On being right…

Ask yourself, "Why do I need to be right?"

Would you rather be right or be happy?

Your need to correct others can leave them feeling hurt or frustrated. In the long-term, people may think that it’s draining to be around you and prefer to keep their distance. As a result, your relationships suffer, and you may end up lonely.

Is it more important to connect with people or have them think that you’re intelligent?

What is right for yourself is not necessarily right for others.

Your desire to "inform" people of their ignorance comes from a place of insecurity and that doesn't need to be acted on.

We always have a choice in life…to be ‘right’ or be kind.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

Being right is NOT essential to self-worth.

Tips to mitigate being a know-it-all:

Avoid Interrupting.

Give others the chance to express themselves.

Wait before responding to other people.

You may find if you wait before responding and practice active listening, your urge to jump in and correct them goes away.

Question your intentions when correcting others.

Are you being insecure, trying to maintain an image of a knowledgeable person?

Let others be wrong.

Know that others may not care or not be as interested in the subject as you.

Don't invest excessive emotional energy into correcting others' beliefs if it's not essential.

Be open to the idea that you are wrong.

Sometimes you can be right and wrong at the same time.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run.

Win through your actions, not your words.

“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure about anything. And there are many things I don't know anything about. It doesn't frighten me!”

~ Feynman

"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one."

~ Voltaire

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

~ Epictetus

Rejecting the idea that you know anything for sure is a wonderful basis for continued learning.

You must loosen the grip of what you already know in order to find some new or changed relationship.

“There’s no rush. Go on being right just as long as you can. You’ll see that being right is actually a tight little box that is very constraining and not much fun to live in. Righteousness cuts you off from the flow of things.”

~ Ram Dass

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."

~ Nietzsche

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”

~ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The truth is no one knows everything. In fact, the less we know, the more we think we know, but the more we know about a topic, the less confident we feel in that area. This is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

People of lesser intelligence tend to overestimate how smart they are and people who are highly intelligent tend to underestimate how smart they are.

It is good to remember that that the intelligent people are often full of doubts while the stupid ones are overconfident.

Be OK with being wrong.

It’s liberating when you relinquish the need to be right all the time. The ability to wheel back on your positions, to take in new information, to see a different point of view, be curious about alternatives, to say “I was wrong” or “I’ve changed my mind” is to erode those hard binaries, the Us vs Them that so many of us have found ourselves stuck in over the last few years.

When you put down your weapons, relax and have nothing to prove, then you can work towards a consensus on the big issues. How can there be real change in society when people don’t listen to each other or have an empathetic approach to other positions?

We have to be prepared that there may simply be no “right” answer — just a choice to be made between two terrible options or between countless shades of gray.

Perhaps trying to be less wrong is a more apt description than being right.

It’s OK not to know something.

If you don’t know or don’t want to address an awkward or controversial  subject say something like;

“Well the experts seem to disagree about it and I'm currently agnostic on that question.”

or

“I don't know and anything else i say on this topic is ignorant speculation.”

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

We don’t gather the maximum possible evidence in order to reach a conclusion; we reach the maximum possible conclusion based on the barest minimum of evidence.

We don’t assess evidence neutrally; we assess it in light of whatever theories we’ve already formed on the basis of whatever other, earlier evidence we have encountered.”

The great Karl Popper often started with an unerring representation of the opponent’s positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceeding to systematically dismantle them.

“Most importantly, ‘good’ disagreements are never based on a misunderstanding.

On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely.

You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning.

And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

Is something that helps you learn a good thing or a bad thing? Mistakes have value. They provide a learning opportunity.

How do you know whether or not I’m completely full of shit?

There is a test.

Before you can be reasonably convinced that you are right about a particular idea, you should be sure that you understand the objections and positions of your most articulate antagonists.

You cannot claim to have a stance on a subject until you are able to argue both sides.

You should find out whether your views are supported by sound knowledge of opposing ideas or by your misconceptions of opposing ideas.

You make this distinction by seeing whether or not you can state the objections and positions of your opponents to their satisfaction.

“You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.”

~ Milton Friedman

Even if you can successfully do this, you cannot be absolutely certain of being right about your own ideas, but the probability of being right is considerably higher if you pass this test.

“Do not try to seem wise to others. If you want to live a wise life, live it on your own terms and in your own eyes.”

~ Epictetus

Being wrong is NOT a bad thing.

For example, if you win in a debate, you’ve gained nothing. It’s not a win at all. It’s much better to have been proven wrong, or to have been made to shift your own view, even a little, than to supposedly win in a debate.

As you attempt to articulate the ideas of your antagonists, be prepared to change your mind, to discover evidence contrary to your ideas – evidence that may alter your views.

Intellectual growth often occurs this way.

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

~ Charles Darwin

Some people aren’t as interested in learning new things or are only interested in specific topics

Many of the same questions have different answers for different people.

To be clear, I am not looking for answers, don’t want or need answers, in fact I submit that we can’t have all the answers anyway which is not only OK, it’s liberating.

Somewhat paradoxically, not needing or finding answers doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn. In fact the more I learn the more I realize how much that I don’t know and can never know. This is not frustrating, it’s amazing.

Be wary of the Dunning-Kruger Effect when study a new field!

It’s not that we can’t handle the truth as Jack Nicholson might say. 

It’s simply that I don’t believe we have the cognitive capability to comprehend certain complex concepts and the words we use to define them are limiting by their very nature.

The unstated truth is that the ‘Ultimate Reality‘ is just not capable of being understood at our level of awareness. A more precise metaphor for our perception of the Great Mystery might be ants trying to comprehend a computer chip – no matter what subjective ant theory is offered no description can be correct, because ants aren’t equipped with a consciousness capable of understanding computer chips.

There are much deeper ways to understand ourselves than by reading and talking such as meditation, communion with nature, art, music, psychedelics, sensory deprivation etc.

Our brain isn’t even capable of asking some questions.

Afterall if you can’t conceive of something you can’t imagine it.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

It takes time and patience for me to realize this simple truth but it is well worth it.

Whether one admits it to themselves or not, truth is a relative concept.

It's possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That's not weakness, that's life.

~ Captain Jean-Luc Picard