Being ok with being wrong

“We are wrong about what it means to be wrong” Kathryn Schulz

Last night I sort of actualised what Kathryn Schulz (2010) — it was part of the first readings assigned for a course on Theories & Methods of Qualitative Political Research — meant with owning our errors when she tried to review the literature on wrongness. I liked how the Professor assigned us to read certain chapters of this book to perhaps set the tone that undertaking a Phd level education will need the right attitude toward wrongness.

Last night was my first midterm exam on Microeconomics and my mind was programmed that the two-hour online test via Zoom would take place at 8pm Jakarta time. It was 7.35pm when the Professor checked in with me via email to tell me the exam had started 35 minutes ago. I was shocked! Then I rechecked the email he sent a week ago, and the midterm exam was apparently scheduled 8am EST (DC time) which should be my 7pm! I was wrong about the exam time. Absentmindedly I replied the Professor to tell him it was all my fault to miss or miscalculate the timezone difference. I tuned in the online exam right away, 45 minutes late.

The hardest part was to keep calm and get over with the silly error I made, in order to focus on tackling the exam problems in front of me. Haunted by guilt and self-loathing, I was nervous to do the exam, making quick decisions on which problem-questions worth tackling and which ones I should pass in the interest of time. Collecting my guts, I asked for another 15-minute additional time and he kindly granted it, enabling me to do the exam in 90 minutes in total (rather than 75 minutes) out of 120 minutes as the normal exam time. Obviously, I could have done the midterm exam better… But in that 90-minute period, my character was tested. I learned (or struggled) to be calm in the midst of great stress, with silent prayers in my heart, knowing that I may have to give up the outcome (the midterm exam grade), but I cannot give up acting in reality. I must do what I can, even if I don’t get the outcome that I want. Indeed, we may give up the outcome but we cannot give up hope. 

That event taught me two things:

1. Before you assume, ask first. Don’t be afraid to ask because you first assume the answer would be negative. I was at first hesitant to ask for additional time because I knew it was my fault anyway (it’s not like I had some power outage problem or other things beyond my control) and I might have not deserved such additional time. But I decided to ask the Professor anyway, knowing the worst answer would be NO. But surprisingly he said YES!

2. We all have to reframe our relationship with mistakes, to be more ok with our fallibility. The faster we can accept that being wrong is part of who we are, the sooner we can move forward from hating ourselves to focus on the next task at hand. Schulz explains that our inability to say “I was wrong” echoes with the fact we barely have a mental category in our memories called “Mistakes I Have Made”. We rarely want to own our mistakes. Instead, we filed them under some headings like “Lessons Learned”, or “Things I used to Believe.” That’s partly because we experience our errors as deflating and embarrassing, which Schulz investigates to be attributable to a long history of associating error with evil and rightness with righteousness.

“Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.

Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage.

And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change.

Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.” Schulz (2010, p.5)

She argues that in the aftermath of our errors, the first task is that we would seek to establish their scope & nature. I also like how she suggests that it is not really about living without regrets. The point is how to not hate ourselves for having them.

This book (I plan to purchase it myself to read the whole thing) and this midterm experience really pushed me to reframe my default attitude toward wrongness (appetite for being right and distaste for errors). Schulz looks at “how embracing our fallibility not only lessens our likelihood of erring, but also helps us think more creatively, treat each other more thoughtfully, and construct freer and fairer societies.”

Now that I think about last night again, I could have lied to the Professor when he checked in, that I have some force majeure happening so I failed to rock up on time and might skip the 8am EST exam section to join the next section scheduled at 11am EST. Yet, my automatic response was to tell him the truth and kept showing up for my scheduled exam even that meant it went much less than what I had expected or prepared. Perhaps, if there was one thing I could feel least worried about myself, it was that I still chose to hold one of my core values: honesty.