Likewise, an acquaintance once confessed to me that when his spouse contradicts a theory he’s just hatched, he begins spontaneously generating “facts” to support it—even when he realizes that she is right and he is wrong. In cases like these, we actually do know the limits of our knowledge; we just can’t stop ourselves from barreling right past them. As with our individual and collective difficulty with saying “I was wrong,” we aren’t very good at saying, “I don’t know.”
