A couple of years ago, a woman comes into Beth Israel Deaconess medical center for a surgery.
幾年前 一個女人到 Beth Israel Deaconess 診所做手術
Beth Israel's in Boston.
Beth Israel 在波士頓
It's the teaching hospital for Harvard -- one of the best hospitals in the country.
是哈佛大學的教學附屬醫院 全國數一數二的醫療中心
So this woman comes in and she's taken into the operating room.
這個女人被送進開刀房
She's anesthetized, the surgeon does his thing -- stitches her back up, sends her out to the recovery room.
麻醉，外科醫生做完手術 縫合，將她送進恢復室
Everything seems to have gone fine.
一切看上去都很好
And she wakes up, and she looks down at herself, and she says, "Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages?"
她醒來，往自己身上一看 說“為甚么我的左腿綁著繃帶?”
Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one.
她應該接受治療的是右腿 但為他做手術的外科醫生 卻把刀開在左腿
When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting.
當副院長出來為醫院的醫療質量 和這次意外做出解釋時 他說了句很有趣的話
He said, "For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient."
他說“無論如何 這位外科醫生感覺 他開下的刀是在正確的一側”
(Laughter) The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous.
(笑聲) 故事的重點是 相信自己的判斷力 相信自己站在對的一邊 是非常危險的
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world.
我們心中時常感覺到的 理直氣壯的感覺 在真實世界中 並不是個可靠的嚮導。
And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things
當我們依此行事 不再思考我們是否犯錯 我們就有可能
88.like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy.
把兩百灣加侖的石油倒進墨西哥灣 或是顛覆世界經濟
So this is a huge practical problem.
這是個很實際的問題
But it's also a huge social problem.
這也是個很大的社會問題
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right.
“感覺對”究竟是什麼意思
It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality.
這代表著你認為你的信念 和真實是一致的
And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you?
當你有這種感覺的時候 你的問題就大了 因為如果你是對的 為甚么還有人和你持不同意見?
It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions.
於是我們往往用同一種 思考方式去解釋這些異議
The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant.
第一是當他人不同意我們的說法 我們便覺得他們無知
They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team.
他們不像我們懂得這么多 當我們慷慨地和他們分享我們的知識 他們便會理解，並加入我們的行列
When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption,
如果不是這樣 如果這些人和我們獲得的信息一樣多 卻仍然不認同我們 我們便有了下一個定論
which is that they're idiots.
那就是他們是白痴
(Laughter) They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly.
(笑聲) 他們已經有了所有的信息 卻笨到無法拼湊出正確的圖像
And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart,
一旦第二個定論也不成立 當這些反對我們的人 和我們有一樣的信息 又聰明
then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes.
我們便有了第三個結論 他們知道事實是甚么 但卻為了自己的好處 故意曲解真實。
So this is a catastrophe.
這真是個大災難
This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly.
我們的自以為是 讓我們在最需要的時候 無法預防犯錯 更讓我們互相仇視
104.But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human.
對我來說 最大的悲劇是 它讓我們錯失了身為人的珍貴意義
It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds.
那就像是想像 我們的心靈之窗完全透明 我們向外觀看 描述在我們之前展開的世界
And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing.
我們想要每個人和我們有一樣的窗子 對世界做出一樣的觀察
That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring.
那不是真的 如果是，人生將會多么無聊
The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is.
心靈的神奇之處 不在你懂得這個世界是甚么樣子
It's that you can see the world as it isn't.
而是去理解那些你不懂的地方
We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place.
我們記得過去 思考未來 我們想像 自己成為他人，在他方
And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this.
我們的想像都有些不同 於是當我們抬頭看同一個夜空 我們看到這個 這個 和這個
And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong.
這也是我們搞錯事情的原因
1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about "I think therefore I am,"
在笛卡兒說出那句有名的”我思故我在“ 的一千兩百年前
this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote "Fallor ergo sum" -- "I err therefore I am."
聖奧古斯丁，坐下來 寫下"Fallor ergo sum" "我錯故我在"
Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome.
奧古斯丁懂得 我們犯錯的能力 這並不是人性中 一個令人難堪的缺陷 不是我們可以克服或消滅的
It's totally fundamental to who we are.
這是我們的本質
Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there.
因為我們不是上帝 我們不知道我們之外究竟發生了甚么
And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out.
而不同於其它動物的是 我們都瘋狂地想找出解答
To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.
對我來說 這種尋找的衝動 就是我們生產力和創造力的來源
Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life.
因為一些緣故 去年我在廣播上 聽了很多集的"我們的美國人生"
And so I'm listening and I'm listening, and at some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong.
我聽著聽著 突然發現 這些故事全和犯錯有關
And my first thought was, "I've lost it.
我的第一個念頭是 “我完了
I've become the crazy wrongness lady.
我寫書寫瘋了