Admitting a Mistake vs. Updating

“ADMITTING A MISTAKE” VS. “UPDATING”

A friend of mine named Andrew was surprised when one of his colleagues accused him of never admitting he was wrong. In response, Andrew pointed out two recent occasions on which he had been wrong and readily acknowledged it—in the company of that very same colleague.

The colleague, whom I’ll call Mark, was surprised in turn. He replied, “I guess that’s right. Why did I have the opposite impression?” Mark was silent for a minute, reflecting. Then he said, “You know . . . I think it’s because you never seem embarrassed about it. You’re so matter-of-fact, it almost doesn’t register to me that you’re admitting you were wrong.”

It’s true. I’ve seen Andrew acknowledge he was wrong many times, and it usually sounds something like this: “Ah, yup, you’re correct. Scratch what I said earlier, I don’t believe it anymore.” It’s cheerful, straightforward, nonchalant.

Mark’s implicit assumption was that changing your mind is humbling. That saying “I was wrong” is equivalent to saying “I screwed up”—something you confess with contrition or sheepishness. Indeed, that’s the standard way of thinking about being wrong. Even my fellow cheerleaders for changing one’s mind tend to say things like, “It’s okay to admit you were wrong!” While I appreciate the intentions behind this advice, I’m not sure it makes things much better. The word admit makes it sound like you screwed up but that you deserve to be forgiven because you’re only human. It doesn’t question the premise that being wrong means you screwed up.

Scouts reject that premise. You’ve learned new information and come to a new conclusion, but that doesn’t mean you were wrong to believe differently in the past. The only reason to be contrite is if you were negligent in some way. Did you get something wrong because you followed a process you should have known was bad? Were you willfully blind or stubborn or careless?

Sometimes the answer to these questions is yes. I once defended a public figure when I thought his critics were taking his words out of context to make him look bad. When I finally got around to watching the interview people were complaining about, I realized: “Oh, wait . . . His critics represented his words accurately after all.” I had to walk back my defense, and I felt a little sheepish because I do in fact know better than to defend someone without checking first. I was just being sloppy.

But most of the time, being wrong doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It’s not something you need to apologize for, and the appropriate attitude to have about it is neither defensive nor humbly self-flagellating, but matter-of-fact.

Even the language scouts use to describe being wrong reflects this attitude. Instead of “admitting a mistake,” scouts will sometimes talk about “updating.” That’s a reference to Bayesian updating, a technical term from probability theory for the correct way to revise a probability after learning new information. The way people use the word updating colloquially isn’t nearly so precise, but it still gestures at the spirit of revising one’s beliefs in response to new evidence and arguments. Here are some examples from bloggers of what this sounds like (emphasis mine):

• In a post titled “Preschool: I Was Wrong,” psychiatrist Scott Alexander says he’s become more bullish about the long-term benefits of preschool programs such as Head Start after reading the evidence: “I can’t remember ever making a post about how Head Start was useless, but I definitely thought that, and to learn otherwise is a big update for me.”
• Researcher Buck Shlegeris describes an experience of receiving some harsh criticism, and says, “I updated initially quite far in the direction of their criticism, only to update 70% of the way back towards my initial views after I spent ten more hours thinking and talking to people about it.”
• Software engineer and product manager Devon Zuegel encourages readers to view her blog posts not as her permanent opinions, but instead as “a stream of thoughts, caught in the middle of updates.”

You don’t necessarily need to speak this way. But if you at least start to think in terms of “updating” instead of “admitting you were wrong,” you may find that it takes a lot of friction out of the process. An update is routine. Low-key. It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin. An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.

Emmett Shear, a cofounder of the live-streaming platform Twitch, described this shift in his own thinking. He used to struggle a lot with acknowledging he was wrong; it felt like a painful blow to his ego. Over time, he’s gotten a lot better at it, not by becoming meek and humble, but by realizing that being wrong isn’t inherently a failure. “As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten easier to be wrong,” he told me. “Not even to be wrong. It’s just an update: I learned this new thing . . . what’s the issue?”