Is it better to be vaguely right, or exactly wrong?

Is it better to be vaguely right, or exactly wrong?

Time to read: 10 minutes.

Loss is central to our lives. Some losses quickly acquire celebrity status, such as death and taxes, others are merely familiar like the ever-present threat of loss through failure. Many more, however, slip through the gaps in our awareness and steal our possibilities, leaving us to suffer the greater hidden loss of our potential futures denied.

In answering our title question, it’s worth considering the fighting forces present at our weigh-in between the contenders. In the “Vaguely” camp we have the Empirical “Come-Back” Kid, who previously lost in a points decision in a mid 17^th century bout, after holding the title unchallenged for millennia. In the blue corner we have N Lightning the undefeated champ’ for “Exactly”, since taking the world title around four hundred years ago, albeit amid allegations of suspicious betting activity.

Rule changes since the famous “Enlightenment” clash, have been controversial, with some claiming they give an unfair advantage to the world title holder, even though a re-match is not likely; ever.

Respectively then, in the red corner Team Vague; survivors of the school of “hard knocks” in our limitless and very physical world of matter, objects, events and contexts, their motto – “Shit Happens”. Opposing, we have Team Exactly, all graduates from the college of concepts, an exclusive long-standing world of scientific problems, theories, objectivity of enquiry, their motto – “P(A/B)”.

Our modern day “Rumble in the Jungle” has similarities to the original Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman fight, in that the third person in the ring was paid by both camps to “keep it fair”¹. And, sad to say, we now arrive at the already stretched limits of our analogy, taking its leave with a reminder that the two combatants, and the referee, require an environment within which to stage the contest – the ring.

Our tournament requires all four elements as active participants, our “referee”, less an enforcer of the rules and more of an interpreter of our own internal world of perceptions, thoughts, context, and our dispositions to act. The ring – the environment that our tussle will take place in, will determine the “boundaries” of the fight, and ultimately bias the outcome by favouring the speed and immediacy of jabbing, or the slow promise of predictive future power.

You will, of course, recognise yourself as Referee; standing in a “situation” between the physical world of objects, and the conceptual world of human generated theory and abstraction. On one hand hard cosmic reality, and on the other an abstract world of ideas concerned with understanding that reality; and action is demanded by the crowd.

Without us, as actor – referee, there can be no interaction between our physical, and abstract conceptual world, we can’t apply and test our theories of how the “real world works” without actions, and as a consequence our acquisition of knowledge would stall.

So, our “title” question will forever remain unresolved without us standing in the ring alongside the heavyweights and making a judgement, which in the domain of a significant decision making event could result in life-changing consequences. Within the limits of our understanding, we must try to reconcile the idealised world of language, symbols and probabilities; to the uncertainties, complexities and imperfections of our comprehension.

It’s frequently tempting to “throw in the towel” in significant decision making deliberations, we’ve all stared into the abyss and felt threatened by an anxious force that presses us to “take a swing at it”, if only to relieve the tension of inaction and create movement, to do something, anything, that might give us some insight into what to do next.

In our darkest moments it is worth reflecting on just how much help we have in the heavy lifting of decision making. Our sub-conscious is firmly in our corner, it interprets the unending blast of sensory data all around us, and from that “noise” constitutes a credible signal to present a consistent version of reality that we can “make sense” of, which is, in itself a feat bordering on the miraculous.

We have to remember to believe only two impossible things (not six) before breakfast: that our shared reality is true enough for us to act within it; and that we can affect a future version of it by our actions in prior moments. To achieve the goals of our actions we create and furnish our perceived world with values, biases, pre-judgements, pre-conceptions and more, in short, we discriminate probabilistically based on our interpretation of prior information and experience.

Our conscious experience is of a world that reveals itself to us as a flickering projection of where our attention is directed in any particular moment, this means that awareness of our situation depends on our discriminating between the minority of information that we attend to, and the majority which we overlook. Given the relative processing power of our sub-conscious, it will be no surprise to learn that there’s a growing body of research suggesting our conscious mind is not in the driving seat much of the time, if at all².

This really matters to our decision making because the meaning we assign to information determines our beliefs, which in turn influences our decisions and subsequent actions. So, if we are misinformed, by design (commission) or perhaps through an oversight (omission) then our decision making will be significantly distorted, leading to substantial errors of judgement and losses.

In living our lives we continually seek our best future prospects, it’s only the time span that alters the scope and range. To achieve our objectives, we must balance our disposition to the world through our actions. Too much reliance on exactitude results in loss by the omission of opportunities that play out in short time frames, conversely, we can also pay a high price for committing to “jabbing” at a decision that requires time and accuracy over speed.

We have no choice but to make mistakes, living requires that we act and action demands error. The lack of our willing acceptance of the finite error filled lives we lead, often blinds us to the incredible potential for future gain that lived experience gifts us, and in turn the many ways that we can influence the type and magnitude of the errors that we make, and limit our losses.

Regarding the lingering question of our “title”, a small wager on a “split decision” would pay out under a closer inspection of the question when held in context. We are, it appears, being unfairly asked to compare two separate conceptions of the qualities of right and wrong. A fast and Vague determination from our physical world of experience; and a slow but Exactly detailed deductive analytical enquiry, and so our only rational answer is “it depends”.

So it appears that the inevitability of loss is central to our lives, as is gain which follows closely in its wake, hidden in the turbulent guise of opportunity, and much of it wasted. Science has illuminated the many ways in which our thinking can be flawed or fooled in certain situations, making us prone to errors that create loss. As it turns out, however, science also demonstrates that we can compensate to a great extent by learning from experience and applying those gains to create an improved future response.

The booing and chanting from the crowd should not deflect the Referee from calling the fight. The reality, as is often the case, is that we are deceived us into believing we have some “skin” in a game being played out before us, while the game we ought to be paying attention to remains just out of view, hidden in a lifelong struggle for the survival of one of our many possible futures.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next: Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

1: https://www.sportscasting.com/boxing/

2: See our article “Improve your decision making” for further discussion and external reference.

Title attribution: “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong”, Carveth Reath