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”:

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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>.