Ask Lemmy

Frequently. When I recognize I'm wrong; it's a couple of times a week at least.

That does not generally coincide with when Lemmy thinks I'm wrong, which also happens a couple of times a week.

More often than I'm actually wrong

Which... is a problem. I think I learned to do this in order to not offend bosses, might have something to do with my field of work...

Depending on who I am talking to.

If it's a person that never admits to being wrong I will have my fun and just say whatever. Doesn't matter with those people.

If it is a person which admits fault, being wrong... Makes themselves vulnerable in general, I do te same.

But I got burned one time to much to still treat assholes as something other then a waste of time.

At least once or twice a week. Maybe more, a lot of the silly mistakes I make and apologise for are pretty forgettable.

For actual book knowledge things you can look up, once every couple months or less. Mostly because I look up a lot of book knowledge, and rarely am behind the curve.

Subjective-ish things are a weird one, because the reason why you arrive at whatever conclusion has a lot more substance than whatever it happens to be. You pretty much have to grow as a person to change your mind on politics, for example. There are people who, if I could speak to them again, I'd like to tell they planted a seed that eventually won me over.

I think some people believe admitting fault is a sign of weakness, but I find it’s more of a power move.

The shitty thing is, certain people will take nothing away from that about your character. It just means you were totally wrong and cornered into admitting it, so you must not be very smart. The end.

Now, maybe those aren't the best people, but there still might be a cost to ignoring them.

All the time.

If i make a mistake I own upto it like an adult

Since having kids, anytime I make a mistake or jump to a conclusion, I try to model for them how to say sorry and make it right.

That said, I don't make mistakes that often; I'm much more likely to just say I don't know or I have no opinion. I think it's most important to teach people it's ok to not know or have enough information to make a judgement.

I'll let you know when it happens... /s

Just kidding. I'm not THAT big of an asshole.

Often, because I'm often a potato.

Sometimes I nearly fall into the "I don't care about facts, I'm still right" trap. It's really enerving to know I might really fall in some day.

Quite a bit. It's the adult thing to do.

I noticed some specific women liked me more when I would do that. So of course I made that my entire personality.

Often, but I still constantly realize that I was proven wrong a few days before and I held on to the wrong opinion rather than admit it. It is a constant battle to honestly admit when I am wrong to people.

When it comes up and I am actually wrong.

I would guess a few dozen times a year since I work in a complicated field where we take our best guess and sometimes it isn't right so admitting being wrong and doing things differently has better outcomes than digging in heels.

There are a lot of people I've known who really focus on other people admitting they were wrong but somehow they are never at fault themselves.

Whenever I am wrong.

Whenever I become aware of it, either through my own realization or someone else pointing it out. I'll always double check before coming out and saying it, but if my first stance is actually wrong, I have no problem admitting it

Always?

As often as I am. Which has become less common in my old age.

Whenever I am wrong.

I think some people believe admitting fault is a sign of weakness, but I find it’s more of a power move.

Yep. Potentially unethical protip: a lot easier to admit you're wrong when you make claims carelessly to begin with.

I despise being wrong, so I will readily admit it and change my position as soon as it's clear.

One hack I use sometimes is suffixing 'i could be wrong' to the end of sentences when I'm not sure so that I'm already halfway there and can easily switch my opinion.

This comes with the side effect of being very hard to convince otherwise when I'm quite sure I'm right.

In real life, I often can't be bothered debating people especially when it's something trivial or when I don't care about them enough to help them see the error of their ways, so I'll concede with a 'maybe' just to move on from it.

Prove me wrong and find out

And mean it?

Lately I admit I was wrong in all instances, maybe just at work it's harder. And idk why, maybe because I'm always mentally exhausted at work.

More and more as time goes by. I can definitely recognize that there have been times where I would have dug in and tried to argue my way out to the bitter end, but now I find myself just saying "You know, I don't really want to waste my time with this" and just cutting my losses. Sometimes it'll get a "You know what, my bad," and sometimes I just realize I never really had anything worthwhile to contribute, and just see myself out of the discussion. I've had shit takes called out in the past, including on topics I thought myself fairly knowledgeable about. Before, I would have been right back in there looking up sources and trying to eke out a "win" in those sorts of circumstances. These days, I'd rather just concede the point early on and go about my life. I don't have free time to go wasting entrenching myself to defend a position that's already benn demonstrated to be untenable and/or just completely incorrect.

To children, I try to admit it every time. I don't want them to grow up thinking that adults are always correct.

To adults, it depends on them. If they are stable and reasonable they I'll do it, but not when the admission is itself grounds for derision.

I kinda did today. Was talking to a guy on the weekend and I was wrong on a thing but not sure if I will see him again or remember to mention it. Somewhat regularly anyway. Whats funny online is you can meet a certain type where you can cede part of an argument and say something is wrong and they will go with. Well then you must be all wrong. Usually its pretty hard to converse with them after that as they will obsess over the one point and its like ugh. Its a good indicator for me though.

I am happy to do so. If I see evidence, I immediately accept.

Probably around 2/3rds of the time, with perhaps half of those cases happening in the convo and the other half some time later. And even then, maybe I'm being too soft on myself, lol.

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.

Only 3-5 times a day.

(More would make my good reputation go away)

I'm long-term married, and that just dies not work without the ability to admit when you're wrong — even and especially when the other person is also wrong.

I'm never ~~wrong~~ right

What can be also hard is to admit that you don't know, but that can be turned into a good thing by admitting your ignorance and either listening to someone's reasoning, or together try to find an answer. Especially with kids, part of being a parent was learning with them as you seeked out answers to a simple question that you weren't sure about. A subset of the XKCD Ten Thousand. Being right or appearing to know something isn't always as good as the journey to get to the actual facts.

When ever i am wrong

I admit I'm wrong when I'm wrong. If I'm factually wrong, I say I stand corrected. If I do something bad, I apologize. I fear it looks like I'm bragging right now but it shouldn't be something to brag about, it should be what everyone does. It's what mature people do.

People who can't admit they're wrong completely close themselves off to learning or growing. They think they're protecting themselves from shame by making excuses that they meant something else or it's someone else's fault they did a bad thing, but oftentimes they suffer even worse consequences by behaving that way

On the flipside, though, the other extreme is also bad. You shouldn't concede that you're wrong when you're not wrong

I'm a slow learner, and I have come to compensate for this by gradually building out this tree of knowledge I can hang new little bits on. When I encounter a contradiction to something I had placed on the tree, I must redo the branches in the area. They need to be self-consistent or I am going to have a bad day.

So when I am challenged, I do probe a bit and ask the other party to prove or justify their stance. It's not motivated by any sort of pride in my own opinions, but rather the work it would take to sort things out again in my head. I don't want to do so unless I am clearly in the wrong.

But if I am proved wrong, I will certainly accept it. It can lead to new insights as I rework the tree.

It may even be that the slow-learning is actually due to this system I've developed? Like every piece of knowledge has to be processed into the context of my current understanding of things, and that takes time and effort.

I think this is perhaps the problem with AI? It makes all these little connections between things, but it doesn't have a big picture, which makes it frequently contradict itself. I couldn't live like that.

As long as the person I'm admitting I'm wrong to deserves that concession.

I sometimes argue with a Facebook "friend". He's a fucking idiot that will instantly change subject or whatabout when I catch him in something stupidly wrong. He then is too stupid to track the multiple different claims and arguments he keeps shoving into the thread so he interprets some of my comments as responses to completely different topics and loudly proclaims how wrong I am and that I can never admit it. I don't admit I'm wrong to him. Mainly because I'm not making many factual claims, just pushing back in him being a fucking dumbass. But also because he would never do it.