and Commerce It was on a surprising topic: on being wrong. The speaker
was espousing a positivity to wrongness, or at least the admission of
error. She spoke of accepting error, of being less afraid of it and
being accepting of the errors and mistakes in life. She's written a book
that goes deep into the complexities of wrongness in our lives.
The theoretical and abstract value of being wrong and accepting error is
very different to the practical because we live in a blame culture and
some mistakes can have catastrophic consequences for the individual and
the community/society. Addressing the blame culture is important and an
important way to reduce the error rate.
The author spoke of the aeronautical industry which has achieved
exceptionally high rates of error free or, more importantly perhaps,
error-resistant systems.
One way it was achieved through engineering innovation was redundancy:
from the co-pilot to the electronic systems, lots of backups mean that a
single failure doesn't make the system fail and the plane drop out of
the air. Another important change was introduced: doing seek to assign
blame for mistakes. It was noted by a senior executive that if he heard
"who did it?" after a mistake happened he knew there was something
wrong. It was the wrong response to seek to assign blame. What could be
done was the important concern. This shift away from blame culture meant
people would be more willing to come forward with their mistakes. They
would be more willing to say "I was wrong." This meant that more errors
could be identified before they became significant and more wrongness
could be addressed. This is how aviation has such low failure rates.
But error, problems, mistakes, fuck ups and all the rest still happen.
There is a necessary acceptance of this.
Acceptance of a definition of wrong was proposed as a view different to
the masses or the largest group/social tribe. It was Heidegger's
definition of right and wrong and I don't agree. It's a useful one to
see the relationship between genius and changemakers and being wrong.
Those who make change often need to be wrong, to be confident in theory
delusion of 'wrongness' (whatever their idea is that is different from
the consensus) in the face of a social construct of rightness (the
consensus idea).
Geniuses also needed to be comfortable exploring the world of wrongness
and doubt.
Though the author of the book didn't use this pedagogy I think it's a
useful one. There are the things that people can be confident in knowing
and have satisfaction about. There are the things that people don't
know, and those who have the humility to accept it are some of the
smartest people. Then there's the things that people don't know they
don't know about yet. This concept is hard for me to think of an example
but it's the awareness of just how limited our knowledge of what is
known at not known is. People underestimate just how much they don't
know. This uncertainty can be too much for many people but geniuses need
to be comfortable the doubt and uncertainty of exploring the area that
people didn't realise existed. From Einstein to Pollock, people who
explored the fringes needed the same mental traits as explorers going to
uncharted lands.
The speaker didn't go into the Dunning-Kruger effect where people who
perform in the highest quartile assess their performance lower than
those in the lowest quartile. Awareness of wrongness seems to correlate
with higher performance in the tests used. I've written a couple of
other blog posts on it.
http://imaginendless.blogspot.com/2010/08/explaining-to-people-theyre-crap-may.html
and
http://imaginendless.blogspot.com/2010/08/dunningkruger-effect-and-something.html
The most interesting part for me was the idea of the joy of wrongness.
This is a thought that's very different to modern ideas of happiness and
what a person should find satisfaction in. The speaker gave an example
of a surprise birthday party which is a tangible one but doesn't really
make the point too well. It's a different sort of wrongness, one which
has positive real world outcomes. It's the idea of joy in wrongness that
has poor outcomes in the real world, in valuing mistakes that cause
negative impact. It's very counter to our culture. It almost sounds like
a sort of evil in a way, to find please in mistakes that have negative
results. It's okay to be happy with mistakes that caused positive
results as long as the positivity can be justified or rationalised well
enough. Otherwise I think people would consider it pathological in some
way. Science and culture value people who take value and satisfaction
and joy in being right because it promotes advancement.
It promotes the most rapid advancement of society in scientific terms.
The RSA hope for a new Enlightenment coming, another great leap for
humanity. The last one involved the value of reason. It was during this
period that religion lost its power and science rose. It was also during
this period that psychiatry was invented as a term and a medical
science. It was during this period that The Great Confinement happened
and the mad were hospitalised in the massive asylum system. Many
establishments were old leper houses and the mad took the role of the
new lepers in society. It was a dark time but a better solution than the
mad ships where the severely mentally ill were cast out to sea in the
hope that, at best, they might reach the next town whereupon they'd once
again be cast out to sea.
Wrongness is the antithesis of reason as is delusion and irrationality.
The same sword that cut down religion also cut down those with learning
disabilities and severe mental illnesses from the mainstream of society
because they were essentially wrong in the philosophy of the time. This
philosophy still holds true today. However it is in art and in genius
where the qualities of severe mental illness, of delusion and
irrationality, of thinking differently and exploring the unexplored, of
unconventionalness and eccentricity, become recognised as essential to
the progress and value that reason provides. Logic is simply not enough.
There are very human qualities, qualities inextricably intertwined with
social constructs of wrongness (and madness) that are essential to
society and the advancement of civilisation. It is not just the
diagnosis of madness but the qualities of madness that are
ill-recognised just as the value of wrongness is ill-recognised.
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