On Being Spectacularly Wrong

Last week, the Hyuns were over, and in the course of the conversation, I interrupted and corrected Minho, being fairly confident about it. Of course, it turns out I was spectacularly wrong. (Specifically, it was about the nature of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, which I falsely claimed was primarily about supply and demand curves.)

I hate when people are emphatic about something they think they know about, but are in fact completely wrong. So when I do it myself, it burns in my memory pretty much forever. It doesn’t happen to me as often as, say, henryhsu.com (whose early entries could each be subtitled “Spectacularly Wrong”), so I’m not used to it.

In fact, I remember making the same type of ridiculous claim to Minho years ago when I was in junior high. I claimed that Michael Jordan wasn’t that great a college player. To which he looked at me with this face like, “what the…” and said something like, uh, yeah, that’s why he was player of the year and drafted 3rd. In fact, he was NCAA player of the year in both ’83 and ’84. Not that great a college player. Egad.

I know why I said that. We had been having some rainy days, so in P.E. the guys were shown a bunch of sports videos, including Jordan videos, one of which included his game-winning shot in the ’82 NCAA championship game against Georgetown. Now, because of my dad, I had this bias against game-winning plays. In ’84, Doug Flutie beat out Keith Byars of Ohio State for the Heisman. My dad is an OSU alum and attributed Flutie winning the trophy to his game-winning last second Hail Mary pass against Miami that year. To my dad, he was an inferior player, but the memorableness of that last-second play inflated his esteem to the voters. It turns out my dad was wrong (Heisman voting occurred before that game), but his comments stuck with me, and for some reason, after watching Jordan hit the ’82 shot, I associated that with him being overrated in college.

It’s kind of crazy that that memory still sticks with me, that I still remember a stupid comment I made when I was 14. But yeah, stupid remarks I’ve made leave a mark. Sorry, Minho!