On Being Wrong

A few years ago, when my daughter was 2 years and 2 months old, my grandmother died. My daughter and I flew to Sweden for the funeral. As we were flying home, there was a blizzard in Boston, and our plane was diverted to Bangor, Maine. After we landed at Bangor, I told my daughter that we were probably going to have to leave the plane and take a bus to a hotel, and that we would not be home that day. However, as it turned out, the pilot announced that the weather in Boston had cleared sufficiently that we would be able to fly there. As she was listening to the announcement my daughter got very excited and started repeating “Papa was wrong!”

It’s hard to read the mind of a two-year-old. However, it seems to me that that was the first time that she had ever realized that I could be wrong. I think it helped her to learn to question authority, not merely in the sense of not doing what she was told, but in the sense of learning that nobody is always right.

Of course, questioning authority does not mean figuring everything out for yourself. After all, when most people believe that something is true, it usually is, in fact, true. While there are exceptions, our time on earth is too short to question everything. To me, questioning authority means to remember the sources for what you think you know. Believe in facts provisionally, with appropriate weights based on the source of the knowledge. If you know why you think something, then you have a much better idea of when it is appropriate to reconsider.

My daughter is probably still too young to fully grasp this. It requires a certain level of maturity and experience to understand how to weight beliefs appropriately. For young children in particular there are safety issues–children should not check for themselves whether crossing the street is dangerous. But I hope that her feelings on the plane already started her on the right path.