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1-Page Summary of Being Wrong

Wrong About Being Wrong

Everyone loves to be right. They love thinking that they are correct and connecting being wrong with shame, stupidity, ignorance, psychopathology and moral degeneracy. However, it turns out that the opposite is true: being wrong ennobles you and makes you more empathetic, optimistic, imaginative and courageous. It also lets you rethink the world around you as well as your own processes in order to make yourself better at what you do. Of course no one likes to admit being wrong because if someone believes truth exists then they might think that when they’re mistaken about something it’s because they don’t know the truth or fact yet; thus not knowing a truth or fact doesn’t mean someone is wrong unless their mistake expands their understanding of their own limits (ignorance). When this happens people feel like a cataclysm has occurred which remakes their world so there seems like an error even though there wasn’t one originally—it was just misunderstood information before it was learned/expanded upon later on.

Truth and the Unconscious

Sigmund Freud wrote that mistakes are a way to reveal the truth. When we can’t cope with something, it is hidden in our unconscious. Small mistakes aren’t always due to forgetfulness or poor judgment; they are messages from your unconscious mind about things you don’t want to deal with consciously. Mistakes and dreams allow us to see truths that were previously concealed.

The Latin word for “to wander” is errare. The English translation of that word is erratic, which means someone with no direction or purpose. This may be why some mistakes feel like they were committed by someone else, because your mind wanders away from you and makes conclusions on its own.

In the Realm of the Senses

When our senses are inaccurate, we make mistakes. The metaphor of the error of perception can be applied to other kinds of mistakes. People who know a lot are seen as having vision and people who learn they’re wrong say they were under an illusion or become disillusioned. When you believe something because you see it, even though human senses routinely misperceive the world, that’s called an illusion.

Knowing That You Know

People want to know things, but they don’t have any way of knowing whether their knowledge is correct. Plato said that if you can explain why something is true, then it’s probably true; the Skeptics argued that nothing can be proven and people are ignorant. Therefore, objective truth must compete with human belief.

Memory is a good place to examine what you think you know. Humans attach memories or feelings to an event, even if they’re not accurate. People will defend their opinion about something that happened when it’s proved wrong because of their own feelings and experiences with the subject matter. In fact, most people are inaccurate in remembering two-thirds of events from 10 years ago because memories fade or become what the person wishes had happened.

Although people believe that recording devices function like the human brain, they do not. The brain functions differently in several ways. It does not have a hard drive or one specific place where memories are stored. Instead, it uses multiple parts of the brain to remember things at once and strengthen those memories over time. People also tend to believe their memory is accurate because they’ve remembered something before, even if it turns out later that what they remembered was incorrect. Recording devices mimic how memory feels by having us believe we’re right about whatever we record and therefore unable to accept any evidence that might prove otherwise.