What happens when you find yourself certainly wrong about something?
You were 100% certain that X was true – maybe because of a little confirmation bias.
And then you turned out to be 100% wrong.
Were you speechless? Stumped? Or, in disbelief?
This happened to me once on a final exam.
I thought I knew the material. I knew that I knew the material.
And – it turned out – I did not know the material at all.
If you have ever seen this or experienced it, it almost resembles a slow-motion car crash inside your head.
The public was about to transition from believing—with total certainty—“ the clown can’t win” to “Hello, President Trump.” And in order to make that transition, they would have to rewrite every movie playing in their heads. To put it in simple terms, the only way Trump could win was if everything his critics understood about the true nature of reality was wrong. Then Trump won. That’s what I mean by “ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe.” Think of it as the moment your entire worldview dissolves in front of your eyes, and you have to rebuild it from scratch. As a trained persuader, I found this situation thrilling beyond words. And I was about to get a lot of company, once people realized what they were seeing.
-Scott Adams, Win Bigly
