I love TED Talks as a resource for encountering new ideas. Today I watched Kathryn Schulz’s insightful talk, “On being wrong.” Schulz is a journalist known for writing about wrongness.

Near the beginning, Schulz explains her purpose for the talk:

What I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside of this feeling of being right; and second, why it’s such a problem; and finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling; and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual, and creative leap you can make.

And here’s what I thought was a key insight from the presentation:

…trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous. This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, when we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well, that’s when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico or torpedoing the global economy.

Here’s the video:

AB — 5 Nov. 2011