(no subject)

[randomness]

Earlier this month one of my friends referenced, in a locked post, Kathryn Schultz's Being Wrong. Schultz talks about how people imperfectly remember their own mistakes, and their faulty memories of this make them believe they were right all along.

Then my friend asked us all whether we could remember situations when we'd been wrong. Being deep in the financial news that day, I replied with some pretty clear investment errors where I'd entirely missed a couple of equity booms because I'd believed they were irrational. I'd missed the ensuing bust, too, but that simply made it a wash--nothing to be particularly proud of there. It was when I learned the truth of Keynes' comment on market irrationality.

Thinking about it later, I realized that I had much better, and probably more interesting--at least to the intended audience--examples of my own error, but that my focus on finance at that moment kept them from occurring to me at the time. Errors which could be quantified in dollars and cents seemed more compelling.

I was entirely wrong, coming out of college, about some pretty fundamental things about life: How money and careers worked. My ideas about gender and dating. Conventional wisdom about current affairs.

These were mostly unexceptionally popular ideas, and the ones I assumed were true turned out largely to be wrong. I ended up making some big mistakes. It took decades to unlearn them, but at least the unlearning of them made me realize how wrong I could be. I could be deeply wrong about things I cared a great deal about, and that I simply took as axiomatically correct.

Learning that was helpful. I think it may have made me a more cautious investor but much more open to the possibilities of life in general. That was probably a good trade.

Comments

[merlinofchaos]

That's crazy. I've been wrong about big stuff nearly as often as I've been right, except for job stuff where I've got a pretty good track record. I actually thought it was normal for most people to be wrong all the time and figure that out the hard way. That's what I always called "growing up"?. Maybe I'm wrong about that?

Relationships? I was wrong about pretty much all of them up until my current one. I'd never been able to be particularly rational within the confines of a relationship and looking back I nearly always did or said the wrong thing.

High school? One incredibly long "I'm smarter than you so I don't have to do any of this and I'm entitled HAHAHA" streak that I'm happy to say I at least learned I was wrong without actually dying.

I've been wrong so much about stuff I was sure about that I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to break down why I did the stuff I did to see if I was being rational or not, and even then most of the time I can only do that well when there's some significant distance.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Truthfully, I haven't read the book itself, only some reviews, so I'm definitely getting the explanation second-hand. But there are studies which show that people's memories of their own mistakes are unreliable.

Besides, don't we both know people who consistently rewrite history and are convinced they don't?

[merlinofchaos]

Very true. I do know some people who consistently rewrite history so they can have been right.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I've watched people in the process of doing this sort of thing. It's simultaneously fascinating and frightening.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

In my experience, a lot of people resist the 'figuring out' part. I commend you that you aren't. (Really, no sarcasm.)

This is a really interesting post, r_ness. Now I'm contemplating both my own mistakes and times I indeed caught myself rewriting history (one reason I keep a diary -- to catch that kind of self-deception).

[colinmac.livejournal.com]

She did a talk at the RSA (http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/kathryn-schulz). As I recall, the focus is on recognizing the psychological and social pitfalls that get in the way of making good decisions. The idea is to get away from ownership of decisions; take the ego, blame, guilt, and recrimination out of it. Create an environment where people are comfortable admitting when they're wrong.

It's interesting that we don't even have a word in English for "a decision that was the best possible at the time given the information available, but which did not lead to the desired outcome due to factors unknown or unknowable, or chance." Actually, I used to work with a bunch of military people who were really good at all this. They would say, "Yeah, that was the plan, but it's OBE now," - Overcome By Events. The situation, or our understanding of it, had changed, and we needed to re-evaluate our course of action. It was a very functional and low-stress way of looking at the world.