No matter how intelligent, rational, or knowledgeable you may be, you are going to be wrong pretty regularly. And you'll be wrong far more often than pretty regularly when dealing with complex topics like politics, people or philosophy. Even if you've freed yourself from thinking in terms of true and false dichotomies, and made the effort to convert your beliefs to probabilities or degrees of belief, you'll still be wrong by way of assigning high probabilities to false propositions.
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How Can We Learn From Our Mistakes?
Suppose that you'd like to make fewer mistakes. How do you go about actually learning from the ones you've already made, rather than repeating them?
The first step is to admit to yourself that you've made a mistake. Trivial errors, like accidentally putting the container of orange juice in the freezer, are easy enough to come to terms with. But for more serious matters, or matters that involve pride or shame, our minds often recoils at the pain caused by acknowledging we've screwed up. We mak...
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Finding Our False Beliefs
By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can't possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider the huge number of beliefs we have, the complexity of the world we live in, and the number of people who disagree with us. The trouble though is that we don't know which of our many beliefs are wrong. If we knew that, we should have stopped believing th...
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