Admitting mistakes

In a podcast with Russ Roberts (pick 5), Megan McArdle (pick 38) says,

I can go back and say, yeah, I can’t smooth away into memory and conveniently misremember how I felt about the Iraq war, how I felt about what we should do about the Financial Crisis, and on and on and on and on and on. And, in fact, I wrote a very embarrassing column about the Financial Crisis when the Bear Stearns collapse happened: that we just we’re involved in a garden-variety recession; don’t freak out. This is not that big a deal, we shouldn’t bail them out. Well. So, I think that that is healthy, but most people obviously don’t do that. And so, you end up in a place where most people think that they know better than they actually do, what’s going to happen in the world.

Reading this, I thought of a new FITs scoring category for a future season: admissions of past errors (A’s). But admissions of the type “I was wrong. X is even more of an idiot than I thought” would not count.

13 thoughts on “Admitting mistakes

  1. This seems related to bets. People are rewarded for making bets, predicting the future, speaking in terms of probability, etc. and the bet itself appears to have more influence than whether or not it turns out to be correct or accurate. Reward people for keeping track of bad bets too and the overall value of bets ought to improve.

  2. I fully support a FIT-based mechanism that addresses this.

    With talk of bets/prediction markets/epistemic accountability all the rage these days, these “admissions” have become somewhat de rigueur; a go-to virtue signal within a certain milieu of public intellectual (observe my epistemic humility and note that I am less a slave to ego than “others”).

    I’m not sure the “early-mid-Covid Megan” got the memo from “Iraq-War Megan.”

    Epistemic humility is a wonderful virtue, but show me, don’t tell me.

  3. She also wrote in the early/mid 2000s that opiods are very helpful for pain management, not very dangerous, and likely underprescribed and unfairly maligned.

  4. “X is even more of an idiot than I thought” statements should drive one’s score down.

  5. Iraq is certainly an error, but is thinking we did the financial bailouts wrong in 2008 an error?

  6. The bailouts weren’t a mistake. Not sure what to do with mistaken admissions of mistakes!

    • ASDF: we all know that profits should be privatized and losses socialized. C’mon, man, what are you thinking?

    • She was admitting that bailouts were needed and she was wrong to oppose them.

      “that we just we’re involved in a garden-variety recession; don’t freak out. This is not that big a deal, we shouldn’t bail them out.”

      I agree that just letting most of the big financial organizations fail would be to disruptive, but I think there needed to be more flesh extracted in return for the injection of capital to curb the moral hazard of a bailout.

      • Yeah, whatever your stance on whether these institutions should have been liquidated it seems reasonable to strongly question if how the various stakeholders and decision makers got treated was optimal or close to it.

        Iraq being an error is a much easier case. I will admit to being wrong on that one. In my defense I was a teenager and didn’t know anything about HBD yet (if I had I would have opposed Iraq). I also put a lot of stock in the testimony of Colin Powell who I admired (I read his biography and at the end of it was his presentation on WMD to the UN. I had some distrust of GWB/Cheney but figured that his presentation was honest, lesson learned).

  7. I found Ms. McCardle a bit misguided in this podcast overall despite her admirable admission.

    She equates denying the effectiveness of lockdowns with denying the germ theory of disease, mere minutes after herself denying the effectiveness of travel bans. These views do not seem compatible with each other.

    • I got very distracted with how she finished every sentence with “Right?”

      Half the time, I was thinking, “Um, not right”

  8. I prefer my late, great Uncle Jerry’s approach to life:

    “Even if that is true, I still don’t believe it.”

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