Being Wrong Sucks

What is it like to be wrong? 

Kathryn Schulz gave a famous TED Talk in which she points out that, for the most part, being wrong feels like being right. After all, people who are wrong feel like they are right. Even when our beliefs are false, they feel right to us. On the other hand, I was dead wrong about big things when I was a young man, and in retrospect I can see how being wrong shaped how I talked about the things that I was wrong about. Being wrong led me to approach my views narrowly and shallowly. 

Simple formulas

When I was a self-styled mystic, if someone questioned my spiritual beliefs, I could say that we were each on our own spiritual journey, so I wouldn’t expect them to agree with me. When I thought that no gender differences were inborn, if my brother reported that his infant son was notably more “boy-like” than his older sisters had been, I could explain any reported differences as caused by subconscious messaging and confirmation bias. When I thought nonhuman animals had no conscious inner experience, I could ascribe all the observed behavior in nonhuman animals to automatic reactions regulated by neural activity. These are all either-or propositions. “No spiritual journey is better than any other.” “No newborn is psychologically more boy-like or girl-like than any other.” “No nonhuman animal is more conscious or emotional than another.” Simple formulations like these defy investigation and are therefore good ways to prevent false ideas from being revealed as false.

Creationists love simple takes on science, such as the idea that evolution contradicts the law of entropy. Atheists who deny the historical Jesus like to say that Jesus is simply like Zeus or Spider-Man, when obviously he’s a lot more like John the Baptist. Critical theorists* say everything is about power. 

Incuriosity

Even though, as a young man, I understood evolution, I still accepting the teaching that boys and girls are born with essentially identical psychological and behavioral predispositions. I never showed any interest in speculating about how the sex-differentiated instincts of our ancestors might have “evolved away”. I never tried looking up scientists who would have contradicted what was in my fraudulent textbook, which featured the infamous case of David Reimer. As a spiritual seeker, I never worked too hard at figuring out the truth. Star Wars had taught me to just “trust”, with no training or discipline needed. I read spiritual books, but as a hobbyist, not as a devotee. If nonhuman animals were unconscious because language created inner experience, then why wasn’t I curious about what happened with Helen Keller? Did she suddenly becoming self-aware when she learned sign language? Why wasn’t I curious about how language and self-awareness develop in children?

Creationists are not curious about which animals group together to form “kinds”. They don’t pursue archeological investigations to figure out which ruins are from before the Flood and which after. Atheists who say Jesus never existed are not curious about how Christianity started. Critical theorists don’t try measuring the relative power of groups over time, or comparing relative levels from one place to another. You’ll never see a graph of how the white-black power gap has risen or declined over the 20th century. 

Rigidity

When I thought that the government should provide everyone with a guaranteed income of $30K a year, I dismissed skepticism as backward and had no way to question whether my dollar figure was right. It was based on intuition, so there was no way to consider whether $20K or $40K might make more sense. (That $30K from 1987 would be over $60K in today’s dollars.) When I heard a case study of workers appreciating an incentive system that paid them more to work faster, I compartmentalized it so that it would not alter my impression that the getting workers to work faster was exploitation. 

Christians are obliged to talk about the Trinity in certain ways and must not talk about it in certain other ways. The three Persons must be distinct but coequal, and the metaphor of one God with three “masks” is forbidden. That’s true even though “person” originally meant “mask”, prosōpon in Greek. Jesus-denialists will talk about whether there’s proof Jesus existed but but don’t like talking about the most likely account of how early Christianity could have developed the weird way that it did. 

Anger and contempt

The flip side of these defenses was contempt toward people who disagreed with me and anger toward them if they had actual evidence that I couldn’t dismiss. The contempt was for people who were unenlightened, and the anger was for people who threatened my ideas. 

Go online and watch people disagree over politics, culture, or religion, and you know what you’ll find: contempt and anger. 

“What if I’m wrong?”

Twenty or thirty years after the fact, it’s easy to see how wrong I was. Partly that’s because it’s not painful to admit that one was wrong decades ago the way it is painful to admit that one was wrong earlier today. How likely is it that people can self-reflect and see the signs of error in their own current behavior? In my personal experience, it takes a lot of work to get there.

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* “Critical theorists”: Critical theory is the ’30s–era political philosophy that describes oppression as power struggles between groups, driven by ideology. It is marked by the Marxist and Freudian theories of human nature that were popular at the time, and it’s become so common in social justice circles that most of the people who promote it just take it for granted. Most proponents seem not to know that their ideology has a name or even that it’s an ideology. If folks don’t like the term “critical theory” for this school of thought, I’m happy to call it whatever they like if that let’s us avoid debating semantics.