To err is human, and our understandings evolve over time. The benefits of being wrong start to accrue the moment we recognize our mistake and update our model.
Here, we lean on the ideas discussed earlier in Facts, Truth, and Beyond.
Being wrong is common
Everyone’s wrong about lots of stuff, and errors of omission are unavoidable within the limited time of a human lifespan. Everything we think we know is either incorrect or incomplete. Our finite human minds do their best, and the most we can hope for is to evolve from fact to truth (but there is a shortcut).
Here’s an academic article for everyone willing to read one along with a much easier visualization of it.
Generally speaking, common sense is common. It’s what most people know about their world, and it’s all one needs to live the average life. However, there’s a growing segment of society that overthinks basic reality. The basics drive 99% of what we see in the real world. Intermediate ideas drive the next 0.9%, while advanced topics drive the final 0.1%. Academics and recent college graduates forget the first 99% and pretend the advanced 1% is driving the whole effect. This putting of the cart before the horse usually doesn’t age very well, and experts who journey even slightly outside their specialty often get more stuff wrong than laypeople.
Ignoring inconsistencies
Believe it or not, science is notorious for ignoring facts that disagree with the currently accepted model. It’s not just individual egos, but the emergent behavior of entire scientific fields regularly ignore contradicting facts.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
A fantastic book, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, details the evolution of scientific advancement. It lays out the phases of science advancement on a per-model basis.
After the adoption of a new model, the scientific process involves validating the new model experimentally. Concurrently, the new model predicts certain unobserved phenomena which can also be verified experimentally. Both of these efforts provide confirmation that the newly adopted model is correct.
The successful new model persists long enough and provides enough insight that more accurate instrumentation is created. Over time, the better instrumentation discovers a few “facts” that contradict the model, but they’re generally swept under the rug. These disregarded facts pile up over time.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
George Box
Eventually, younger researchers take notice and find a new model that fits all the observed facts. The establishment continues clinging to the old model since entire careers and institutions are invested in the existing “standard model”. Often, the established institutions panic cling to their accepted models. It’s not very scientific really, and thankfully it doesn’t last forever.
Revolution happens, and eventually, the model that best fits the facts achieves widespread adoption by the scientific community. The process repeats.
Our Fourth Turning
Another book, The Fourth Turning, which has gained a bit of fame in the last couple of decades describes the social change that kind of mirrors scientific revolutions. Every four generations (80-90 years), populations lose confidence in their government institutions and rebuild them. In North America, the 2020s are the latest occurrence, but the last few have been WW2 in the 1940s, the American Civil War in the 1860s, and the American Revolutionary War (which was more of a civil war than its name implies) in the 1770s.
Presently, a couple of large government institutions dole out almost all the research money driving various fields of scientific and medical research. Unfortunately, this funding goes almost exclusively to researchers who work within the currently accepted models. Inconsistencies are piling up but generally not dealt with. We have a bit of a “scientific dark age” going on to the point where inconvenient facts are actually censored by scientific journal editors or by social networks if they gain too many views.
It seems to us that this Fourth Turning is set up to coincide with one or more scientific revolutions. We sense a powder keg of wonderful things as potential rapid advancement has never been closer!
Being open to being wrong
Everything so far is included to remove any stigma of being wrong. There’s no shame in being or discovering you’re wrong. In fact, we argue there are tremendous benefits to being wrong, but only when you realize it and update your thinking.
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Mark Twain
The moment you realize you’re wrong, you’ve made a tremendous leap forward. Feel free to congratulate yourself; you’ve just evolved! Every expansion is celebrated by your inner being. Nobody should cling to their mistakes or be embarrassed to be wrong. The whole point of this physical life experience is to grow all that is and know thyself.
“No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back”
Turkish Proverb
An indication of alignment
Imagine you’ve gone through your entire life so far utilizing an incorrect model. Somehow, on this particular day, you find out that the model is wrong. What changed? The truth has been staring you in the face this whole time, but only today did you notice something new. Why now?
Your vibration changed. You reached for the other end of the stick. You allowed a greater truth, and it flowed right into your experience. For whatever reason, on this particular subject, you began playing a new game.
The reality you experience is a reflection of your current level of acceptance. The moment your acceptance expands so too does your reality. You can think of all your previous evidence and observations as manifestations and premanifestations. There’s no reason to wait for this to happen haphazardly! Everyone is welcome to broaden their acceptance and raise their vibration. Here’s an easy method to get started.
Challenge your assumptions
When inputs stop making sense, it’s a good time to reexamine your assumptions.
“Are you still beating your wife?”
Sometimes, questions have a misunderstanding baked into them. When starting from a false premise, everything downstream is suspect. These types of misunderstandings are particularly hard to catch in real-time, and it results in a mismatch between the asker and answerer.
Begin with concrete definitions. Be specific about terms and assumptions. Most misunderstandings and disagreements, we observe, occur when people are using the same words but in different ways.
From being wrong to having a bigger world
Imagine you’re touring Paris but accidentally packed your map of Madrid. The street names are all Greek to you, but with enough rotating and squinting, you seem to manage your way forward. With each additional fact, however, you have to work harder to cram them all into your understanding of where you are on the model, err, map. You spend a lot of time walking according to your map, but it doesn’t seem to lead you anywhere terribly helpful much of the time. Your model is broken, and the sooner you open up to the possibility that your truth is incomplete, the sooner you can have a better vacation.
We are interchanging the words map, model, and truth on purpose. People are living very different truths according to their models of reality. Interpreting more and more facts against an incorrect model is putting the cart before the horse. It may seem to kind of “work” for a little while, but it’s suboptimal for sure.
We had been assuming the model (map of Paris) accurately represents reality (the city), but that turned out to be an incorrect assumption. The moment you question your model (or your other assumptions), you open yourself up to the possibility that it’s wrong. From there, the answer often flows quickly. A relevant map of Paris is available everywhere and only costs a few Euros, but first, you need to recognize one is needed.
We say often that we enjoy being wrong. When we discover the mistake, our world gets bigger and more exciting.
