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How often do you admit you were wrong? (startrek.website)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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As the title says, how often do you admit you're wrong? Is it different when it's a factual dispute versus something more subjective?

I make an effort to concede early if I'm in error. I think because my mother almost never admits fault. She'll fall back to "that's not what I meant" or similar deflections first, and that's really annoying.

The last big factual error I made was about the distance of walking, and that's where I learned about Taxicab Geometry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry ).

I think some people believe admitting fault is a sign of weakness, but I find it's more of a power move. It takes strength to do it, and people can tell when you're sweating and desperate. Usually it leads to resolving the conflict faster and cheaper, too.

(I expect some people will feel the urge to reply they're never wrong. I'll file that under never admits fault.)

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[–] 1 point 3 months ago

I'm a slow learner, and I have come to compensate for this by gradually building out this tree of knowledge I can hang new little bits on. When I encounter a contradiction to something I had placed on the tree, I must redo the branches in the area. They need to be self-consistent or I am going to have a bad day.

So when I am challenged, I do probe a bit and ask the other party to prove or justify their stance. It's not motivated by any sort of pride in my own opinions, but rather the work it would take to sort things out again in my head. I don't want to do so unless I am clearly in the wrong.

But if I am proved wrong, I will certainly accept it. It can lead to new insights as I rework the tree.

It may even be that the slow-learning is actually due to this system I've developed? Like every piece of knowledge has to be processed into the context of my current understanding of things, and that takes time and effort.

I think this is perhaps the problem with AI? It makes all these little connections between things, but it doesn't have a big picture, which makes it frequently contradict itself. I couldn't live like that.

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