How to be correct AND compassionate

I’m going to give you access to two superpowers. I know—that’s a big claim. But I’m not offering secrets, alchemy, or snake oil. I’ve got just one very practical, somewhat boring tip, which will unlock one or both superpowers. The first superpower will appeal to your inner Machiavelli, while the second will appeal to your more tenderhearted nature.

We all have—to varying degrees—a thirst for power. To that end, what kind of a tool would you have at your disposal if you were correct significantly more often than you are right now? How much more effective would your actions be if they were more frequently based on accurate knowledge of the world around you? Less Machiavellian, how much good could you do if you had a more accurate knowledge of the world?

The first superpower—to be correct more often—requires, quite paradoxically, to be wrong more often. More precisely, it requires recognizing when we’re wrong more often.

So here’s my one, somewhat boring tip, as promised: We have to rethink conclusions that we’ve already reached. Even knowledge we’ve been sure of our entire lives may require updates. This is a tough concept to prove. It’s especially difficult because in the matters that we hold most closely to our identities, the ability to measure our correctness with concrete data is complicated in some instances and impossible in others. So, what can we measure?

Let’s look at superforecasters, who take messy, complicated inputs leading up to large-scale real-world events and predict—with uncanny accuracy I might add—the outcomes of those events. We’re able to measure the effectiveness of their ways of thinking because we can compare their predictions to the actual outcomes.

A 2021 open forecasting tournament was set up to do exactly that. In this event, participants made tens of thousands of forecasts about the outcomes of things like elections, sporting events, and so on. Want to know the difference between those who killed it and those who were mediocre or poor? Run-of-the-mill forecasters updated their forecasts twice for each event; superforecasters made more than four updates. If you’re interested in knowing more, you can read on in Adam Grant’s Think Again (Amazon Associates affiliate link). If you’re not interested, no worries—you’ve already got as much as you need to get my point.

Just a couple more rethinks led to superior results for these superforecasters. Why did they make updates? They received new information. New polling data, new understanding of the ins and outs of events they were predicting—a new something to give them an inkling that maybe they’d been wrong so far.

We too are receiving new information constantly, and just as with the superforecasters, we’ll benefit from doing more rethinking than those around us. By acknowledging our wrongness more, we’ll actually be right more. And there you have it—Superpower #1, the power of correctness.

Even if the new information we’ve considered doesn’t merit a wholesale change of mind, it could introduce a little bit of uncertainty about our own opinions. This little bit of uncertainty goes hand in hand with understanding why people who think differently from ourselves think the way they do. This is the essence of Superpower #2—the power to understand and empathize with people who hold different opinions. Think that sounds like a lame superpower? Think again.

In a world as divided as today’s, we’ll need heroes and heroines like you with precisely that soft yet potent superpower. After all, who else will get people of different religions, political allegiances, cultures, and languages talking to each other rather than shouting at each other? Who else will treat people who are different as human beings with something to offer the world rather than as rivals to be defeated? Who else will be able to positively interact with perspectives not their own?

So please join me in rethinking something you already know all about. You may find the way you interact with the world changes for the better. Given how incredibly powerful each of us is (as we can learn from the observer effect), you may even find the world itself changing for the better.

I’m interested to hear…what are you rethinking?

-Parmenides