The pleasure of being wrong

One of the ways I define a conversation I want to be in is that there’s a possibility I will discover I am wrong about something.

For me, there’s often a rush of excitement when I think “oh, my mind is changing about this!” And “oh wow, I had such a superficial understanding of this!” Sometimes it happens just from reading or listening to an audiobook, but conversations are where discoveries feel the most thrilling.

Allowing for this possibility is not a feature of many social platforms, in my experience.

There are two reasons that stand out : one, that most things tend to stick around, so there is a social cost to saying something and then discovering you’re wrong, to the degree that I see many people entrenched in a position that doesn’t make sense, or being afraid to say anything that isn’t benign or, maybe even more often, a sort-of self-congratulatory bid for attention.

Second, nearly all social technology is either broadcast-oriented, meaning everything you say is on some kind of stage, even in a small Slack or Discord. Or it’s very private, in ‘messaging’ that is at least intended not to be shared even though someone is storing it on a server somewhere indefinitely.

In person, conversations can happen more freely- like where you’re talking to someone or a few people and there might be people who can hear but aren’t participating, or people who might come over to the conversation, hear a part of it, and decide to join in. There aren’t invisible people listening, but the conversations aren’t exactly private either.

You can have conversations on Zoom, but it’s pretty hard to do without a fair amount of management and mediation. VR-ish spacial chat apps try to mimic some of these ‘stumbling in’ aspects of physical space. So far, my experience is that they require a lot of fiddly stuff tying you to a larger screen, but I’m sure they will improve.

At any rate, I’m curious how to design systems that support a discovery process, not just of entering into conversations but also in allowing the possibility of a hypothesis or assumption being questioned. I’m thinking about what might lead to more curiosity and willingness to experiment. To encourage the kind of joy that comes from a mutual exchange of perspectives, where everyone has progressed with their thinking in the end, even if no one agrees fully. This is essentially what creative collaboration is, right?

Even better if there’s a way to act on the progress, if there’s a collective process. I’m not an idealist. Instead, when we look at amazing eras of progress, there are a lot of people exchanging ideas from different perspectives and seeing different angles or nuances that they missed on their own.

To address the problems we want to tackle (or at least, some of them), we need the space and grace to be wrong.