My biggest changed position

For the first 30-odd years of my life...I was (a lot) smarter than everyone around me, with fewer than a dozen exceptions. I knew it. Everyone near me knew it. And my parents reminded me of it frequently for my first 20. Not only was I smarter...I was certain of it with a calm confidence like that of a football quarterback knowing he's the hottest guy in the room. I thought that my brain could walk on water, and deduce the structure of the universe. Experiments were a waste of time, and boring. I was a philosophy/math guy with excellent teaching/verbal skills...and that gave me truth.

Now? Arguments are like fencing. It's practice + long arms + fast reflexes. Doesn't have anything (+/- 3%) to do with truth. Truth still interests me, and my aesthetic math sensibilities of good clean theory are still honed. But I have a math degree because reality is sloppy....and reality is no less sloppy for my disliking it.

Presently I believe that: "you're probably wrong, and certainly incomplete" is the most important line in all of thinking. Intellectual humility (of which I have almost none naturally) is the primary intellectual virtue (though not the most aesthetically pleasing). The first attempt at anything is mostly wrong. And trying, getting it wrong, and incremental improvement is the ONLY reliable way to make anything better...or even good at all.

Bridges mostly don't fall down because folks have been building them so long we know most of the failure modes. We've made all the errors available. How many other fields is that true for?

Error Appreciation...the Key difference in my thinking between now and any historical time before '07.