How I Handle Being Wrong in Public

Writing about method means the failures are part of the record. That is the point, and it creates a specific difficulty: an account of a mistake can easily become a performance of humility that teaches nothing.

Three rules keep it useful.

Rule one: publish the reasoning, not just the outcome

An account that says “I was wrong about X” is not informative. An account that reproduces the reasoning at the time, in the words used at the time, is.

The useful part of my 2018 notes is not that I was wrong. It is that the reasoning reads as entirely sensible, and that I cannot distinguish it from the reasoning I use today.

That is the transferable thing: not the specific error but the fact that the error felt like analysis.

Rule two: separate the process from the outcome

Some decisions were wrong in process and produced good outcomes. One addition made outside schedule in 2022 worked, and it was a process failure.

Some were correct in process and produced bad outcomes. The rebalance I made late in an advance reduced my eventual gain, and it was the right thing to do.

Writing about outcomes alone would score those backwards. Every account of a mistake has to say which kind it was, or it teaches the wrong lesson.

Rule three: no redemption arc

The temptation in writing about a mistake is to end with what it taught and how things are better now.

Sometimes nothing was learned. The two quarters where I answered invalidation questions from memory rather than data had no insight attached; I simply did not do the work, and the fix was to add fifteen minutes to a checklist.

Dressing that as a lesson would inflate a procedural failure into wisdom, which is how this genre becomes useless.

What I will not write about

Positions I currently hold and currently doubt.

Not to protect my record. Because writing about a live doubt commits me publicly to a view, and the commitment then influences whether I act on the doubt. The consistency pressure works in exactly the wrong direction.

I write about the position I exited because it is finished, and about the process failure that delayed the exit because the process is now different.

Why publish any of it

Because the visible sample of people writing about long-term holding is selected by outcome. Everyone still writing is someone for whom it worked.

The failures are the part of the record that is not selected, and they are therefore the part most worth reading. Nine right, eight wrong, six too vague. One position exited. Two quarters of answering from impression.

That is a more honest description of five years than any account of what worked, and the operational side, including keeping the working balance at the exchange I have used since 2021 small enough that none of this mattered to my life, is the part that made the mistakes survivable.