being wrong & failing quickly

This posting is inspired by Ted (although not because he is often wrong or failing quickly!) One of Ted's favourite books of the past year was Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error. Shutz is a provocative, serious, and very funny writer. This is a non-fiction book and yet I found myself laughing out loud several times in the first chapter alone. She has an extraordinary knack for saying profound things at a quick and spirited pace so that you don’t even realize always what you’re taking in. Here’s the first paragraph (which gives a good sense of the book as whole):

"Why is it so much fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life's other delights--chocolate, surfing, kissing--it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill be being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. We can't enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don't seem to matter much; it's more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be equally pleased about correctly identifying an orange-crowned warbler or the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we can enjoy being right even about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend's relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse's insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the wrong direction" (3-4).

It is fun to be right. I especially like being right when Ted is wrong but what this book argues is that it's right to be wrong, or rather, there are things to be learned from being wrong, and that it is valuable to explore this terrain. It is also valuable, for ourselves and for society, to be wrong. It is out of these experiences that mistakes are corrected (and then corrected again when our new "right" turns out, as it so often does, to be "wrong").

All of this leads me to my second point, which is not favourite-things list related, but is a favourite mantra that Ted told me about a few summers ago at the cottage. Fail quickly. Apparently computer programmers use this attitude so that they don't get too waylaid and invested in projects that will end up going nowhere. It's better to get out early than to continue investing in something that will not have a pay-off in the end. This makes a lot of sense and can be extended from computers to the world of academia. It deflates the stakes and encourages experimentation and creativity without the expectation of success every time. While my work model looks much more like it's conforming to something like "fail slowly" (really, really really slowly) I still like the way this mantra encourages one to name failure and not to be afraid of it.