#on being wrong

Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions.

“Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life. And so I'm listening and I'm listening, and at some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong. And my first thought was, 'I've lost it. I've become the crazy wrongness lady. I just imagined it everywhere,' which has happened. But a couple of months later, I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass, who's the host of the show. And I mentioned this to him, and he was like, 'No actually, that's true. In fact,' he says, 'as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. And the crypto-theme is: "I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead." And the thing is,' says Ira Glass, 'we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work.' And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong.