Why I Love Being Wrong | Mackinzie Loughlin | TEDxHayesStreet

[Music] [Applause] when i tell myself that i love being wrong that is admittedly a kind of coping mechanism that i use to help me deal with the reality that i'm wrong a lot and i'm wrong a lot for a lot of various reasons but i have one particular life strategy that i think causes me to be wrong more often than usual you see the way that i approach problem solving is with a kind of rapid fire technique which allows me to iterate through possible solutions very quickly and rule them off as they don't work in my profession i often get to help people problem solve technical issues what happens a lot of times is that someone approaches me with a problem they've exhausted the solutions that they're willing to attempt and they're hoping that i can provide them with the correct solution in truth many times i do not know the correct solution any more than they do however i jump in i begin trying solutions i cross them off as they don't work and i move on and i like to tell the people that i'm helping that i don't necessarily know the right answer but we can find everything that doesn't work together and then maybe we'll both know the right answer for next time i basically get to be professionally wrong telling myself that i love being wrong may or may not truly reflect how i feel on the matter but it helps me to create a mental framework that allows me to routinely be wrong without getting my feelings hurt basically i know that being wrong is part of the process of growth and i think to myself if i'm not making mistakes and i'm not crossing off incorrect ideas then i'm not trying enough new things so this is where i get the idea that i love being wrong in my mind being wrong means that i have a new piece of information the incorrect answer and that i'm making progress toward more complete and accurate knowledge so i'd like to note at this point that i'm not some sort of problem-solving superstar and in fact i'm done talking about myself what i'd like to do is explore this mental framework of putting a value on being wrong in the hopes that maybe someone else will find it useful so here it goes i think that many people have a tendency to view being right and being wrong as a zero-sum game and that that tendency is a detriment to the problem-solving process in a zero-sum game one person's gain is exactly equal to another person's loss if i bet you one dollar that circumstance a will result in outcome x and the actual outcome proves to be y then i will lose one dollar and you will gain one dollar no new wealth or utility has been created or lost the total net of the transaction is zero in terms of being right or wrong a zero-sum situation might look like this let's say i believe it is going to rain tomorrow and you believe that it is not when tomorrow comes if it does not rain then i am wrong and you are right in the grand ether of being right and wrong i lose one point and you gain one point the fact of raining or not raining does not have an inherent value it is not positive or negative maybe we were going golfing maybe our crops needed water the outcome does not have an intrinsic value i was simply wrong and you were simply right and i think that many people tend to view every opportunity that they have to be right or wrong as this zero-sum scenario but let's say instead that i believe it is going to rain tomorrow and you believe that it is not but this time we're basing our beliefs off of some piece of evidence that we both have access to we believe it is or isn't going to rain tomorrow based on the observation of a change in barometric pressure when tomorrow comes regardless of who is right and who is wrong we both gain knowledge on the implications of the evidence we observed maybe one of us loses a point and one of us gains a point but new wealth or utility is created by understanding the outcome of our predictions thus we have a net positive non-zero sum in the 19th century there was a physician and scientist who proposed that doctors not washing their hands prior to performing medical procedures was leading to the deaths of patients specifically mothers giving birth this physician observed that in a clinic wherein midwives performed births there was a much lower rate of maternal mortality than a clinic operated only by physicians and medical students he eventually concluded that this must be because the physicians and medical students often handled cadavers for autopsy purposes prior to performing the births while the midwives did not he believed that something about touching the dead bodies and then performing these medical procedures must have been causing the mortalities but this man was ridiculed and his ideas about hand washing were not widely adopted until after his death this man's name was ignas semmelweis and today we have what we call the semmlewise reflex which roughly states that we tend to reject ideas that contradict established beliefs ignaz may have only had anecdotal evidence to support his claim but he had an idea so what kept his idea from being more readily explored well for the sake of this discussion could it be that the scientific community who opposed symowise's idea viewed this opportunity to be right or wrong as a zero-sum game in their mind did they stand only to lose a point for semmelweis's gaining of a point well if so then the scientific community who opposed summerwise's idea failed to see the potential for a net positive non-zero sum outcome of them being wrong think of this let's say there are three stages to being wrong the first is where you are wrong but you believe you are right nature knows you're wrong maybe some others believe you are wrong but you believe you are right you believe that two plus two equals three the third stage is where you know you were wrong nature knows everybody knows now and you have concluded through experimentation that you were in fact wrong you have added two beans to a bin of two beans and found that the new total quantity of beans is four well then the second stage is where the danger lies the second stage is where you are wrong you still believe you are right and you are acting on your wrong idea you are accounting for transactions under the assumption that two plus two equals three the second stage is where you can make mistakes with grand repercussions and the second stage is where you stay so long as you believe you are playing a zero-sum game and you don't want to lose the scientific community who opposed some wise were stuck in the second stage of being wrong they were wrong but they believed they were right and they were acting on their wrong idea they didn't want to be wrong but the fact of the matter is that if they had moved on to this third stage of being wrong lives would have been saved the best part about the third stage of being wrong is that that's when you have the opportunity to be right you get to move on from the wrong idea that you had and maybe you get to be right from now on the net positive non-zero sum nature of this transaction means that even though you were wrong you now have a new piece of information the incorrect answer and you're making progress towards more complete and accurate knowledge we don't always have to be strictly wrong in order to fall victim to this mentality we as humans struggle with a cognitive bias where we like our own ideas when somebody presents a new idea that challenges or contradicts something that we work to create sometimes we don't want that idea to work simply because it means that this person has an opportunity to be right about something and that means that we're wrong right by denying the possibility that our idea or method should give way to something new we think we're winning a zero-sum game but the reality is is that we're forcing everybody else to lose a non-zero sum game we're actually creating a net negative non-zero sum you see the other person loses a point because we say they're wrong but we don't really gain a point because nothing's really changing plus we're denying the new wealth or utility that could have been created by a new understanding players only lost if we can systematically recognize our mistakes setbacks and wrong ideas to be natural and meaningful occurrences along a path toward greater understanding then maybe we can react to these episodes better emotionally and mentally and we can not only handle them emotionally and mentally better but perhaps we can react with greater self-awareness in the moment we can identify that second stage of being wrong and we can recognize the potential for a net positive non-zero sum we can be wrong and we can lose a point knowing that new wealth or utility will be created by the new understanding maybe we won't love being wrong but if we can start to see being wrong as something other than losing maybe everyone can start to win a little bit more thank you [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 7,490

Rating: 4.9534883 out of 5

Keywords: English, Life, Life Development, Life Hack, TEDxTalks

Id: Ff9_uJBp2DI

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021