Dear Readers,
Recently I’ve spilled a lot of ink talking about how other scholars have been wrong about various things. But, hey, I’m wrong sometimes too. And so are you.
We’re all wrong about something all the time. The world is an infinitely complex place. Things move quickly, and we are all fundamentally wired to be deeply influenced by our present context and our past experience. Some of us are more wrong than others of course. But the more we recognize that we’re all wrong about something all the time, the more likely we are to be less wrong than we might otherwise be.
I may of course be wrong about that. It’s just really hard to tell. We’ll eventually look back from the future and render a judgment on our current moment. But then the future of that future might reject the first future’s judgment of this present, leading to the conclusion that we were right in this moment, about this moment, all along!
What?
Here’s another way of putting it: People tend to be irrationally confident i…
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