On Being Wrong in Public

There is a particular species of silence that descends on a room when someone in authority has just been shown to be wrong, and it is worth studying, because almost everything that follows is determined by what fills it. The person in question may laugh, in which case the silence dissolves and the meeting resumes with an obscure sense of having been improved. They may bluster, in which case the silence hardens into something that will be discussed, at length, in the corridor afterwards. Or — and this is the rarest outcome, though not the least instructive — they may simply say: "You're right. I hadn't seen that," and move on, at which point the room's estimate of them rises by an amount that no quantity of being correct could have produced. We are, as a culture, badly calibrated about error. We treat it as a stain rather than a signal, a thing to be minimised rather than metabolised, and we reserve our harshest judgements not for those who are wrong but for those who admit it. The result is a curious inversion: the people most visibly committed to accuracy — scientists, forecasters, the better sort of journalist — are precisely those whose revisions we count against them, while the confident and the unfalsifiable sail on, immune, because they have never said anything specific enough to be caught. Part of the difficulty is grammatical. "I was wrong" is a complete sentence, and a complete sentence invites a full stop, whereas what actually happened is almost always a process: a reasonable inference from incomplete evidence, later overtaken by better evidence, which is not a failure of character but the ordinary mechanism by which anyone learns anything. The sentence flattens the process into a verdict. It is hardly surprising that people resist pronouncing it. Another part is social, and older. To concede in public is to lower one's guard in front of witnesses, and there is a deep, pre-verbal part of us that experiences this as a threat regardless of how civil the setting. The corporate away-day and the Pleistocene watering hole are, in this narrow respect, the same place. And yet the calculus is not as unfavourable as instinct insists. Consider what the graceful concession actually communicates: that the speaker's attachment is to the truth rather than to their previous statement of it; that they can be argued with, and therefore trusted; that being corrected by them, when the roles are reversed, will not be an ordeal. These are not small things. They are, in fact, the entire basis on which useful collaboration rests, and a person known to possess them acquires a kind of credit that is spent slowly and replenished every time it is used. None of this is a plea for indiscriminate humility, which is merely arrogance wearing a cardigan. Some positions deserve defending, and the ability to tell which is a skill in its own right. It is a plea for proportion: for treating the discovery of one's own error as a minor administrative event rather than an existential one, and for noticing that the silence in the room, so alarming from the inside, is very often just a group of people waiting to see whether you are the sort of person they can work with.