There is no convenient way to achieve perfect correctness unless you happen, on your first attempt, to have floated with grace into a feathered bed of accuracy. If this is you, congratulations and have a look at my middle finger. For the rest of us, we had better suit up for the slog.

When you find your gun is empty, and you perform what is by now the religious movie ritual of looking directly at the firearm in your hand after it clicks impotently (watch for this in nearly every out-of-ammo shot), you have two options.

It is intuitive that we perform the first in regurgitative foundation of the great majority of arguments, which exist in the first place due to the anathema of admission: we stick to our empty guns, puking up fatuous retorts in support of bad thinking. This is a major asset in the clunky industry of wrongness, blank-shooting and stubborn idiocy.

The great joke is at our own expense — if we had just amended to the opposing accurate view, we would also be correct. We tend instead to emphasize wrongness in argument for the precise and ironic reason that we do not wish to be in error.

So has many an apology-toting buckaroo foiled the gunplay of his own argumentative prowess and issued piddling rejoinders when he might otherwise have borrowed a few logical .38s from his former competition. The most reliable way to be right (this is assuming the other person has you pinned, and how do you like it under there?), which is your second option in debate, is to defer and accept the newly discovered stance offered by the Other. This ought to serve as profound impetus to debaters - the more likeable you are, the greater your chance of changing the mind of another.

I can only conclude that I have been misled by humanity at large, insofar as having understood us to pursue correct stances. What we actually desire is to have been right at the first go. It is a thorough embarrassment and an invitation to wolf-pack psychology’s bloody judgment to submit to the correctness of another pack member, which is viewed as a kind of intellectual demotion.

This may be! But tell me which you prefer to collect your history among friends, family and peers: the reputation of the fool who was easily too stupid to observe her own fault, or the formerly foolish person of good (enough) sense? The latter will, by the way, provide you with winning stances in other micro-communities that have not yet been burned by the flame you suffered, and now carry on your own torch.

Accept the premise, supported abundantly by cruel modern science, that you are often wrong. To juggle a ratio of worldviews with the greatest possible percentage of accuracy, you must raise your correctness average by accepting when this humiliating conclusion meets your attention. And if you are confident this behavior is a regular attendant of your repertoire, it probably isn't.

Wrong again!