I went through this phase, learning how to be wrong. It was rough, and surprising, and ego deflating. It made me question nearly everything. It forced me to uncouple my identity, my own sense of worth and intelligence from my knowledge, which was the hardest for me. My sense of self was rooted in my intellect, and the polar opposite was being wrong. It was tough and grueling and humiliating, but I did it. It still doesn’t feel good, but like exercise it gets easier. You look at something and do the heavy lifting and accept that part of being right is accepting being wrong about basically everything else, and that that is okay. Learning can only happen from being wrong, and that truth, such that it exists, is an eternal horizon, and we can only strive for a sense of accuracy or intimacy with this infinity that reduces inefficiencies and compliments our human existence. For me the path to this was through identification. Clarifying was best – definitions of terms, reduction of concepts to core meanings, naming each component and mapping the meanings to concrete non self-referential definitions. Above all I held in mind the philosophy of the scientific method: Define, Predict, Gather Data, Analyze, Conclude.
As Westworld put it:
“Mistakes is the word you’re too embarrassed to use. You ought not to be. You’re a product of a trillion of them. Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool… The mistake.”
The way I see it we blunder gloriously, we pursue every path, we optimize for efficiency, we build algorithms with our organic supercomputers that rival the pinnacles of modern technology, and form connections between the most ephemeral. But the only way we can do this is by keeping our eyes open, by staying aware of our failings and sharing them. We do the hard work, we explore the paths that don’t work, and by marking them we make the world better for everyone. We should not be shamed by this, we should be proud of saving others the wasted effort, the only thing more precious than gold and that which we may never get back: lost time. By pooling our losses, we really are combining our strengths. This is the only way we can explore the universe, to grow, change, and learn how to succeed. Life isn’t a race, or a zero sum game, every one of us has the potential to make the world better for everyone else, both right now and endlessly onward, whether we are cosmic dust fueling the chemistry of some far flung civilization or tomorrow’s achievements lighting the way from some dreamer, some poet, some scientist, to do what we though unbelievable, incredible, improbable, because we eliminated the impossible.
We walked on the moon, and gazed upon the birth of the universe. There is so much more to discover, to explore, to create, and we should not forsake our greatest tool, the one that forged us from stardust, the mistake.