You are wrong, but it’s okay

Ranjan Yumnam
Mistakes mark our lives. We consult astrologers, invest in Nigerian Scams, cast votes for losers and fall for gold diggers. But it’s not that bad. We are faulty by default, and our blunders transform us and even make civilisation possible.
People are the end results of mistakes, trials, and tribulations in many ways. Natural Selection does its magic through errors in DNA replication. Evolution progresses by blundering and capitalising on those freaks that turned out well accidentally. We are defective in many ways; we are the offspring of the Mother Mistake called Evolution.
How we think, see, and interpret objects and ideas is bound by the limitations of biology, environment, and society. Truth is hard to find, and some truths may be unreachable in this lifetime. What we know for sure is that being right makes us happy. On the other hand, being pointed out that we are wrong is like dying a little. We experience shame, guilt, anger, sadness, worthlessness, etc., in our mental court; our self-identity feels attacked.  
Let’s celebrate our humanity, though. We are the only animals who can feel and sometimes be lucky to know what is right and wrong. Other animals, like the kangaroo, cannot comprehend what music is. They are unaware of Taylor Swift, although both hail from the same country. Meanwhile, the chicken sticks its neck out from the cage, not knowing it is so tempting for us to catch its neck and knife it at a perfect angle. The dogs don’t see colours as we see them. Maybe their sense of colour is more realistic, and ours is just an illusion. Our red may be their stool colour, for God knows what. They don’t repent or apologise because they do everything that instincts tell them. Once upon a time, I was bitten by a dog during my school days. I am pretty sure that the dog didn't know I was a nice boy, and I meant no harm to her. Such distinction doesn’t matter to bitches; thieves and jolly boys are in the same category of humanity. They keep barking to their bliss because of their ignorance of what makes the right or wrong targets. So, she bit me without remorse. It was an absolutely righteous act for the dog. For me, it was a mistake to learn from. Never get near dogs, especially when they are lactating. My bad.  
Dogs are dogs. Even machines can’t make unprovoked mistakes. They disintegrate, become rusted, and run out of battery, but they would never make mistakes on their own. They malfunction because of natural causes, human design errors, or bad algorithms. The LPG goes empty when the guests arrive at your house for a party. The electricity disappoints, and the bulbs go dark as if they have a mind of their own and are trying to embarrass you. Don’t blame these non-conscious utilities; it’s science making sure that LPG gets depleted after heating countless sausages for breakfast. The same goes for electricity, which has to be shut down due to incoming storms. Don’t blame inanimate objects. Curse your luck.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Since only human beings make mistakes, which are inevitable unless you want to become a machine or a dog, so wisdom lies in learning from errors made by others, making some of them yourself and being more open-minded about them. A helpful mind trick is called Via Negativa. It is an idea from theology and philosophy which suggests that we understand things better by knowing what they are not. We don’t know what God is. But we are certain that iPhones are not God. So subtract iPhones from the definition of God and so on for other propositions as well. That is,  we can improve our knowledge by subtracting and ruling out bogus claims to the truth. Subtract your bad habits, eliminate your phones, simplify, be a minimalist, and get rid of red meat. Instead of doing more, do the minus arithmetic. Thomas Alva Edison is a poster boy of this mindset. He had to botch numerous experiments before he could make the bulb come to light.  Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
UNIFORMITY IS IMPOSSIBLE
Sloppiness is a democratic trait of human beings. We are not perfect. At least not all of us can be excellent. The Bell Curve illustrates the distribution of traits and abilities in a population. It is statistically impossible for everyone to be above average. If everybody is above average, where will all the dimwits go in the graph ? Your suspicion that your child is lovelier, smarter and more good-looking is natural but not an objective judgment. For example, the distribution of IQ in the population is primarily average, and only a few are at the top or at the bottom. So, calibrate your self-awareness along the Bell Curve. If you are a mother, don't take sides in the fight between your kid and other children if you don't want to be called a fanatic.
A closely related phenomenon is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It describes most of us. We overestimate our ability to perform a given task. If you ask any driver, she will think she possesses above-average skills in manoeuvring a car. That’s why every driver blames the other in an accident scene. As Charles Darwin observed, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.” Centuries earlier, Plato said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
WORDS MAKE WARS
How do you express whether you know something ? By words, of course, mostly. But words are notorious for igniting debates rather than resolving differences of opinion. Words carry multiple shades, nuances, etymology and cultural hangovers. They are rough representations of actual objects and ideas. This inherent imprecision means that misunderstandings and miscommu- nications are almost guaranteed when you use too many words or fewer. The word ‘hot’ in “she is hot” is open to so many interpretations that some could go to prison. Ludwig Wittgen-stein aptly noted, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Therefore, objective reality exists independently of our minds. Our minds colour them and make them dance to our subjective perceptions. This gap between objective truth and subjective experience is fertile ground for slippery conclusions. This is where people suffering from depression have an advantage in understanding the reality for what it is, which is mostly gloomy. Researchers call this phenomenon Depressive Realism. While being right makes us happy, this bias towards positivity can sometimes cloud our judgment. At the extreme, people’s fortunes are lost at casinos where optimism rides roughshod over the better sense of caution and self-restraint.
Also, don’t rely on your memory and attention span. If you happen to read till this point or while scanning through this article, your eyes stumble upon this; remember, your attention is a limited resource, and your memory will desert you in no time. To boost efficiency, our brain is economical with its memory and attention. We can hold only seven items in our working memory at one time, and our attention contracts when focused on a specific task. In a famous study, participants failed to notice a gorilla in a video when they were told to count the number of ball passes between the players near the gorilla. Another observer could see the giant gorilla in the video when not given any specific instruction. In short, don’t trust your eyes. Mirages and optical illusions fool our senses and occur for real. What you see may not be the reality all the time.
Nevertheless, we activate our flight or fight mode while encountering any false alarms. We run away from the ‘snake’, but later, it turns out to be a coil of rope.  (Inset picture: See the optical illusion created by Edward Howard Adelson, an American neuroscientist. The squares marked A and B have the same shade of grey. This, like naturally occurring optical illusions, proves how deceptive our eyes are and not to be trusted at face value).
MAKING UP IS OUR SECOND NATURE
Confabulation, or the creation of false memories, shows how our mind fills in gaps with convincing but incorrect information. This is linked to various cognitive biases, such as hindsight bias (believing we predicted an event after it has happened) and the fundamental attribution error (attributing others’ actions to their character rather than situational factors). Because we love theories for everything, our biases determine what we construct of them. We hate uncertainty. We jump to conclusions using insufficient data, context and insight. This is the bane of inductive thinking in which we invent a grand explanation for the million little things happening in our lives. Our intuitions are good slaves but bad masters of inductive judgments. They are responsible for gutsy decisions and scanning the world later for evidence.
Explaining by stating that my grandfather smoked all the time but lived to 102, so smoking is good for longevity and doesn't cause cancer is a flight of imagination. We are experts at using a piece of anecdote instead of a statistical fact and deriving a theory. These biases shape our understanding of the world and contribute to our errors. As Daniel Kahneman stated, “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
However, not all errors are weighed equally. Some mistakes will be catastrophic, and some will be inconsequential and forgettable. It will be a significant mistake if the doctor cuts you up on the wrong foot and you want to run to a human rights court. It will be a world extinction scale danger if the nuclear button is pressed with your clumsy butt by mistake. So, there are different safety protocols for these specialised areas.
Generally, committing wrong actions and holding expedient beliefs in our mundane lives are not catastrophic. Civilisations advance on the ruins of their mistakes, dangerous chances, missed opportunities and failures. Screw-ups in routine and mechanical jobs are best avoided; they should be delegated to robots. But there is another category of errors in which we need to be prolific. The knowledge-pushing enterprises of space travel, medical science, climate change, green energy, a better economy for an equitable society, AI research, etc., will need more experiments and mistakes to clarify, fine-tune, and improve upon earlier models to advance forward. These mistakes differ from the garden variety ones we make in our routine activities. Mistakes can be avoided in process and rule-based works that are ossified in their predictability. Like flushing the toilet properly and leaving the lid closed.
On the lighter side, if you look at the structure of comedy, mistakes and irony are at its heart.  Laughter is the recognition of errors and absurdities in human behaviour. In this context, laughter is a coping mechanism that helps us deal with our imperfections. Mark Twain once said, “The secret source of humour is not joy but sorrow; there is no humour in Heaven.” It's the joker, not the severe saint, who can speak to the power in their own house, enjoying their tea and snacks.
CIVILISATION’S BEST FRIEND
Mistakes are the partners of the innovators, and they are matching accomplices in achieving game-changing milestones. Mistakes challenge our assumptions, prompt us to seek better solutions, and foster resilience. They let us adjust our thought settings and recalibrate and adapt to the environment. You must dip your foot and get wet to catch fish from the muddy water. Mistakes are the wetness of our intellectual hunt. In a democratic society, many ideas and beliefs compete for popular sanction and become political policies. All ideas should be tolerated; by the same token, feel free to express your thoughts. By tempering our harsh commentary for unfamiliar ideas of others, we can encourage the silent lambs to speak up and the jokers to spring their pranks with occasional truth. The tragedy in this society is that people use labels to trash others by dubbing them ignorant because they disagree with us. Then, if they don’t convert to our point of view, they are anointed idiots. They are a clear case of evil if they don’t budge even after heated arguments.
These are value-laden judgments. You could be someone’s idiot. I may be your evil. She could be ignorant. The point is we could all be wrong but never realise we are wrong owing to our cognitive biases, situations, beliefs and cultural experiences. It’s worth reflecting even a broken clock is right twice a day. So, make mistakes, let others make mistakes, and find out who gets mistaken. This is the only we can get to the closest truth.