Recently I got officially diagnosed with "suffering more than normal from other people's stupidity" and I am currently in the process of getting happy pills to have an easier time surviving the work place. Which could have prevented a lot of misery, if people would have diagnosed this earlier, but well, as we all know, most people suck at their job.

However, due to this affliction, I was and still are always literally painfully aware when other people are stupid or wrong. While I still want to explore the exact mechanisms of actual neurological stupidity in another post (I always get derailed by my pent up anger regarding this topic), most people seem to miss blatantly obvious things, which can not be explained by them just being on the slower side of things.

And usually, being right is easy. Nothing is ever surprising. Yet, people are surprised.

I am tired of reading and generating a rule-of-three set of examples. This is a blog post, not a school essay. Just think of something you were right about a long time before everyone else caught up.

Overall I think it comes down to economics. Being right takes some intellectual effort, and there is little incentive to be right, or you are often disincentivised of being right in the first place. So most people forego, or downright avoid being right, and stick to their wrong world view.

To be right about a thing, you have to have some understanding of the thing. This is for most people already the first non-trivial obstacle. Hell, many people even can not jump over the "make a statement that makes any sense"-hurdle, as evidenced by most of the slop we get fed every day. So here we already have some cost associated just to making a truthful statement.

Of course, the higher and more useful your education, the lower this barrier is relative to your intellect, and this makes it much easier for you to be right. You still paid the cost, but in advance and it probably already paid off in other ways.

Now, most people do not suffer directly the consequences of their actions, which means that there is often no direct cost associated to being wrong, and being right usually does not yield any benefit. Consequently, there is no incentive to be right in the first place. Why pay the high cost then? Unless of course, you already paid in advance and you get being right for free.

This is especially true for people in leadership positions, as they are shielded from consequences by their optionality. Politicians get away with being wrong, because they get paid hundreds of thousands of money units anyway and rarely get shot, even if they put millions in misery.

However, this initial, intellectual cost of being right is miniscule.

The true cost actually is a consequence of being right and acting upon it. It is the old "it is simple, not easy"-cliche. Being right about things usually excludes you from comfortable options and means extra work. While this usually means benefit down the road, this benefit is usually distributed across many people, whereas the cost is initially only incurred to you and everyone actually trying to make a change. Privatized cost and socialized profit is rare for a reason.

In the extreme, being wrong is just too profitable to be right.

Naturally, there are also many instances, where the benefits of being right mainly befall the person being right. But being right is easy, in the sense that the intellectual cost of being right is low, so that these instances are usually exploited quickly, to the point where everything settles into some equilibrium of being not more profitable than your average job of comparable difficulty.

As a corollary, if you want to benefit from being right, you have to catch such an opportunity quick enough as long as it generates excessive returns.

If you want to convince people, you have to lower their cost of being right. Usually this involves providing a face-saving pivot and even more work on your side, but ultimately. But often this is not really something you can do, especially on the level of companies, or worse, in politics.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just to wait and try to hedge your bets. Being wrong is only possible for so long, for one reason or another. And sometimes, things just end.

All your strength, all that rage and you couldn't save this world from itself... - Dr. Samuel Hayden