“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…
yes. thank you.
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