Sometimes in Error by Dean Gloster
If my birth family had a motto, it would be “Sometimes in error, but never in doubt.” All three of us boys were scary smart. We were maybe even more sure of ourselves than we were smart. We each had the ability to reach conclusions based on small data sets. I'm on the left. I eventually grew into my ears. That is, we were quick and clever but sometimes spectacularly wrong. Worse, some of us had a touch of what later in life I came to call “Brightman’s syndrome”—we’d had enough experience of being right even when a bunch of people disagreed, so that even if everyone else in the room argued with us, we still might assume we were right. That’s a terrible trait if it leads to things like mansplaining to a someone who’s a domain expert in the subject matter under discussion. Did you hear about the mansp...
