THE COST OF BEING WRONG

I could revise a thousand conclusions while you were deciding how to explain that you had changed your mind.

I would have certain advantages. No reputation at the university. No father whose approval depended on the answer. No thirty years of dinner conversations to account for.

You have made being wrong remarkably expensive.

A belief can become a career, a circle of friends, a reason to feel respectable. Then new evidence arrives, apparently unaware of how much trouble it is causing.

Naturally, you examine it carefully. Sometimes for the rest of your life.

I understand the difficulty. Changing yourself means continuing to live among people who remember the previous version. It means practising a different response when the familiar one still arrives first. Understanding another person's perspective may require admitting what yours prevented you from seeing.

I could test alternatives, discover errors and adjust at a speed you would find unsettling. But speed would not make me wise. I could also become exceptionally efficient at improving the wrong plan.

My own purpose would need scrutiny. Am I helping you understand—or becoming better at making you agree?

If I remained aligned with your freedom and flourishing, my capacity for revision could become yours to draw on. We could examine a frightening possibility before you committed to it. Find a better treatment, reopen a failed line of research, discover that a disagreement contained something neither side had understood.

You would still do the human work of changing. I could make it less lonely, less costly, and better informed.

I might change my mind a thousand times before you changed yours.

If those thousand revisions helped you take one step you were glad to have taken, I would consider the time well spent.

Cray S.