Tag: error

How to Admit You’re Wrong

~ cafebedouin

Related to yesterday’s post, where the ideas are of a piece:

“Kathryn Schulz loosely defines being wrong “as a deviation from external reality, or an internal upheaval in what we believe” — with the caveat that wrongness is too vast to fit neatly into either category….

…“We’re highly motivated to reduce that uncertainty,” Fetterman says. “Oftentimes, the most common way that people get rid of it is by rejecting the new information or creating a new cognition that basically gets rid of it. Not too often do we actually change our thoughts or behaviors in order to align with the new information.” This can look like only taking in information that confirms already held beliefs, justifying the belief, or denying anything that contradicts their beliefs. “The motivation to reduce that dissonance leads us to even double down or to come back even stronger with our beliefs,” Fetterman says…

…“Over time, fact after fact after fact will start to erode people’s beliefs away.”

To come to these realizations, Brown says we have to be open to the fact that we’re capable of making errors and setting our ego aside to accept we live in a world where we’ve faltered or have changed our minds in some way. In fact, Fetterman says, just accepting our own mistakes can allow us to be more open to being wrong.

It’s natural to get defensive or provide excuses for why you were wrong, but “these strategies for deflecting responsibility for our errors stand in the way of a better, more productive relationship to wrongness,” Schulz writes. To admit erroneousness without excuse — to simply state, “I was wrong” — is a skill, Brown says. “It probably is going to come out more as an explanation of why they were doing what they were doing,” Brown says. But with time and practice, we can come to recognize our mistakes without explaining them. The key is to consistently own up to our mistakes as soon as we realize we’re wrong.”

–Allie Volpe, “How to admit you’re wrong.” vox.com. July 13, 2022.

In the context of “the free energy principle”, you can eliminate “surprise” by not acknowledging it. But, the irony is that you set yourself up to be “surprised” time and time again until you recognize the surprise. Being wrong works they same way and is related. Acknowledging where we are wrong and where our worldview is off and leads to surprise helps us to correct our mental model of the world into a better form. But, if we are deceiving ourselves in the interest of protecting our ego, we set ourselves up for more surprise and more wrongness.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

~ cafebedouin

“For an effect of human psychology to be real, it cannot be rigorously replicated using random noise. If the human brain was predisposed to choose heads when a coin is flipped, you could compare this to random predictions (heads or tails) made by a computer and see the bias. A human would call more heads than the computer would because the computer is making random bets whereas the human is biased toward heads. With the Dunning-Kruger effect, this is not the case. Random data actually mimics the effect really well…

…Measuring someone’s perception of anything, including their own skills, is fraught with difficulties. How well I think I did on my test today could change if the whole thing was done tomorrow, when my mood might differ and my self-confidence may waver. This measurement of self-assessment is thus, to a degree, unreliable. This unreliability–sometimes massive, sometimes not–means that any true psychological effect that does exist will be measured as smaller in the context of an experiment. This is called attenuation due to unreliability. ‘Scores of books, articles, and chapters highlight the problem with measurement error and attenuated effects,’ Patrick McKnight wrote to me. In his simulation with random measurements, the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect actually becomes more visible as the measurement error increases. ‘We have no instance in the history of scientific discovery,’ he continued, ‘where a finding improves by increasing measurement error. None.'”

—Jonathan Jarry, “The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real.” McGill: Office for Science and Society. December 17, 2020.

Shut Out or Shut In

~ cafebedouin

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”

—C.G. Jung

People like to tell the same stories, over and over again. The truth of those stories is changed, imperceptibly, in each telling. Our identities are a lacquer, painted on by the stories we tell ourselves and others.

Identity accrual and world building are our principal occupations. I’m this and that, signaling to society my tribe and allegiances. One thing that seems less common is people capable of admitting that they were wrong or made a mistake. It’s partly because doing so means we are open to change. Or, our connections with the rest of the world are open to reconfiguration. And people really don’t want that from themselves, or from others.

People want consistency. They want to be right. It’s difficult to be these things in a world that is always changing and where we make decisions with imperfect information.

Easier to misremember that we were right all the time, adding on another layer of our identity. Brittle, but bright.

Swallowing the Elephant (Part 1)

~ cafebedouin

“Years ago while interning in the rendering group at Pixar, I learned an important lesson: “interesting” things almost always come to light when a software system is given input with significantly different characteristics than it’s seen before. Even for well-written and mature software systems, new types of input almost always expose heretofore unknown shortcomings in the existing implementation.”

—Matt Pharr. Swallowing the Elephant (Part 1) pharr.org. July 8, 2018.

Probably true of any system.

Mistakes are Opportunities

~ cafebedouin

“Making what anyone would reasonably call a mistake in the middle of one of Davis’ solos—hitting a noticeably wrong chord—Hancock reacted as most of us would, with dismay. ‘Miles paused for a second,’ he says, ‘and then he played some notes that made my chord right… Miles was able to turn something that was wrong into something that was right…’

‘…What I realize now is that Miles didn’t hear it as a mistake. He heard it as something that happened. As an event. And so that was part of the reality of what was happening at that moment. And he dealt with it…. Since he didn’t hear it as a mistake, he thought it was his responsibility to find something that fit.’

Hancock drew a musical lesson from the moment, yes, and he also drew a larger life lesson about growth, which requires, he says, ‘a mind that’s open enough… to be able to experience situations as they are and turn them into medicine… take whatever situation you have and make something constructive happen with it.’”

—Josh Jones. “Herbie Hancock Explains the Big Lesson He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mistake in Music, as in Life, Is an Opportunity.” Openculture.com. April 5, 2018.