Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [41]
This was a conversation to give the phrase “theoretical physics” a whole new meaning. My friends and I were the most outrageously unqualified group of string theorists ever assembled. In fact, we could far more aptly have been called shoestring theorists: virtuosos of developing elaborate hypotheses based on vanishingly small amounts of information. The Chicago Public Radio show This American Life once dedicated an entire episode to this kind of mild confabulation, in the course of which they did us all a favor by coining a vastly better term for it. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that they launched an imaginary magazine devoted to covering it—a magazine they called Modern Jackass.
Modern Jackass: once you learn the phrase, it’s easy to find yourself using it all the time, which says everything you need to know about the pervasiveness of mild confabulation. One of the producers of the show, Nancy Updike, joked that she herself is a frequent contributor to Modern Jackass: Medical Edition—you know, the one where you bullshit your way through an explanation of the merits of antioxidants or the evils of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. I introduced the Modern Jackass concept to my family and within a matter of hours they were turning around and congratulating me on my cover story for the magazine. (It was about the origins of ethnic tension in the former Yugoslavia, about which I know only slightly more than I do about string theory.) And I recently offered a friend a position as a staff writer, after he tried to explain the difference between alternating and direct current, and, immediately thereafter, why the Americans and the British drive on different sides of the road.
As ill-informed as these ad hoc, out-loud musings can be, such Modern Jackass moments can play a useful role in our lives. Assuming we have the internal flexibility (and the communal permission) to backtrack and revise, they can help us solve problems, arrive at answers, and figure out what we really believe. But, much like the pantyhose experiment, these intellectual improvisations can have a troublesome outcome. For us, as for those shoppers, something in the alchemy of the interaction often causes our half-baked hypotheses to congeal on the spot. Thus one extremely good way to become wedded to a theory you’ve just idly expressed is to have it contradicted by, say, your mother. I myself have gone from noncommittal to evangelical in a matter of milliseconds using this technique. Likewise, an acquaintance once confessed to me that when his spouse contradicts a theory he’s just hatched, he begins spontaneously generating “facts” to support it—even when he realizes that she is right and he is wrong. In cases like these, we actually do know the limits of our knowledge; we just can’t stop ourselves from barreling right past them. As with our individual and collective difficulty with saying “I was wrong,” we aren’t very good at saying, “I don’t know.”
This ineptitude creates all kinds of friction that should, in theory, be avoidable. Imagine how many unnecessary conflicts we’d all have to endure if we didn’t have the ability to say “excuse me” when we needed to get past someone in a crowded space, and “I’m sorry” when we accidentally bumped into them instead. These are simple tools, but it is precisely their simplicity that makes them so valuable, since it makes them easy to remember and deploy when we need them.
An equally convenient way to acknowledge our ignorance would improve our lives on three fronts. First, it would give us a relatively