On being wrong in public
Keeping a list of my mistakes turned out to be the most useful page on this site
Three years ago I started keeping a public list of every claim I had made here that turned out to be wrong. It began as a way to keep myself honest, and it ended up changing how I write.
The first entry was embarrassing: a confident prediction about housing prices that missed by a mile. Writing it down took ten minutes and cost me a little pride, which seemed like a fair price.
What surprised me is how few of the mistakes were about facts. Most were about confidence: I was right about the direction and wrong about the size, or right about the size and wrong about the timing.