Being Right is Stupid, and Boring
Some conversations just aren’t worth having.
You know those people who are already convinced of their own correctness?
For whom the whole point of a conversation is proving they’re right?
Consider the difference between CNBC and CNN, or Fox Business and Fox News.
When you see an interview on a business channel, chances are the interviewee has a substantial monetary bet placed behind every one of their declarative sentences. Skin in the game. And yet, most of the time the conversation will turn on risks and probabilities. They know that everything in the financial world is uncertain and unpredictable, and even a strong position may still need a hedge, just in case.
Switch over to current events, and unless the interviewee is an elected official, the only thing they’re risking is being called back for another five-minutes of punditry. Yet their statements will be full of is’s and should’s and ought-to’s. Black and white certainty about the world and how it should be run.
It’s boring, and no one learns anything.
A good conversation is a chance to learn from each other, to play with ideas, to explore the possible and impossible. It’s creative. It takes a bad idea and makes it better. It’s adventurous, exploring the unforeseen and unlikely. It’s collaborative. The words may be heated and sharp, but the cutting and burning are directed at the ideas at play, shaping and polishing them into something closer to true. It takes a wrong idea, as most are, and finds the truth in it, makes it closer to right. It’s a game with two winners.
A bad conversation is two or more people trying to prove they’re Right, that that came into the conversation Right, that they’ve always been Right, and that the other person is Wrong. They’re not just Wrong, there is no middle ground between them, no combination or compromise that is better than their original ideas. You really know a conversation has turned bad when it becomes personal, when it degenerates into labelling and name-calling. One or both accuse the other, more or less, of being stupid, ignorant, or willfully misleading.
Before we “solve the world’s problems,” might it be better if we sought to understand the world’s problems first?
Doing so requires humility. Willingness to understand others’ perspectives without dismissing them or calling them names. Willingness to let others be wrong without rubbing their face in it. Willingness to explain things to each other. Willingness to see the right in the each others’ view.
But most especially, it requires a willingness to admit that none of us have all the information or all the answers, that we’re all wrong. That we each, no matter how educated, smart, or informed, still have a vast lot to learn.
Me included.
But I think I’m right about this: It’s a lot more fun to play with and improve upon an idea you both know is wrong than it is to dig in one’s heels in defense of whatever half-baked idea you think is right, right now.
It’s a lot more fun to learn from each other than to fight over who is right. And you both end up smarter for the effort.
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
— William Shakespeare
