Member-only story
30 Quotes That Proved The Road To Wisdom Is To Err and Err Again, But Less And Less
Every now and then I come across websites that get me sucked into a loop of visits. I don’t quite get enough of their content.
The most recent is Less Wrong, an online forum dedicated to deep intellectual exploration of diverse topics, to improve reasoning, and decision-making and, in their words, each day aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before.
The last sentence contains an idea that has been, for me, a game-changer.
Aiming to be less wrong each day is not the same as aiming to be right. Each requires different approaches to life. If you aim to be right, you’ll try to avoid mistakes by taking fewer actions. This only compounds possible mistakes. But when you aim to be less wrong, you tend to take more actions, knowing that mistakes of today are lessons for tomorrow, and that the more mistakes you make the less you’d have left.
Wisdom sounds like spotless brilliance. It’s typical to want to attain it by trying to be spotlessly brilliant. Yet, we’ve had brilliant minds teach us over time that that is the wrong way to go about wisdom. They tell us that rather than seek brilliance or a mistake-free life, we should embrace these things, as more of them eventually means less of them.