Long-term Free thinking is more important than short-term correctness.
Being correct is boring.
Being correct is safe.
Being correct misses the point.
It is only possible to find new paradigms of correctness through free thought, unencumbered by pre-optimization of correctness.
It might be alluring to obsess over correctness, but obsessing over correctness is short-sighted. Your correctness is correct until it’s not, at which point you are now incorrect, which defeats the purpose of trying to be correct in the first place.
If your short-term motivation is to maintain correctness, you will miss out on more interesting forms of correctness later.
Free thinking allows one to explore the domain of thought that may or may not be correct, acknowledging that your assumptions about what you feel is correct might be wrong. Free-thinking is living comfortably in a superposition of thoughts in which correctness may collapse from the wave function. Free thinking is about permitting yourself to say, “I don’t know, yet,” and even be presumptuous enough to say, “I don’t think others know either; I think we still need to work on this idea a bit more before we can know.”
This is important because, throughout history, we’ve seen that radical thinkers are the ones who help us break out of old, comfortable, and “correct” ways of thinking that turn out to be incorrect.
One of my favorite examples of this is that Ancient astronomy (and astrology) was remarkably accurate in predicting celestial events. The movements of the planets, solar and lunar eclipses, the calendar, and more. And yet, none of these fantastic achievements, in their complex algorithms, understood the more profound truth of a heliocentric solar system. Heliocentric and geocentric models created algorithms that predicted outcomes, but only the heliocentric view led to a more valuable generalization for the observable universe.
Sometimes, wild ideas end up leading to endless cascading realizations:
What if our sun were just another star? led to…
What if our solar system is just another solar system? led to…
What if our galaxy is just another galaxy? led to…
What if our universe is just another universe? …and on and on
What is essential is that all of these thoughts are allowed to dance on the edge of delusion. Many of our free-thinking thoughts will never be correct, they will be wildly wrong, and they will never lead us to more profound truths, but only by allowing free thinking to flourish can we discover new perspectives about the universe that break us out of our shared delusion of correctness.
We aren’t rational beings; we are rationalizers. When we teach kids about the solar system, they “get it” so young, while the scientific and religious establishments of the time vehemently resisted such notions as dangerous and misguided.
How many ideas are perceived that way today but will eventually become “obviously true” later? How many ideas are accepted as truth but will be remembered as dangerously archaic?