What are some reasons I might be wrong?
What would I do if it turned out I was wrong?
Most of us spend a lot of time visualising scenarios we’d like to happen, thinking about reasons the things we believe (or the things we want to believe) are likely to be true. We very rarely do the opposite: really thinking through worst case scenarios, or actively looking for reasons our deepest held beliefs are false. Why would we want to do this? We might found out something we don’t want to know. But this is exactly why we should do it.
Applying this idea to career choice: suppose you’ve always assumed you’ll be a doctor. You’ve long believed that this is the best way for you to use your skills to do good in the world, and have found you can provide convincing reasons why it’s a better career path in this respect than any other options you’ve come across. A couple of people have questioned certain aspects of your reasoning, but you’ve always managed to provide convincing responses, which increases your confidence. Yet you’ve never really seriously reconsidered the idea that medicine is the best route for you. You tell yourself that you remain objective and open-minded, but in fact your brain has stopped looking and listening for alternatives.
So imagine the world will be destroyed unless you can write a paper that convinces a jury, composed of earlier stages of yourself, not to become a doctor (or embark on whatever career path you’re inclined to prefer.) This technique may help by forcing you to focus attention on reasons against your belief that you likely wouldn’t otherwise have considered, rather than simply finding ways to defend against them when other people throw them your way. There’s experimental evidence that in general, the method of “considering the opposite” – looking for reasons your initial judgement might be wrong – is effective at reducing the effects of an impressively broad number of biases.
“As Sun Tzu advises you to do with your enemies, you must do with yourself—leave yourself a line of retreat, so that you will have less trouble retreating. The prospect of losing your job, say, may seem a lot more scary when you can’t even bear to think about it, than after you have calculated exactly how long your savings will last, and checked the job market in your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess the probability of keeping your job in the planned layoffs next month. Be a true coward, and plan out your retreat in detail—visualize every step—preferably before you first come to the battlefield.
The thought of realising you’re wrong and having to do something about it may be scary. But isn’t the thought of never realising you’re wrong, and so not being able to do anything about it, even scarier?