#on being wrong

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Elliot Erwitt, New York City, 1950

* * * *

"The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently."

Kathryn Schulz, American journalist and author, Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong, TED talk [12:00-12:17], Mar 2011. (via amiquote)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.”

—Kathryn Schulz, American journalist and author, Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong, TED talk [12:00-12:17], Mar 2011. (via amiquote)

[jjksbobaeyes]

Sometimes it’s important to remember: I am not always right. It’s human to fail, to be wrong. I think this is an important lesson for most of us to remember. 

[therebetterbetea-blog]

Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions.

Kathryn Schulz, TED Talk, “On Being Wrong”

I found this TED Talk from an article that talked of how we like to hide behind “This is my opinion” to prevent facts from clouding issues. It also seems just as prevalent that we often masquerade our opinions as fact, which is just as harmful. 

[messenger4reality]

That human beings can be mistaken in anything they think or do is a proposition known as fallibilism. Stated abstractly like that, it is seldom contradicted. Yet few people have ever seriously believed it, either

[punch-me-in-the-inkstains]

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong (by TED)

"It does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right."

[liveandlovethequestions]

“Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life. And so I'm listening and I'm listening, and at some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong. And my first thought was, 'I've lost it. I've become the crazy wrongness lady. I just imagined it everywhere,' which has happened. But a couple of months later, I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass, who's the host of the show. And I mentioned this to him, and he was like, 'No actually, that's true. In fact,' he says, 'as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. And the crypto-theme is: "I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead." And the thing is,' says Ira Glass, 'we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work.' And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong.

But, you know, our stories are like this because our lives are like this. We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead.”

— Kathryn Schulz, On being wrong