You are wrong about politics

Politics has yet again dominated the news and social media. People are taking this opportunity to push their narratives and agendas. They are sniping at their political opponents and making bold claims about what will happen in a week or two.

Most of these claims are wrong.

Two weeks from now reality will have been filtered through our preferred spin cycles. Maybe you listen to news pundits. Maybe you prefer public radio. Maybe your political updates come through Twitter and Facebook. None of these platforms are capable of admitting they were wrong. They will twist all of the information to explain how their very wrong claim wasn’t wrong at all. Or that they were right except their political enemies conspired against them. Or whatever other excuse allows them to maintain their engagement levels.

But all of this information is wrong in some way or another. That information is all we really have access to. This means we are also wrong.

You are wrong about politics.

So am I. We all are. That might sound depressing — and I suppose it is. But my focus this past week hasn’t been trying to hide away from the imperfect information. This as an opportunity to watch each source’s treatment of imperfect, always-changing information.

As many of us inevitably opine about Russia invading Ukraine, stop and listen to how people face that they were wrong. The easy examples are the strong claims that Russia would never invade Ukraine. Those claims were wrong. Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, how many people are avoiding admitting they were wrong?

Those people will never learn why they were wrong. Which means they will be just as wrong in the future. If those are the people who you trust for information then you will continue to be wrong.

It is okay to be wrong about politics. It is not okay to be wrong in the same ways over and over again. It is especially not okay to be wrong while thinking you are less wrong than your political opponents. We are all struggling with the same issue.

You do not possess a magical ability to extract perfect information from biased, willfully wrong sources. No one does.