I know two ways to be wrong very well, but people have more ways to be wrong, and I donât know the rest very well at all. But Iâd like to.
The first way to be wrong - and the most wrong someone can be - is to make a contradiction. People do this when they get their sums wrong, miscounting how much money to give to a shopkeeper; or when they make contradictory statements, claiming that a politician they dislike has no right to do something, then claiming that everyone has a right to do the thing the next day, because their own political partyâs members did the thing.
People who study types of wrong call this first type âanalytically wrongâ.
The second way to be wrong is saying something is the case when it isnât. People do this kind of wrong all day, and we judge the wrong by degrees (when youâre only a bit wrong), or justification (when you had good reason to think something, overlooking a subtle detail) or intentions (because saying âyouâll be fineâ is fine, but saying âI think we ate the last cake alreadyâ with the intention of checking the fridge later, alone, isnât).
People who study types of wrong call this second type âsynthetically wrongâ, and focus on how universities and corporations can avoid being wrong, but almost never discuss the messy little allowances and unstated rules of being wrong-about-facts.
People have many more ways to be wrong.
This VPN uses military-grade encryption!
People say this about VPNs, which gives uninformed listeners the impression that:
- encryption comes in grades (it could, but it doesnât),
- one of the highest is âmilitary gradeâ, which is therefore âgood encryptionâ (unlike the standard encryption you buy at the shops),
- so this extra encryption must make you safer.
These statements are all synthetically wrong, but the original sentence? Is it wrong? The âmilitaryâ (whether that means Italian soldiers who look at Tik-Tok, or Chinese generals who want to transfer plans across China, or any other meaning), all use standard encryption, like TLS certs, mostly on their outdated Android phones and Windows 10 PCs. So is the sentence right? It seems about as right as saying âI eat military-grade breakfast cerealâ.
For now, Iâm calling this âpresumptuously wrongâ. Itâs possible to show someone has a presumption, and to show itâs wrong when theyâre making making short inferences. I have a Polish friend who noticed someone checking up on her, to make sure she didnât steal anything, moments after learning sheâs Polish. Thereâs only one difference to make the difference, so the check-up clearly came from bigotry. And more than clearly, her thinking was analytic.
- Premise 1: This person is Polish.
- Premise 2: Redacted
- Conclusion: Therefore, we must check sheâs not trying to steal anything.
The missing step is as plain as x + 2 = 4. People may obfuscate this process, objecting âno, in fact:â
âŚand the assumptions around theft were not concerned with being Polish, but âsimply that they were concerned about certain things, after reading certain reports, and taking certain facts into accountâŚâ et c. ad obfuscatium. However it goes, following this thread just means taking the long-way around.
But that little trick-of-the-Maths works rarely. Mostly, people degenerate quickly into mind-reading accusations. Most people donât act on a single piece of information simply because they have a lot more information. Give the aforementioned bigot another day, and he would have plenty of other facts he could plausibly have taken into account. Or if not âplausiblyâ, we could not deduce the bigotry from clean (not âpureâ, but still âcleanâ) Mathematics. Likewise in the case of people advertising Nord VPNâs âmilitary-grade encryptionâ, I canât see any room for good motivations, but I canât Mathematically verify bad intentions.
This kind of presumptuously wrong might just be the regular wrong but inferred, but it has sharp differences. It often looks like someone holding a world-view thatâs wrong, and the statements are more of an indicator of the wrong than actually wrong themselves.
I found myself being presumptuously wrong a while ago while watching a CGP Grey video with a slippery question.
Which planet is closest to Earth?
The âgotchaâ here is that Earth and Mars revolve around the Sun, so they spend some time far away from each other. Once you start looking at how close other planets are to Earth on average, the answer turns out to be Mercury. But the videoâs not about getting the question wrong, itâs about the underlying world-view that makes us think in terms of planets in a line.