(2025-08-20) Hall Rightness Is A Prison

Cate Hall: Rightness is a prison. *We just wrapped up our first quarterly reviews for Astera’s spring residency cohort, and one of my favorite things to come out of it was this statement by resident Edwin Kite: “Based on past completed projects of comparable ambition, it is near certain that our initial scientific assumptions are wrong.”

This is the reality of science. It’s also the reality of life more generally.*

Given that perpetual wrongness is the natural condition of human beings, it’s funny that we try so hard to avoid acknowledging that we’re wrong, either to others or to ourselves.

Trying to avoid being wrong would look completely different. It would look like cultivating the mental habits Philip Tetlock identified in Superforecasting as central to great forecasters’ ability to predict the future with far greater accuracy than normal folk. People who are good at forecasting update their views frequently, actively seek disconfirming evidence, and try to take the outside view. They try to break their big beliefs down into more granular ones, to expose more surface area to contact with the real world. (For real-life examples of these habits in action, see Matt Yglesias, Scott Alexander, Alexey Guzey, GiveWell, and, just yesterday, Kelsey Piper.)

None of these things are very hard to do; they’re certainly within the capacity of most medium-smart people. So what stops most of us from seeing the world more clearly? Mere speculation on my part, but I think most of this is downstream of one core superpower of superforecasters: They’re not strongly psychologically committed to being right about any particular fact or in any particular instance.
This is one of life’s delicious ironies: The way to be right more often is to care less about being wrong.

When you learn to admit that you’re wrong, you also learn to course-correct much faster.

For most of my life, until well into my 30s, I was totally under the thrall of seeming-rightness. I put an astonishing amount of energy into keeping up a pretense, internally and externally, that I was always right. I can’t for the life of me remember why I felt this way — probably because I didn’t have reasons for it, per se — but I remember feeling existentially threatened by the possibility that I might be wrong or just not know something. I got so good at coming up with plausible arguments for my beliefs that I often didn’t even realize I was full of shit.

I fell in with some rationalists and got convinced that I should be more dedicated to following and acknowledging the truth, and upon doing it came to realize that the pain that threatened to overwhelm me was just an illusion, a trick of the ego.

What actually hurt was the feeling of resistance to being wrong, the cognitive dissonance between who I was at my outermost and innermost layers — a feeling that would build and build for as long as the dissonance was maintained.

The judo of agreeing

We tend to feel vulnerable when we admit that we’re wrong — we feel weak and undefended, and we assume that others will see us this way too. But, in fact, admitting fault typically has the exact opposite effect. Acknowledging that you’re wrong displays a willingness to be vulnerable that we intuitively understand only the confident can afford.

My husband (Sasha Chapin) calls this the “judo of agreeing.” Just like a skilled judo player uses an opponent’s momentum to throw them, a well-timed admission of fallibility shows a disarming level of self-confidence that, paradoxically, throws off those who are tempted to attack us.

It’s okay to start small

You might want to get some practice with admitting wrongness before plunging into it in high-stakes situations. A great way is to start practicing with family and friends.

Beginning with small things is fine. You can admit that you were wrong about which New York pizza is the best

If the admission is uncomfortable, even a tiny bit, you’re making progress.

But you do want this process of training to lead before long to making larger admissions, to yourself or others.

The irony is that we have a tendency to put the least effort into questioning our most consequential beliefs — like what our priorities are — even though, logically, we should spend the most time trying to disconfirm them.

Once you get used to loosening your grip, the same beliefs can transform into lenses you can slip on and off, experimenting with how the world looks in each tint (model agnosticism). You can try on these rose-colored glasses, then these darkly tinted ones, noticing how each alters your perception, without mistaking any single view for the whole of reality. What began as constraint becomes play, and that play is the beginning of real freedom.