from this comment thread over on Lookout Landing (on a post well worth reading if you’re a baseball fan), from a commenter named Milendriel:
Bottom line is, there are people who want to be right and approach new information objectively, and then there are people who don’t want to admit they’re wrong—which is necessary to eventually be right; none of us were any good at evaluating from the outset.
Beautifully put, that. To be fair, I think we all need to realize that even the best of us spend at least some time in the second category—this isn’t a justification for beating up on people; we need to keep in mind that this isn’t about better people vs. worse people (which tends to mentally devolve to “us vs. them,” which is completely counterproductive), but rather about differing mental attitudes and approaches. As long as we do that, though, this formulation does as good a job of contrasting the approach that produces real growth and understanding (the former) with that which merely produces pride and folly (the latter) as anything I’ve seen. It’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned about being right; it’s that our concern should be for the real value of truth, and should thus be essentially disinterested and not about ourselves, rather than for being believed to be right, which is not about truth at all but rather about ego.