You are learning the courage to be wrong: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (epistemic modesty: qualifying certainty in intellectual discourse), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
The Morgan Library & Museum, Madison Avenue, then dinner at Upland
The Morgan Library on Madison Avenue houses manuscripts by Dickens, Thoreau, and Einstein. In the Manuscript Room, behind glass, lies a draft of Einstein's general relativity paper with corrections in his own hand. He crossed out equations. He rewrote paragraphs. The greatest mind of the twentieth century was wrong — repeatedly, on paper, for posterity.
I stood there for twenty minutes, thinking about the relationship between genius and error. Our culture celebrates certainty and punishes revision. We reward people who say 'I've always known' and distrust those who say 'I've changed my mind.' But the manuscript behind the glass told a different story: progress is not a straight line from ignorance to truth. It is a recursive process of proposing, failing, revising, and proposing again.
All conclusions are provisional. Every claim worth making is falsifiable. The intellectual virtue is not in being right — it is in being willing to discover you were wrong and having the language to say so with grace. 'I've revised my position' is a sentence that costs nothing and earns everything.
At Upland on Park Avenue South, over roast chicken, I told a colleague I had changed my mind about a position I'd published two years earlier. She said, 'That must have been difficult.' I said, 'No — what's difficult is pretending you haven't changed when you have. Intellectual humility is not the absence of conviction. It is conviction that stays open to evidence.'