An important and possibly overlooked part of fallibility is that you are very frequently wrong about the way in which you are wrong, even if you’ve identified that there’s an error. These are mistakes about mistakes!
Example: You think: “I sort of understood this concept, but then forgot it, and that’s why I messed up.”
The truth: “I never really understood it in the first place.”
It’s easy to fall into this. One would rather think one partially knew something than that one never knew it. It’s easy to want to “trade up” in terms of mistakes.
But it’s important to remember that this is one way bad memes can survive. If you don’t identify the error in your thinking properly, it will keep happening; it’s not enough to be right about being wrong. You have to know the way in which you are wrong.
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