Essay:On the importance of being wrong

All right and accurate ideas emerge from wrong ideas. This can seem counter-intuitive to people versed in logic: if you take a false assumption, you can arrive at false conclusions. But one of the most crucial kinds of proof, proof by contradiction, depends on this fact.

When your beliefs start to lead you astray, and applying your ideas starts getting you unusual or unexpected results, it becomes a clue that something in your stable of ideas needs to be rethought. In this way, and only this way, can you ever make progress.

Science and falsification

Have I just described falsification in a different framing here? Possibly. It is true that seeing a problem calls for you to reconsider, thus falsify one of your theories, but, this essay is about the importance of having the wrong beliefs in the first place. You can't muddle through the world treating every thought you've had that hasn't been empirically verified repeatedly as a hypothesis, that you can't truly accept. "I should stop at stop signs" isn't an idea that demands empirical testing. It comes from a rational place. It can't simply be dismissed as an untested hypothesis.

But once you're sure it's wrong, you're done with it, right?

Not at all. Take classical physics. When performing the dual slit experiment, scientists saw behaviors that simply couldn't be explained with Newton's laws. And they had to rethink the core assumptions of physics, eventually beginning to extrapolate the laws of quantum mechanics. But when Einstein started to develop special relativity, he wasn't answering questions on the leading edge of quantum mechanics. He took one of Newton's big assumptions and started questioning it: Why do you need an arbitrary "universal" frame of reference to describe the motion of the heavens? Poking and prodding at that question eventually led him to his famous elevator thought experiment that helped reveal the behavior of the high-energy universe.

So an idea, even if already proven wrong, can always be helpful for giving you assumptions to question. It can help by causing you to reexamine the assumptions you share with the idea.

Free speech

The most common framing people give for valuing free speech is one of empathy. "You'd hate if someone locked you up for what you believe, right?" these hypothetical common folk ask you. Well, sure. But I allege we all benefit from the crazies as much as we benefit from being able to express our own ideas. It's quite possible that the extreme positions taken by homophobes helps us shape a dialog that expresses the importance of sexuality acceptance to people who aren't extreme.

There's a fairly well documented history of creationists providing a few ideas for the improvement to evolutionary theory. Playing the devil's advocate is often considered a useful activity, simply because criticizing ideas helps flesh them out.

Religion or points refuted again and again

So, a lot of anti-theists get it into their head that religion needs to go. They do so on the basis that it takes ideas that are wrong, leads people to conclusions that are wrong, and creates an environment to repeats mistakes. The usual problems with this argument: things are attributed to religion that's just humans humaning, people are going to believe regardless, non-theistic philosophies have had their own problems, etc, are all quite serious.

But even if you ignore those arguments, I'd say seeing the errors is good for us as a species. I do wish people wouldn't make them quite so frequently, but we need to see how faith isn't a good answer to questions. Because that would be an easy trap to fall in for other considerations.

Conclusion

I don't encourage you to be wrong, but I encourage you to embrace your own and other's wrongness when it happens. To understand how it helps guide you.