In 1975, a young Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built something strange in the company’s own lab: a clunky, 8-pound box that could capture a picture without film.

It took 23 seconds to shoot one photo, saved it to a cassette tape, and the image could only be viewed on a TV screen. It was the world’s first digital camera — and Kodak invented it, years before anyone else even attempted it.

When Sasson showed it to his bosses, they weren’t excited. They were dismissive.

Kodak filed the patent, quietly shelved the ambition, and went right on selling film.

For the next two decades, Kodak keep on investing in printed photos. Digital image quality kept improving, competitors like Sony and Canon kept getting more serious about it, and Kodak’s own engineers kept handing the company more and more evidence that the ground was shifting. And each time, the Kodak’s response wasn’t to re-examine its original bet — it was to protect it.

Kodak had more foresight than anyone, since it literally owned the invention. The failure was an unwillingness to be wrong out loud — to say “we were mistaken about how big Digital ecosystem would get” while there was still time to act on it. By the time digital cameras and then smartphones made film irrelevant, In 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court.

Kodak’s failure wasn’t a failure of information. It was a failure of updating. They had the facts earlier than anyone. What they lacked was the willingness to let those facts change their mind while changing their mind still cost something manageable — which is exactly the muscle “the joy of being wrong” is asking us to build.

Why is being wrong treated as such a catastrophe, when it’s actually the most reliable, constant feature of being human?

If you’re wrong and never find out, nothing improves — you just stay wrong. But if you’re wrong and do find out, that’s the good outcome. You’ve traded a false belief for a truer one, and the discomfort of “I was mistaken” is just the entry fee for getting smarter.

We have more data available to us than any generation in history — instant access to research, real-time fact-checking, entire archives of human knowledge in our pockets. By any reasonable expectation, this should make us better at avoiding error, not worse.

More data hasn’t converged people onto shared truth — it’s let different groups build separate, self-reinforcing versions of it.

Instead, we seem to be getting more confidently wrong, more often, and faster than ever. A few reasons why:

• Access isn’t the same as engagement. Having information available doesn’t mean people are reading it carefully. Most decisions about what to believe still run on shortcuts — a headline, a source’s reputation, what a friend shared — not on close reading of primary material.
• Data Abundance makes cherry-picking easier. When there’s a mountain of information, you can almost always find something that looks like it supports what you already believe. More data hasn’t made wrongness harder to sustain — it’s given wrongness better camouflage.
• When a factual correction threatens something we value (our identity, our income, our tribe), we often respond as if our values are under attack, not just our beliefs about facts — and values feel much more personal to revise than facts do.

What’s something you’ve changed your mind about recently? If you have, welcome to the Joy of Being Wrong Club.