Bill and I were far from expert sailors. We’d purchased our 36-foot boat a few years earlier. Since then, we’d taken a number of short trips around Lake Michigan. But Bill and I still had a lot to learn.

It was clear on the first day of this trip, our longest adventure to date—80 miles to Fayette State Park. Not long after we’d left our home port, Menominee, Michigan, on the shore of Green Bay, the sky turned dark, the waves grew and the wind picked up. There had been rain and strong wind forecast, but we weren’t prepared for them. Should we keep going or head for a safe port?

“Escanaba’s not far away if we can make it,” Bill said. I nodded my head. He drew down the sails and turned on the engine. Soon we made it to the port. After Bill gassed up, we cooked up some dinner, made hot coffee and listened to the music of the rain and wind.

The next morning, we awoke to a beautiful midsummer day. The sky was clear. We set sail after breakfast across Green Bay and onto the waters of western Lake Michigan. Twenty miles were left to our destination. For the first hour or so, everything went well. Then the wind, which had carried us along at a steady but gentle pace, suddenly died. Died completely. We had to start the motor.

The engine coughed, and the boat trembled. I looked at Bill. “I pumped in enough gas, so that can’t be the problem,” Bill said. The engine coughed again, and then shut down. Every attempt to start it failed. “I think I know what’s wrong,” he said and raced to the bow. I followed. When I reached there, he was holding the gas cap. He had been in such a rush to fill up the tank the night before to get out of the rain that he had forgotten to fasten the gas cap back on. Now the boat motor was flooded.

We tried to make a phone call, but there was no signal.

Just as we were desperate, an old boat came along.

The woman speaking to me at the basketball game looked quite familiar. She said, “Joe? Is that you?”

“Marci?”

“It is you!” she said, smiling widely, “It’s good to see you again!”

It was good to see Marci, too. Off and on during the past tens of years, I’d wondered about her. I almost tried to find her a few years ago, after a friend told me that Marci had been going through a hard time. So running into her at the basketball game was, at the very least, unexpected.

We spent a few minutes catching up on the business of our lives: kids, work, houses, education and hobbies, etc. We played a little “Have you seen...?” and “Did you know..?” And we talked about the old days, both good and bad.

Then Marci grew quiet for a while, looking out over the people moving around. “You know, Joe,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to tell you...how...you know...how sorry I am for the way I treated you.”

I felt a little uncomfortable, remembering how Marci had broken up with me without any warning.

“It’s okay,” I said. “No big deal.” At least, I thought to myself, not anymore.

“But I was such a bad person,” she continued, lowering her head.

Yes, you were, I thought, “We were both pretty young,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But that’s no excuse for ...” She hesitated (迟疑), and then continued: “I’ve always regretted it, remembering how mean I was to you. And I’ve wanted to tell you that I’m sorry and ask for your forgiveness. So ... I’m sorry.”

The smile on her face was warm and sincere. And there was something in her eyes — it looked a lot like relief (解脱) — that washed away my anger and hate that may have built up within me during the years since she had broken my heart.

Comics on show!

7 . “Assume you are wrong.” The advice came from Brian Nosek, a psychology professor, who was offering a strategy for pursuing better science.

To understand the context for Nosek’s advice, we need to take a step back to the nature of science itself. You see despite what many of us learned in elementary school, there is no single scientific method. Just as scientific theories become elaborated and change, so do scientific methods.

But methodological reform hasn’t come without some fretting and friction. Nasty things have been said by and about methodological reformers. Few people like having the value of their life’s work called into question. On the other side, few people are good at voicing criticisms in kind and constructive ways. So, part of the challenge is figuring out how to bake critical self-reflection into the culture of science itself, so it unfolds as a welcome and integrated part of the process, and not an embarrassing sideshow.

What Nosek recommended was a strategy for changing the way we offer and respond to critique. Assuming you are right might be a motivating force, sustaining the enormous effort that conducting scientific work requires. But it also makes it easy to interpret criticisms as personal attacks. Beginning, instead, from the assumption you are wrong, a criticism is easier to interpret as a constructive suggestion for how to be less wrong — a goal that your critic presumably shares.

One worry about this approach is that it could be demoralizing for scientists. Striving to be less wrong might be a less effective motivation than the promise of being right. Another concern is that a strategy that works well within science could backfire when it comes to communicating science with the public. Without an appreciation for how science works, it’s easy to take uncertainty or disagreements as marks against science, when in fact they reflect some of the very features of science that make it our best approach to reaching reliable conclusions about the world. Science is reliable because it responds to evidence: as the quantity and quality of our evidence improves, our theories can and should change, too.

Despite these worries, I like Nosek’s suggestion because it builds in cognitive humility along with a sense that we can do better. It also builds in a sense of community — we’re all in the same boat when it comes to falling short of getting things right.

Unfortunately, this still leaves us with an untested hypothesis (假说): that assuming one is wrong can change community norms for the better, and ultimately support better science and even, perhaps, better decisions in life. I don’t know if that’s true. In fact, I should probably assume that it’s wrong. But with the benefit of the scientific community and our best methodological tools, I hope we can get it less wrong, together.