The cost of being right

There is a particular smugness that comes from being right. I know it well. I have felt it settle into my shoulders like a cat that has decided it owns the house. It is warm. It is self-congratulatory. It is also radioactive, and by the time you notice the damage, the half-life has already done its work.

We are trained to treat being right as an unalloyed good. Wrong is thy enemy. Wrong is a failure, its an embarrassment, a needed correction, the red mark on the test. Right is the goal. Right is clean. Right is the end of the argument, or rather Right is the end of all arguments. But often we forget that right is not free. It was never free. Its cost is just deferred, and is deducted from the accounts we are not in the habit of checking.

In software, this cost is worse. Because software is not a field where you can just borrow someone else’s answer and call it a day. You have to build out your own theory, your own analysis, your own proofs, your own theorems, your own experiments, your own observations, and then — this is the part nobody warns you about — your own counterpoints to your own points of belief. It is honestly quite taxing(and infuriating) to lead the world by example about how a problem should be approached.

And the problem only compounds when you are not just right but against the league. When you are fighting against the tide. When you are trying to prove the world is a sphere and not a disc, and the people around you are not even interested in looking at your evidence because they have already decided what shape they prefer.

It is not about being right

Here is the thing nobody tells you: it is not about being right in the first place. You might be wrong. You probably are wrong about something. The point is not the correctness. The point is conviction. The grit, at the end of the day, to stand by your beliefs and your opinions as to what led you to believe a certain way.

Do you have enough experience, knowledge, and understanding to defend your way of thinking?

THAT is the real question. Not whether you are right. Whether your thinking is defensible. Whether you can articulate the chain of reasoning that got to reach that conclusion. Or whether you have done the work or are just parroting the work someone else did.

And then the harder question: should you even bother with someone already sold to the other side? I mean why the fuck should you bother wasting time and brain cells on someone who is not going to change their mind? A lot of the time, you are not having a debate, you are performing theater for an audience that has already left the hall. The other person is not waiting to be convinced or even wanting to learn something new or insightful. They are waiting for you to either surface holes in your argument or to stop talking so they can return to their certainty. You are exhausting yourself on a wall that is not going to move.

Where is the side? Who is the judge?

What and where the fuck is the side, anyway? In software, the “sides” are usually made up by feel and familiarity. They are tribal affiliations dressed up as technical positions. React vs. Vue. Microservices vs. monoliths. Static vs. dynamic typing. The arguments feel technical but they are mostly emotional and clingy. People picked a team and then came up with the excuses and the vocabulary to defend it.

So who is the judge? Who qualified them to be the judge? The senior engineer with the loudest voice? The conference speaker with the most followers? The person who wrote the blog post you read last week? Most of the time, the judge is just whoever managed to sound confident and authoritative. We need to understand that confidence is not the expertise, volume is not the evidence and popularity is not the correctness we should be looking for. Moreover, the judge clouds your thinking in rejecting due dilligence and the need to think for yourself. The need to do your own research and the need to have your own opinions.

If you let the league of these extraordinary gentlemen(and women sometimes) decide whether you are right or whether you shoule change your mind, you have already lost. Its not because the league is wrong, though it often is, but because the league is not the point of contention and the point is not to be right. The point is whether your model of the world, your own formulated model, holds up under pressure. The point is whether you have done the thinking and the work to get to your conclusion.

The art of conviction

The art is not about being right, or about the fear of being wrong and clinging to a wrong conviction long enough to get ridiculed. That is just stubbornness. That is your lazy and over-inflated ego wearing a lab coat. That is just asking for it.

The art of conviction is about having the facts, the info, the evidence, the understanding, and at the end of the day, the fucking difference that knowing about and being a certain “right” way landed you in a better place. Be it life or work. The crux is not worrying about who is right or wrong. The question should be:

Do you even HAVE an opinion of your own, or are you regurgitating something you heard from someone else?

This happens because most people do not have self-standing opinions. They have secondhand headlines. They have retweets. They have the vague sensation that someone smart said something once and it sounded right so they adopted it as their own. The appeal to authority is everywhere in software. That is not thinking. That is decorating, your walls of ignorance with someone else’s tapestries.

Are you prepared enough to defend your thoughts against vehement attacks on your beliefs, or are you a product of hallucinated sycophancy?

Sycophancy is everywhere in software. People agree with whoever has a “status”. They repeat the talking points of the current moment. They adopt the framework the big companies use. They praise the pattern the influencer endorsed. They do not know why they believe what they believe. They believe it because its easy. They believe it because they think believing it signals belonging. They belive it because who the hell wants to do some due dilligence and come up with their own rationale?

Hallucinated sycophancy is worse. It is when you do not even realize you are doing it. You think you have an opinion, but if you trace it back, it leads to a conference talk, a Hacker News thread, a CTO who sounded confident at all-hands. You have built a belief system out of other people’s performance of expertise. You have a theory, but it is not your theory. It is a theory you have inherited. You have a belief, but it is not your belief. It is a belief you have inherited. You have a conviction, but it is not your conviction. It is a conviction you have inherited. You are preaching the gospel of the league. You are appealing to authority. You are a product of hallucinated sycophancy.

The cost of leading by example

When you refuse to abide by the league, when you insist on building your own theory, running your own experiments, forming your own conclusions, you HAVE pay for it. You pay in time. You pay in isolation. You pay in the exhaustion of having to explain things that should not need explaining because some things are obvious and need little effort in separating them from the noise. The problem is you are the one who has to do the work.

Leading by example is expensive and tiring because quoting an example is easy but becoming example is slow and painful. Basically to preach to the choir, you have to become the part of the system, the voice and the song that the people would and should be listening to and singing about. You cannot just tell people. You have to show them. You have to build the thing. You have to document that thing. You have to answer the same objections over and over and over and over and over and over while your work speaks for itself waiting to be heard and adopted.

Be not the man who has heard 10000 views, but the one who has built 10000 things.

And when you are right against the league, the cost doubles. Because now you are not just doing the work. You are also carrying the social friction of disagreeing with the consensus. People do not like being disagreed with, even politely. They especially do not like being disagreed with when they have not done the thinking themselves and your disagreement exposes that. The work and the research that YOU performed exposes that insecurity in them. It exposes their own lack of conviction. It exposes their own lack of original work.

Only time will tell

There is no clean way to know, in the moment, whether your conviction is wisdom or delusion. That is the tax. You have to hold the position long enough for reality to render a verdict, and while you are holding it, people will mock you, ignore you, or politely tolerate you.

Only time will tell. This is not comfort, this is the discipline to do the work and form the opinion. To defend it when it is worth defending and to let it go when the evidence tells you to let it go. And you do not outsource the verdict to the league. This is the way to approach the truth in the best way possible by adopting the rigorous scientific method.

The cost of being right, then, is not the rightness itself. The cost is the work required to earn the right to have an opinion at all. The cost is the willingness to be wrong in public while you figure out what is actually true. The cost is the discipline to stand by your reasoning without becoming a prisoner to it.

That is the bill. It does not arrive as a single invoice. It arrives as years of thinking out loud, of building your own proofs, of being the weird one in the room, of letting the market and time decide whether what you saw was real or a figment of your delusion.

Read it before you sign. Who knows when and you might owe.