As the title says, how often do you admit you’re wrong? Is it different when it’s a factual dispute versus something more subjective?
I make an effort to concede early if I’m in error. I think because my mother almost never admits fault. She’ll fall back to “that’s not what I meant” or similar deflections first, and that’s really annoying.
The last big factual error I made was about the distance of walking, and that’s where I learned about Taxicab Geometry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry ).
I think some people believe admitting fault is a sign of weakness, but I find it’s more of a power move. It takes strength to do it, and people can tell when you’re sweating and desperate. Usually it leads to resolving the conflict faster and cheaper, too.
(I expect some people will feel the urge to reply they’re never wrong. I’ll file that under never admits fault.)
I’m rarely certain enough to claim that I’m right. Oftentimes I’ll acknowledge that uncertainty by stating where/when I heard something so the other person can judge the validity of that source themself.
That said, if I am confident in something and I’m told that I’m wrong, I’ll usually look it up there or just say something like “that’s not my understanding but I can’t dive into it now.” Then when I do have time I’ll do a bit of research, or if the topic comes up again I’ll assert what I was confident in with the caveat that so-and-so told me this other thing.
If I do the research and find that I was wrong, I’ll try to remember that the next time I see the other person and let them know I confirmed they were right.
This reminded me of a person I used to know. She adamantly refused to look things up. We were having some casual conversation about work, and I was like “I think that’s not what that word means.” She just refused to look at the dictionary or engage with trying to find out the answer. I don’t know if it was pride, or an insane commitment to a bit, but it was frustrating to deal with.
Incidentally, she was the worst D&D player I ever had, and was deeply dysfunctional in her romantic relationships. I can only imagine what madness she’s up to now.
Do you remember what word it was and what she thought it meant?
Unfortunately, no. I think it was a semi-obscure but not terribly so word like “esoteric”. We were all native speakers from the same region. From what else I remember from the conversation, her general practice was to avoid looking things up. If she couldn’t figure it out from context, it wasn’t worth doing more.
I felt this. I use qualifiers so damn much. The moment you say something like “X is a result of Y 100% of the time” some pedantic little shit is gonna “ackshualllllly! In this ultra rare and never considered case it can be a result of Z”.