Being Wrong

 When I read this line Kathryn Schulz’ book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, it sounded both true and arrogant:

“As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us.”

She says this belief is perfectly understandable because it affirms “our sense of being smart”.

And that is exactly why we hate to be wrong. As Shane Parrish says, “it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed”. On the lighter side, I loved these lines by Parrish:

“The sentence "I am wrong" describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say "I was wrong." Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.”

Failure is a bigger version of being wrong about something. This line by a Swedish guy to Alex Stone, the author of the book Fooling Houdini is revealing about cultural attitudes towards failure:

“If it had been an Asian guy, he would probably stop with magic forever, because it would have been such a humiliation. But you Americans…”

And then there's Silicon Valley that “has managed to turn failure into a bragging right” as Kevin Roose says. Why does the Valley do that? Roose feels it may be to “ensure that entrepreneurs keep gambling on crazy ideas, despite the likelihood that they’ll lose. It’s also a hopeful reminder that what starts as failure can morph into success”. San Francisco even held a conference on start-up failures, appropriately called FailCon!

I guess the golden middle is what Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster (a site that might have been what Facebook is today), says:

“You don’t want to fetishize failure. You don’t want to be afraid of it, but you don’t want to glory in it either.”