Be the Right Kind of Wrong

Why Learning from Your Mistakes Publicly Enhances Your Expert Status

Photo by Santa Barbara on Unsplash...

If you're going to be an expert in public, sooner or later you're going to be wrong in public.

What you do next tells us everything – about whether we can trust you, about whether you actually have a process worthy of an expert, and about whether you're worthy of our attention and investment.

Or, conversely: whether you're just another pundit.

Maybe that sounds dramatic. After all, aren't talking heads on cable news and Twitter wrong constantly, seemingly without consequences? But that's the pundit model of public expertise, and it's rapidly becoming obsolete in our post-legacy-media world. What's replacing it? A direct-to-audience model built on two fundamental pillars:

1. Your unmediated relationship with your audience; and

2. Your ability to provide value as defined by that audience themselves.

The audience is keeping score now. And that changes everything.

The Right Kind of Wrong: Matt Yglesias's Masterclass

Every year, Matt Yglesias turns the email celebrating the anniversary of starting his Substack, Slow Boring, into a lesson in public expert accountability. He reviews what he launched the previous year and previews upcoming directions. (His 2024 initiatives were ambitious: launching a subscription podcast, identifying high-leverage down-ballot political races where subscribers’ contributions could make a difference to worthy candidates, and partnering with GiveWell to support effective charities.)

But what truly sets him apart from other public experts is his willingness in this email to own his mistakes for the past 12 months through a public audit of his hits and misses. His most significant miss this year? Ignoring clear signals about Joe Biden's decline, despite insider warnings. Rather than burying this error, Yglesias made it central to his anniversary letter, using it as a teachable moment about blind spots and cognitive biases.

Four years of boring hard boards, slowly

Lots of people disagree with Yglesias’s politics and/or can’t stand his snark. But whether you align with his positions and style or not, his approach to accountability as a public expert is extraordinary:

• He frames his work as an ongoing project of exploration;

• He sets clear, measurable goals for his audience to track;

• He maintains a public scorecard of his insights and failures; and

• He explicitly connects his misses to future course corrections.

And this transparency package here isn't just admirable—it's strategic. It signals to his audience that they're not passive consumers but active stakeholders and participants in his intellectual journey.

When Experts Fail: The Cautionary Tale of Allan Lichtman

Contrast Yglesias with Allan Lichtman, the American University political scientist who had used his famous "The Keys to the White House" model to correctly predict every US presidential election since 1984—until this year’s.

But rather than examining his model's assumptions or acknowledging its limitations, Lichtman has blamed the voters, claiming misinformation (particularly from Elon Musk) had confused them about what truly mattered. In other words: Lichtman’s keys were right—it was the electorate that was wrong.

This response perfectly encapsulates the dying pundit model: rather than adapt or learn, blame the audience. It's a strategy that might have worked in the era of unidirectional media, but it's fatal in today's landscape of direct engagement. It’s proving fatal for Lichtman’s standing as a public expert with the media as well.

Weirdly, I admired Lichtman: At least he put his system on the line every four years. He just couldn’t turn the inevitable failure of that system into the next phase of his public expertise, because his access to an audience depended on the Keys always being right. That’s not expertise: That’s a schtick, or a magic trick.

The New Rules of Expert Credibility

The shift from pundit to direct-to-audience expert requires a fundamental mindset change. Yes, you want to be consistently accurate and deliver expert insights your audience can use. But you also want to:

• Maintain transparent processes;

• Acknowledge errors promptly and thoroughly;

• Demonstrate clear learning and adaptation; and

• Treat your audience as partners in your intellectual journey.

Consider incorporating these practices into your expert presence:

• Keep "error logs" where you analyze your misses;

• Publicly document how you've updated your thinking, especially on contentious issues;

• Maintain clear frameworks for when and how you'll change your mind publicly; and

• Practice active engagement with thoughtful criticism.

In future emails I’ll go more into some of these in depth with examples.

The Path Forward

The death of the pundit model doesn't mean the death of public expertise—quite the opposite. It means the emergence of a more authentic, accountable, and ultimately valuable form of expertise. To embrace it, stop treating media appearances as the endgame. Start treating your direct audience as the primary engine not just for amplifying your thinking, but for continuously improving your value as a public expert.

Remember: In the direct-to-audience age, being the right kind of wrong isn't just about damage control—it's about demonstrating and sharing what you see as an expert (using the Public Expert Formula) and how you’re evolving to see it more clearly. Your ability to publicly acknowledge and learn from mistakes will become one of your most important traits as a public expert. Not developing that trait is the biggest mistake you could make.