also thinking that Sharon is partly right when she talked about having to make "brave decisions"--some of the issues that effect the student and faculty experience, including class sizes, after-hours access, and course offerings, are part of what makes the NSCAD model unsustainable, and they do need to be addressed.

I'm thinking about that exchange of information I was talking about between Bernadette Kehoe and I. Bringing different, potentially conflicting perspectives together in an open way.

Allowing imperfect proposals to be put out into the open.

That exchange needs to happen at a larger scale. As students, we spend a significant of time in the studios, navigate through the course calendar every semester, etc. We are in a particular position to point out what needs to stay and what can go (painful as it may be), from a student's point of view.

We might not be "right" (we don't have the full picture either), but we have our particular point of view.

For example, as much as I appreciate the 20-odd-student class size limit, there are some classes where I felt that wasn't particularly necessary. It could've been a little bigger. What is more important is that the classes are more well-planned, the critiques more focused--not less students but less time wasted.

I personally also don't need 24-hour access in the paint studios; if they were eliminated, I would just plan my time around painting when I needed to, and do off-campus work (such as writing) during the night.

What I just said is "wrong" for a lot of reasons (for example, Intro Paint can't go above 20 students anyway because it doesn't have the studio space to accommodate more; also, there are other students who work on different schedules and need that around-the-clock access). But that's just my experience, just as each student has their own experience.

But if we can systematically survey these opinions and find commonalities, together that data can go towards funding useful change.

So what if there was a website where we polled students on all of these matters: studio space, studio access, class sizes, course efficiency, etc.?

That input can be extremely valuable.

I don't see that happening yet--we have student council meetings and meetings with the president, where all students can attend, but nowhere that a student can just say, off-the-cuff, what is more important and less important to his or her educational experience.

Especially since, I believe, many students are similarly hesitant in having to devote time to attending a general assembly, and having to speak their mind on potentially controversial sacrifices (such as reducing hours of access). We need to find out how many people need that campus access, for example, to judge how important it is to keep it. Otherwise, we are just working off assumptions, which may not be the most efficient solution.

It may not be pretty.

Moments after I thought about this I also thought, "wouldn't this just start putting people--faculty, maintenance, security--out of their jobs?"

And students, particularly, seem to think that anything in the realm of sacrifice is sacrilege.

Maybe. Not necessarily. Perhaps as Russell Ackoff says, we (and by that, I mean "I"--my own censor) need to not shoot down suggestions on the basis of what's wrong, but take it and try to make it better.

We need to allow it to happen.

We also need to allow it to be wrong.

11: Going Out on a Limb

When I first started this project in the form of a blog, I was thinking about the problem that the blog format presented, that the entries come up in reverse chronological order, with the newest ones at the top of the page. And then I thought about how reading the research backwards might actually be a fitting metaphor (I forget how, exactly).

At the moment I’m reminded of something that Ernest Hemingway once said in an interview regarding his novella, The Old Man and the Sea:

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better…. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true. (“Books”)

I’m embarrassed to admit that I began this self-proclaimed “journey of errors” with much of the road already mapped out—or, at least, I had preconceived in my mind all the topics I wanted to touch on, all the quotes that would be fitting (the above one aside), all the artwork that I could bring in—all I needed was to go from one, to the next, to the next… and surely some grand, profound conclusion would be reached at the end.

And now I’m sitting in front of this computer screen (and have been for hours), and there are no such conclusions to be found. That’s the point, I think.

Being wrong means not writing the ending at the very start.

We’ll find out tomorrow what Howard Windsor thinks about that.

We’ll find out tomorrow what we think about that.

Works Cited

“Books: An American Storyteller.” Time 13 Dec. 1954. Web. 24 Nov. 2010.

10: An Imperfect Proposal

Earlier in the semester I wrote what I thought was a research essay, but what was in reality an opinion piece, comparing merit versus need-based student funding in art universities (link).

A research essay or an opinion piece: are these two different entities? I will immediately concede that the distinction is possibly arbitrary, but thinking in these terms has helped me re-interpret what I previously thought I had gotten “wrong”.

I’ll give two examples:

For one, I argue in the essay that in a merit-based funding system, there are more students left with unmet financial need, and their struggles (to keep a part-time job, to deal with the effects of debt such as stress and poor health) have an adverse effect on the classroom experience as a whole. Turning to a need-based system that helps these students first would thus potentially improve the overall quality of education enough for everyone to compensate those who lose out on awards under the new arrangement.

But I can’t prove that this is actually the case. To be able to do so requires some level of research—if not a longitudinal study, then at least a thorough survey of current students on their finances and lifestyles, and on how things might be different if they were given more or less assistance from the university.

Later in the essay I propose that well-publicized non-monetary awards could help kick-start an outstanding student’s artistic career, thereby making up for eliminated merit-based scholarships. This claim is also unsubstantiated. Without an analysis of whether existing awards (such as the Starfish or the Sobey Art Award) actually boost artists’ reputations or help them secure more exhibitions, there’s no telling whether my idea would work either. Problematic, too, are the economics of such an enterprise, which would need to be investigated—is it actually cheaper to hold award ceremonies and publicize winners than it is to just give them modest scholarships?

The two statements I had made in the name of research made me very nervous, because in fact no research had been done—at least not in the scientific sense, where experiments must be drawn up and data must be collected. Instead, what I had written bore greater resemblance to a columnist’s article in a newspaper: given a set of facts and opinions obtained in a journalistic fashion, I proceeded to give my own take funded by personal experience and rational deliberation.

It makes me feel a bit relieved, then, to realize that what I had written was not a failed attempt at research, but rather something that belonged to a different category of inquiry. But what is the purpose of this category? What does the plebeian observer have to offer in the realm of the thoroughly-informed expert?

The answer may seem obvious (it became less so when I had to be the intruding non-expert). As Karin Cope suggests, every observer possesses his or her own unique perspective which is inaccessible to someone else, including the so-called expert. In my case, while I don’t understand NSCAD’s endowment structure the way that the school’s Director of Financial Aid does, neither does she know exactly how the decisions being made at her level affect the experiences of the school’s students—not unless a student shares that experience with her.

In other words, each side can learn from the other. One does not necessarily possess greater knowledge than the other; it is instead more likely that the two sides possess very different areas of knowledge. An exchange of such ideas thus requires that both are allowed to get some things wrong without having an error diminish or invalidate their positions completely. It requires that both are flexible to correcting what’s wrong while appreciating what’s right.

Organizational theorist Russell L. Ackoff makes a similar case in his essay “What’s Wrong with ‘What’s Wrong With’.” Ackoff observes that critics tend to shut down any proposed change to a system by immediately targeting what’s wrong with the proposal. A more productive alternative, he says, would be to seek ways to modify an imperfect proposal by removing the perceived deficiencies while preserving the advantages (78).

Works Cited

Ackoff, Russell L. “What’s Wrong with ‘What’s Wrong With’.” Interfaces 33.5 (2003): 78-82. JSTOR. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

9: But of the Quarrel with Ourselves, Poetry

Works Cited

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Penguin, 2000. 465. Print.

8: ...And an Intervention

I was delighted to find that Kathryn Schulz had given another TED Talk while I was in the midst of producing this body of research. Her new presentation is entitled “Don’t regret regret”:

***

To be honest, I don’t feel I’ve had much success with this project.

I thought this was going to be easy. I had constructed this expedient framework within which to advance my research on my own terms, and I had declared from the beginning that within this framework I could literally do no wrong. Making mistakes was, in fact, almost a prerogative.

It wasn’t enough. I had neglected that to be able to make mistakes meant first and foremost getting it past ourselves. No matter what external permissions I had set for myself to be wrong, my gut instinct wasn’t allowing any of it. I still found myself in the same predicaments as before, obsessing over every word and agonizing over every fault, saying to myself “this argument’s logic is all wrong” even when being wrong was supposed to be okay. It was not, by any means, the liberating and inspiring free-form experience I had imagined at the outset.

What brought this whole operation to a halt was when I realized that, if I can’t even allow myself to make mistakes, how could I possibly put forth a strategy of being wrong for an entire society?

Schulz’s talked reminded me that having regrets is an integral part of making mistakes. This was the missing link. I had expected that the structure of my research would allow me to get everything wrong as I please and simply “carry on”. This assumption, in itself, was very wrong. Simply allowing myself to make mistakes was an intellectual decision that made no concessions for the emotional state that such mistakes would put me in. Regret, it turns out, is that emotion, and to fully be able to be wrong means being able to deal with regret.

I’m still not sure what this all means, yet. However, if I may allow myself to go off on a tangent here: I might replace that word, “regret”, with another—shame. Making a mistake brings about a visceral impulse to conceal it, or mask it, or rectify it discretely. A very relevant example is the “edit” button on these blogs, which makes it so easy to go in and tamper with the evidence of all the mistakes I’ve already made (so far I’ve resisted the urge to do so). So here’s a new experiment: instead of hiding mistakes, why not expose them?

With that in mind, I wanted to point out what I feel are the mistakes I’ve made in the course of this research, thus far:

i.) Relying on sentiments: Karin Cope asks, “How can you develop adequate proofs? What kinds of evidence can you use?... What’s the role of your own experiences in ‘serious’ writing?” I feel myself struggling continuously with these questions. Granted, personal experience is a significant part of why I chose to write about being wrong—I have a gut feeling that it’s something that affects me in my daily experience, and it’s also something that I need to look for within myself if I am to understand it (as I have been doing in the current entry). But what is this act of analyzing my own thoughts—is it legitimate research, or is it nothing more than uncorroborated musings that have no place beyond the daily journal or personal blog?

It’s a question that extends beyond my thinking, “what do I need to do to fulfill the requirements of a ‘serious’ writing assignment?” Instead, it’s a fundamental question of how we arrive at what we know, and how we can be certain that we can trust our conclusions. Lynda Barry’s What It Is proves to us that important lessons can come from such a kind of sentimental philosophizing. The insights that she shares with us are profound precisely because she’s lived and made mistakes and learned something that she believes can be universal lessons for all of us. On the other hand, Schulz proves that some of our great cultural wisdoms can turn out to be wrong. In her talk, Schulz explains how she had “drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret… that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets” (Schulz). But upon closer inspection, she realized that this was a largely unexamined and unsubstantiated axiom.

ii.) Failing to be critical: “Wrongology”, as Schulz calls it, is an admittedly niche field. Schulz has produced a body of research arguing that we should allow ourselves to be wrong, and for the most part, there aren’t many people out there who are arguing for the reverse position—at least not in a way that stands in direct response and opposition to what she has put out (that is, unless we get into real epistemology—and as I stated in the proposal, I'm not looking to let things get out of hand). The absence of contradictory evidence is always dangerous, and it’s something that is continually worrying for me, even though I don’t have a real solution for it.

iii.) Coerced evidence: This is another danger in research very much related to the previous—we start out with a hypothesis we believe in, then subsequently spend all our efforts manipulating the evidence, especially by selection and omission, so that what we’ve decided from the outset never has to come into question. From an undergraduate student’s perspective, we typically do this out of constraints for time—having to enter the realm where the initial plans for our research might not actually work out is a risky business that two-week assignments don’t allow us the time for. Yet this tendency is merely symptomatic of our real-life experience: we never want to have to face the fact that we might be wrong, and that our views might need to be corrected.

And isn’t that just the problem I’m trying to solve?

Works Cited

Schulz, Kathryn. “Don’t regret regret.” TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences. Dec. 2011. Web. 6 Dec. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret.html>.

7: An Interlude...

“‘Do you sing?’ I exclaimed with surprise. At the same time I remembered with amusement the incident of my first youthful love, and how it ended when I heard the girl sing so badly.”

– Hermann Hesse, Gertrude

Works Cited

Hesse, Hermann. Gertrude. Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York: Picador, 2005. Print.

6: Better the Devil You Know (Part II)

Determinants of Political Apathy:

- Physical – geography, population density, weather, ease of access to sites of political activity
- Socioeconomic – age and demographics of citizens, wealth/poverty, employment rates
- Institutional & Political – structure of government and political processes (e.g. electoral methods), relevance of political issues in discussion
- Sociological – perceptions of danger, futility, or alienation in political processes

In today’s post, wrongness intersects with the topic of political apathy. I am beginning this discussion with the above list for several reasons:

i.) I want to illustrate that there are multiple causes of political apathy—my discussion on wrongness attempts to find it as an underlying factor in some, but not all, of those causes.

ii.) Most of these variables were, for due diligence, pulled from research literature (Merrifield 666, Rosenberg 350, Dean 186) but I am confident that most readers could just as easily have named them on the spot—they are, after all, conveniently aligned with all the excuses we make for being politically inactive. What this suggests is that our intuitive and emotional response to politics should not be taken for granted.

***

American sociologist Morris Rosenberg took this qualitative approach for studying political apathy. He collected his data through seventy open-ended interviews that were designed “to encourage the respondent to reveal his views regarding the political process with a minimum of direction and a maximum of spontaneity” (350).

From the interviews, Rosenberg identifies threats to interpersonal interaction as one of three predominant deterrents voiced by participants. These include: threats to harmony between families, friends, and communities; threats to business or occupational success; and finally, threat of ego-deflation (353). Some of his interviewees expressed that they didn’t like to talk about politics with their peers because they didn’t understand much about politics or didn’t think they were capable enough to take part in it. Or, by Rosenberg’s clinical evaluation:

…there are [those] who, facing the prospect of revealing factual ignorance
or committing gross logical errors, seek to avoid the feeling of defeat,
abashment, humiliation, or other discomfiture by staying far away from
such discussions. (353)

***

I’ll admit: I ended the previous post with little more than personal experience, and a general hunch, to go on when I claimed that the prospect of wrongness makes us underachieve instead of overachieve. What I’m now trying to do is establish at least one example of a common site of “error aversion”, and I think political apathy is a good one. But why should that be the case anyway? What makes political participation (by which I mean participation in a normal environment—not in, say, a radical protest) such a high-stakes endeavour?

Rosenberg writes at length about the potential hazards of discussing politics as perceived by his interviewees—these range from suffering embarrassment at a dinner party with the in-laws to losing the business of customers on the other side of the party line. Rosenberg makes no effort, however, to examine why politics is so charged to begin with. He seems to take for granted that politics is intrinsically contentious and prone to unhappy disagreement.

To be sure, our personal politics are indeed a sensitive matter. Please excuse, again, the arbitrary terminology—by this I mean our opinions on questions that point back to the core of our society, such as the issues of gay marriage, capital punishment, or stem cell research. These topics are sensitive because, in describing our own ideals of society and governance, we also expose our fundamental beliefs and ideologies. Paradoxically, however, these personal politics are the easier variety to talk about because they require little more than our own “moral compass” as guidance. Everyday conversation is proof that most people are adequately comfortable voicing their political views at this level, even if they are ambivalent or uncertain. So when Rosenberg’s interviewees admit that they don’t understand politics, I am inclined to interpret that they are talking instead about public politics, which has more to do with aligning one’s personal views with this politician or that party, or with this bill or that piece of legislation.

Having just established that “sensitivity” may not be the only concern holding us back from political conversation, we are tasked with finding alternative culprits. My hypothesis, in light of this research on wrongness, is that misinformation makes us very anxious. Indeed, economists Matthias Benz and Alois Stutzer propose that citizens rarely sort through “real” political information, but instead use a variety of shortcuts to lower their costs (time and effort). These shortcut political indicators include generalized party ideologies, past performance of a government, reputations of candidates, recommendations from interest groups, or information collected as a by-product of mass media consumption (32).

I believe that we are all aware of our own failings at heart. Having taken shortcuts to arrive at a shallow understanding of whom or what we’ve decided to support, to voice our allegiances is to tread extremely treacherous waters. We are less fearful of expressing our own opinions, of which we are at least master, than we are in letting our opinions be spoken for by people and parties we don’t fully know, lest we are unaware that they completely misrepresent us on another matter. Debates of politics at the public level, then, are prone to defensiveness and animosity, since we really can’t be sure that we’re sure about what we’re talking about.

To be continued… (What is the solution, and does it have anything to do with wrongness?)

Works Cited

Benz, Matthias, and Alois Stutzer. “Are Voters Better Informed When They Have a Larger Say in Politics?: ‘Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland’.” Public Choice 119.1/2 (2004): 31-59. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Dean, Dwight G. “Alienation and Political Apathy.” Social Forces 38.3 (1960): 185-9. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Merrifield, John. “The Institutional and Political Factors that Influence Voter Turnout.” Public Choice 77.3 (1993): 657-667. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Rosenberg, Morris. “Some Determinants of Political Apathy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 18.4 (1954-5): 349-366. JSTOR. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

5: Better the Devil You Know (Part I)

“How does it feel to be wrong?” asks Kathryn Schulz to her audience at the TED2011 conference. The responses she gets are “dreadful”, “thumbs down”, “embarrassing”. Then she reveals the trick: as she had expected, her audience unwittingly gave her answers to a different question: how does it feel to realize you’re wrong? (Schulz)

As Schulz explains it, being wrong, in itself, doesn’t feel like anything (or rather, it feels the same as being right). We don’t have any innate mechanisms built in ourselves to tell us that we’re wrong (Schulz). That’s why it can be devastating when we do finally realize it—we’ve already run a mile with that undetected mistake out into the world before the world lets us know.

Schulz argues that, faced with the painful possibility of discovering too late that we are wrong, we shore up our defences by becoming perfectionists and over-achievers who are ostensibly infallible, and then we just insist that we’re right all the time (Schulz). To me, this is the most glaring deficiency in Schulz’s talk. In making this assertion, she fails to acknowledge that we all avoid being wrong far more than we persist in being right. The problem is not that the prospect of being wrong makes us try too hard; it’s that, most of the time, it makes us scared of trying at all.

To be continued…

4: What it Feels Like

“There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky 144)

Works Cited

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Best Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Trans. David Magarshack. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2005. Print.

3: Recurring Themes

Know thyself.
– Ancient Greek aphorism

Si fallor, sum (If I err, I exist)
– St. Augustine, City of God (qtd. in Potter 18)

Works Cited

Potter, Vincent G. On understanding understanding: a philosophy of knowledge. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Google books. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://books.google.ca/books?id=SnO1FKnJui4C&dq=city+of+god+st+augustine+fallor+ergo+sum&source=gbs_navlinks_s>

2: Dropping the Bomb on Wrong

My research on being wrong is partly inspired by Kathryn Schulz’s presentation (also entitled “On being wrong”), which she gave at the TED2011 conference. As a self-proclaimed “wrongologist”, Schulz has spent years thinking about fallibility. Her talk, which serves as a rough introduction to her discipline, is one that I will be returning to as a springboard for introducing a variety of concerns that she has already identified.

Before I get too far ahead, however, it seems like a good time to address why such a topic is important. Because, for all the work she does convincing us that we are all “trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything,” Schulz fails to give anything beyond vague optimism for why we should step out of that bubble, and what the world would look like if we did.

One online viewer took issue with the way Schulz glossed over how mistake-making manifests in reality. “George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East, and something else happened instead,” Schulz cites, with a shrug, as one example (Schulz). The viewer rebukes: “Well, yes we need the mistakes to learn. But what of it? What happens when there is no accountability? Do we just need to forgive and forget? What does that imply for our society?” (Liu). He likely understands that this is not Schulz’s intention, but says so to illustrate that Schulz tends to overemphasize the admissibility of our errors at the expense of suggesting practical methods for dealing with them.

***

Let us, in fact, extrapolate Schulz’s ideas in the case of the Iraq War. This was the topic of a recent interview between television host Jon Stewart and former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the interview, Rice makes a strong case that Saddam Hussein had, by 2003, proven to be an imminent international security threat that needed to be removed. Yet Stewart is unsatisfied with how the administration chose to convey that threat to the public. “I think the complaint people have,” explains Stewart, “is that the administration was very efficient at selling us on the idea of the danger [Hussein] presented, with very specific thoughts of weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be not the case” (Rice).

Stewart doesn’t believe that the administration simply made a mistake, but rather that the “conversation they had with the American people was not necessarily an honest one” (Rice). His argument is that if we can, for the moment, take Rice’s statements in the interview at face value—that the administration had a real, justifiable case for taking action against Iraq which they could’ve presented to the public—then why did they concert a rhetoric based on unconfirmed WMDs instead?

The administration construed the WMDs as a material certainty; this certainty would’ve been impossible to establish with any subjective measurement of Hussein’s Iraq as a “threat”. That the Bush administration used a strategy favouring the assurance of certainty is telling: it suggests that political discourse is the way it is—distorted, disingenuous, and dishonest—because the speaker assumes that the listener is incapable of making judgments based on complex information. In essence, the speaker therefore fakes a false certainty. In turn, a public that is continually fed these neatly packaged statements of certainty loses their faculty for dealing with complexity, thus perpetuating a cycle that leads to a breakdown of meaningful discourse.

This is really about our expectations of rightness and wrongness. We expect the politician to tell us definitively, “we need to attack Iraq because they have the bombs to attack us,” rather than to say that an invasion of Iraq is a desirable strategy, given a weighing of the advantages and disadvantages using the information available. I am trying to imagine that, if we lived in a culture where we acknowledge fallibility as a norm, the latter statement is something that the politician could’ve presented and that the public could’ve processed. Deception on the one hand, and non-confidence on the other, could both have been avoided.

In the end, the outcome of the war might’ve been the same—except with a much better approval rating. “I’m very regretful about the intelligence [report on WMDs] and the fact that it was not correct,” says Rice. “I am nonetheless very glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, because you would not have the Middle East that you are seeing unfold now” (Rice). She is expressing that a good can result from a wrong decision—and that is something that no one can fully predict. If this is really the case, then why not dismantle the false pretence that we are in possession of perfect information that allows us to make perfect choices, and instead focus on how we can work with what we have, under the circumstances, to the best of our abilities?

***

I think this is what Schulz is getting at. Of course, with only eighteen minutes to speak at the podium, she is understandably brief about it. Her first priority is to stress to the audience that fallibility is real, and she has me convinced. In fact, I’m starting to see it everywhere, and it becomes more amusing all the time. The television interview, for example, closes with Stewart appearing to, quite aptly, poke fun of the polarizing effect of wrongness:

Stewart: And you are with me in thinking that I’m also right?

Rice: Jon, both sides can’t be right… (laughs)

Stewart: Alright, well I really appreciate you coming by and talking, and I do feel like I have a better sense of why we did make that huge mistake.

Works Cited

Liu, Jeff. Comment on “On being wrong.” TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences. 16 May 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html>.

Rice, Condoleezza. Interview by Jon Stewart. The Daily Show. The Comedy Network. 1 Nov. 2011. Web. 23 Nov. 2011. <http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/#clip560829>.

Schulz, Kathryn. “On being wrong.” TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences. Apr. 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html>.

1: They Say...

During a peer discussion of our projects, one classmate was quick to take objection to my proposed research. “Are we actually wrong,” he challenged, “or are we just not completely right?” What he wanted was a distinction between absolute and functional levels of correctness, and in turn, the concession to be made that we can be “right” in a practical sense.

I find his comments interesting, and relevant, for several reasons:

i.) They point out that the terminology I am using is vague and may be dangerously contentious. At first, I was annoyed with this student’s insistence on debating semantics; only afterwards did I realize that I was operating with my own working definitions in mind, and that they weren’t available to the reader.

When I contend that an individual is “wrong”, I am trying to say that the individual has taken up a position that is still in a state of flux, and that cannot answer definitively to all challenges. Such properties do not apply to a true mathematical equation, such as 2 + 2 = 4, which remains constant and unequivocal. It would, however, be fair to say that an individual who believes first in pro-life, then later in pro-choice, was wrong in the former perspective on his own terms because his latter perspective repudiates it. Furthermore, either stance is also wrong on collective terms because each stance carries with it unresolved problems.

Most of our arguments, even if we do not make 180 degree turnarounds, are subject to continuous amendment. As such, they are rarely complete, infallible statements. This level of uncertainty, which is all that we have to stand on, is what I have chosen to call “wrong”. It is problematic terminology, but I must stress that I am more concerned with the qualitative state of mind that this “wrongness” occupies, rather than a clinical notion. “Wrong” and “right” will have to do for now, at least. Perhaps the research that follows will present a word that better fits my definition.

ii.) This is an instant example of how questions can so quickly snowball and become the kind of overwhelmingly huge topic that I alluded to in the proposal. The above clarification is a desperate attempt to curtail such hazards; just barely suppressed by my ad hoc definition are grand notions like morality and universal truth. How can I speak of being wrong when I am ignorant to what is true?! They beg to be addressed; they mock me and write off my research as amateurish at best, and hardly airtight in the face of philosophical logic.

My response: stick to the plan…

iii.) The student’s reaction tells me that my research strikes a nerve with our collective consciousness. We tend not to want to concede that we’re living, breathing bundles of erroneous thought—we want credit for all the things we’re educated on and knowledgeable and wise about. The contention that we may not be so knowledgeable and wise after all about the things we’re best at may even be a bit offensive. This cultural reaction is exactly what I’m proposing we critique (put on the chopping block?)—so I’m glad things are off to a good start.

0: Proposal

I have spent a great deal of this semester wrestling with the notion of fallibility—that is, our human tendency to be wrong, and what we, individually and collectively, should be doing about it.

I am made increasingly aware of my own capacity for being incorrect with every successive school assignment. Whatever the class, it’s usually the same drill: take a topic and, with a two-week turnaround, produce five to eight pages of lucidly articulated arguments. That’s two weeks to pick out the question, absorb the literature, boil it all down, and finally, choose a side and speak for it.

What ensues is a tumble down the rabbit hole into the chaotic realm of critical research. Given any starting point, one answer leads to another question; one perspective is invalidated by the next; one isolated concern points to a variety of complex causes. I am so often overwhelmed by the realization that whatever I can absorb is only a sliver of the pie. What if I’m missing something important in the equation? What if I’m misinformed? What if I’m wrong?

Yet it would be false idealism to assume that, free from the constraints of the school assignment, I could somehow procure every piece of information I need to come up with the correct conclusion. A research thesis is, after all, merely a microcosm of the decisions we must continually make in real-time. When word broke recently of the Howard Windsor appointment and the NSCAD union negotiations, for example, students, faculty and the public alike scrambled to understand the situation, sorting through a torrent of partisan announcements, media reports, hearsay and rumours. Each of these channels of information was biased, incomplete, imperfect. With only such resources to draw from, it follows that our own perspectives must be equally imperfect.

It would be impossible to put the world on pause while we analyze all the pieces in some clinical fashion that arms us for a perfect discourse. Most problems are volatile and evolving—they evade our best attempts at pinning them down. And, even if we could, would it really allow us to make infallible decisions?

The proposed body of research will examine the problem of fallibility and its place in our society. More than just the notion that we are often wrong, I am interested in our culture’s tendency to deny or avoid such a perspective. This tendency, as a result, shapes the ways we present ourselves and engage with others. My research will attempt to uncover where this ideology comes from, how it affects us, and how we can solve the difficulties it poses.

Clearly, my attempt at answering these questions is in itself a struggle against being wrong about them. Underlying this project are the difficulties I face in confronting my own fallibility, and my desire to find the means to overcome it.

My methodology for writing this report is informed by my very resistance to committing to words out of a fear of being wrong. In blog form, I will be publishing bite-sized portions of research and analysis as I proceed. Each entry will respond to only one or two research sources, and thereby necessarily present in-progress arguments, made without the luxury of the full picture, subject to continuous amendment. I see this as a mechanism that forces me to not so much negotiate the perils of imperfect information, as to accept them. It is, at the same time, a mechanism that grants me permission to be wrong—the potential for mistakes is laid bare by the process. After all, this methodology already exists in our minds—it is only out of our anxiety for correctness in the public sphere that, usually, the formative process of arriving at our ideas is banished to obscurity.

It is my hope that this project, through both content and process, achieves the dismantling of the ideology of wrong that binds us to an overriding concern for being right; and in its place, presents new approaches for confronting the questions that we encounter in our lives.