“If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time,” writes Dale Carnegie in the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, “you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?”
We always feel so sure of our judgments and conclusions. From the health and safety of GMO foods, to the impacts of a new tax, to who is going to win the Super Bowl, we are often very confident people. The world seems to always want our opinions, and we are usually very excited to offer our opinion with a staggering amount of confidence. This has lead to a lot of funny social media posts about people being incorrect about history, science, and sports, but more seriously, it can create thinking errors that lead nations to invade countries for poor reasons, lead to mechanical failures of spacecraft and oil platforms, and can cause us to loose huge sums of money when the game doesn’t turn out the way we knew it would.
I think a good practice is to look for areas where we feel a high degree of confidence, and to then try to ascribe a confidence level to our thoughts. We can try to tie our confidence levels back to real world events to help us ground our predictions: The percent chance of getting blackjack in a given hand is 4.83%, Steph Curry’s 3-point shooting percentage is 43.5%, and the percent chance of getting heads in a coin flip is of course 50%. Can you anchor your confidence (or the chance you are wrong) to one of these percentages?
I haven’t studied this (so I could be wrong – I’d wager the chance I’m wrong and this is not helpful at Steph Curry’s 3-point percentage), but I would expect that doing this type of exercise would help us recognize how overconfident we often are. It might even help us get to the next step, admitting that we might be wrong and considering different possibilities. Carnegie continues:
“You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong. That will stop all argument and inspire your opponent to be just as fair and open and broad-minded as you are. It will make him want to admit that he, too, may be wrong.”
The important thing to remember is that the world is incredibly complex, and our minds are only so good at absorbing lots of new data and articulating a comprehensive understanding of the information we synthesize. We should be more willing to consider ways in which our beliefs may be inaccurate, and more willing to listen to reasonable people (especially those who have demonstrated expertise or effective thinking skills) when they suggest an idea that does not conform to our prior beliefs. Try not to be close-minded and overly confident in your own beliefs, and you will be better at avoiding thinking errors and making better long-term decisions.
Novel Learning 
One thought on “We Might Be Wrong”