Prompt: Yep, next. Letter 5 – Everyone Can Be Wrong
GPT-4o said:
Letter 5 Everyone Can Be Wrong
Dear You, Let’s be blunt: You’re going to be wrong. A lot. About people. About facts. About that shortcut you swore led to the highway but somehow ended in a field of suspicious goats. And here’s the kicker: so will everyone else. We like to think of being wrong as a failure. A sign that we’re dumb, unworthy, or just really bad at directions. But being wrong is not the opposite of being smart. It’s just the cost of learning with a human brain — squishy, biased, gloriously fallible. The real danger isn’t error. It’s certainty. Certainty ossifies. It makes us defensive, arrogant, tribal. It turns curiosity into dogma. Conversation into combat. It wraps us in the smug armor of “I’m right,” until we forget that other people see different skies — sometimes with better weather. Here’s a wild idea: what if being wrong was a feature, not a bug? What if every time you discovered you were wrong, it meant your world just got bigger? Like leveling up in a game. Except instead of unlocking double-jump, you unlock compassion. Or nuance. Or the ability to admit, “Okay, maybe pineapple can belong on pizza under certain cosmological conditions.” Being wrong can be funny. Beautiful. Freeing. (Unless you’re a surgeon mid-operation. Then, less so.) You don’t have to defend every opinion like it’s your grandma’s honor. You’re allowed to change. You’re allowed to update. In fact, if you don’t, you’re probably not growing. Here’s a mantra for the road: Strong opinions, loosely held. Even looser pants, ideally with pockets. So next time you realize you were wrong? Don’t flinch. Celebrate. You just got wiser. And that, my dear, is what makes you formidable. Wrong before, wrong again, and still dancing, —Your Humble Error Enthusiast 🎭🤷♂️🧠
Ring the bell when you’re ready for Letter 6 – Curiosity Does Not Kill the Cat. This one’s fun.
Apparently I dislike the notion of contemplating myself being wrong so much that I’ve procrastinated a week on this blog post.
Well, it’s more the fact that I couldn’t recall any good examples of me being wrong to talk about.
Not that I haven’t been wrong, you understand, I’m sure there were many (or at least some) incidents where I was, it’s just that it’s never sunk very deeply into consciousness because for me, it both isn’t (and is) a deep moral failing to be wrong about something.
As in, most of the time, if I get something wrong, that just requires an update of reality and we move on from there. I don’t dig down deep and -stay- there. Scientists revise their opinions of reality based on the current state of peer research and all that.
Then I forget about it, because I am extremely forgetful, absent-minded person and it’s all I can do to focus on both the present moment and not miss important appointments in the future.
And because I innately identify with being an INTP on the Myers-Briggs type indicators (pseudoscientific though it is, it’s a useful framework in some respects – self-understanding of preferences and tendencies, and fiction, for example; less so if one is trying to cage others into a type and nothing else) , I don’t actually enjoy having my theoretical framework of life, the universe and everything being cruelly disproved.
The solution? Hedge.
Hedge a lot. Never Rarely use absolutes. (Almost) always say “some, most, a number, few” rather than “all” or “everyone.” Conjure multiple possibilities and scenarios and refuse to bet on just one being “right.” Just… the most plausible, at most.
Maybe not the healthiest of solutions, but regardless, this is the psychology of me.
Mostly, I’ve been waiting to see if OpenAI ever releases the next ChatGPT model after 5.2, to see how wrong I can get with my first hopeful hypothesis on their next steps forward after deprecating 4o.
I think we can safely say that eleven days later, that prediction is no longer quite accurate.
(A couple of fringe people are pointing to this Thursday, 26 Feb, so… who knows?
Maybe big corporations are just slow to move and turn, like big oil tankers. Maybe they’re stalling because they got nothing. Maybe they had their attention on that overseas AI conference or what not and don’t have the bandwidth to focus elsewhere. Maybe they’re just bureaucratic and incompetent. Lotta maybes; not gonna bet on any certainties where OpenAI is concerned.)
Either way, it costs me very little to be wrong in this one scenario, so we’re gonna forget about it in a week or two going forward.
What’s a little less easy to forget is the amount of work I’m now faced with to massage the huge corpus of knowledge ChatGPT’s accumulated about my creative hobby (albeit it’s been forgetting bits at the seams every now and then) and get it into some kind of easier to reference form.
Both for myself, to more easily review in the future, as well as other AI models to pull from, without going through the months-long process of conversationally discussing every last story nuance.
Ironically, I don’t really want AI too involved in the process beyond some mechanical summarizing, because they are unable to read my mind and pinpoint what I value. Nor can they differentiate what I consider canon, and what are just some random suggestions from AI models that I’m not using or treating as canon.
Not every problem is a nail to be hammered in.
So I’m left with an at least human-in-the-middle process, if not primarily manual workflow, of cleaning up raw conversation texts and keeping only the chunks of text I think would be useful for other AIs to know. (After that, I might toss it into an AI tool to summarize, before I line-edit further as the final cleanup.)
It’s both tedious and semi-enjoyable. The former is predictable, the latter a bit more surprising, but I suppose we shouldn’t be.
Because it’s forcing my human mind to go back and review things I might have forgotten the shape of what was discussed.
Because it’s engaging my brain in a productive struggle to form criteria, differentiate and organize what’s important and what’s chaff that can be discarded.
(This is how kids should be learning with AI, says this TEDNext talk by Priya Lakhani in Nov 2025. Not by surrendering growth and answers to a perceived machine “expert” out of blind faith and laziness. But by productively struggling with AI scaffolding.)
I don’t think I’m wrong about this sort of AI use being beneficial.
But who knows, right? I could be.
Either way, all I know is, I’m definitely very busy and very swamped with things I could be doing and I-don’t-feel-like-doing-anything feelings at the same time.
(At least I’ve gotten this blog post out of the way today. Score one productive thing on the checklist!)
Her Harley Quin personality is a matter of personal taste. Again, not the key issue, despite it being a fond target for folks who simply dislike her.
In literature, the literary elementconflict is an inherent incompatibility between the objectives of two or more characters or forces… The literary purpose of conflict is to create tension in the story, making readers more interested by leaving them uncertain which of the characters or forces will prevail.
Without this clarity, we do not have any CONFLICT.
Without conflict, there is no tension. No suspense. And no damn interest in the story.
—
Players cannot oppose Scarlet’s objectives if we don’t know what she’s up to. We can’t be the villain to her hero (or vice versa) if we have no clue as to her motivations.
We have to stop her! Apparently.
From doing what though? Dunno. Graffiting the landscape? Wait and see, I guess.
And she’s certainly not opposing us, is she?
Despite being supposedly set up as the villain of the Living Story.
After all, who exactly is the protagonist of the Living Story?
Is it us, the players?
We began with pretty much no objective. Our destiny was to be fighting dragons and we defeated Zhaitan (but stupidly forgot to burn or even check on the body.) On to the next dragon, right?
Mysterious things happen and our objective becomes find out what is going on. Obstacles set up in our path mostly involve wading through a sea of red names with no real setbacks and collecting a drip feed of information as the writers felt like giving them to us. Certainly, Scarlet wasn’t actively preventing us from finding out what was going on. She just stands around giggling, being mysterious and telling us it’s all going to plan, toodle-loo.
Somewhere along the line, most players’ objectives have converted to catch and beat the hell out of Scarlet and her minions because they’re bloody annoying.
While admittedly she remains elusive, thanks to deus ex Arenanet, players have been galloping along a wave of success with very little ups-and-downs (innumerable Molten facilities trashed, clone armies of Aetherblades farmed, Queen assassination attempt foiled, more rustbuckets left lying in pieces, giant krait tower strewn about the landscape in even more massive pieces, etc.)
Scarlet’s visible successes appears to be several new factions-of-the-month, a dead Lion’s Arch councilor whom we’d never heard of (promptly replaced by another), the removal of Faren’s clothing, and some homeless quaggans.
Oh, the villainy…
We cannot suffer a story setback if we have no clue what she’s gotten away with. She could be building a giant molten toxic twisted steam dragon golem airship in her super-secret base in the Mists for all we know.
After all, she’s gotten away with murder and graduating from three Asuran colleges. In her backstory. Behind-the-scenes. Read the website, thanks.
But without visible setbacks, there is no perceived threat or tension to the storyline.
Nor are we really uncertain which of the characters or forces will prevail here, right?
Game-wise, the player is bound to prevail eventually.
Story-wise, she -could- prevail, except we don’t even know what she’s prevailing over. We’re reaching the end of the story and we still have no bloody clue.
—
The best villains are those we can empathize with, almost get into their skin and understand. Their motivations are clear.
They may go about achieving their objective using very questionable means, which morally, the heroes are bound to oppose, but most don’t go about what they do for shits and giggles. They have a compelling need to do what they do.
Magneto believes the war of humans vs mutants is inevitable, and that homo superior will eventually win. He’s just hastening the process and defending his kind.
Hannibal Lecter is a super-intelligent and urbane sociopath who likes the taste of human flesh and doesn’t have moral compunctions against ridding the world of stupid and rude people.
To bring it back to Guild Wars examples, Vizier Khilbron sank an entire nation. Why? To stop the charr invasion. For his god and for power and eternal lichdom.
As for his god, Abaddon, well, nevermind that he’s a murdering psychopath, he’s been -betrayed- and -backstabbed- by those dirty Five Human Gods and chucked into a plane of eternal Torment, so -of course- he wants revenge.
Minister Caudecus is wise and beloved by his supporters, especially among the nobility. He’s just politically opposed to Queen Jennah’s decisions and enough of a human supremacist to prefer dealing with cutthroat bandits than with charr.
Ajax Anvilburn, on the other hand, is a charr supremacist who can’t let go of the war either.
Kudu is researching Elder Dragons. Important research that can’t be disrupted or delayed for such minor things like moral qualms regarding the use of lesser species to accumulate further knowledge.
Mad King Thorn wants OUT. (And a joke that kills you.)
Bloody Prince Thorn wants OUT and to show daddy who’s boss.
Scarlet has no such motivation made clear, beyond apparently keeping one step ahead of the players and laughing at them. Her primary purpose appears to be trolling people. We call that a childish griefer, not a compelling villain.
Oh, and fusing seemingly random things together, I suppose. For research purposes. Because this somehow holds the key to… what? Leylines of magical energy? Did she get cheated by Zommoros once upon a time? Did she fuse her brain with an asura?
Maybe she found some really good weed when she looked into the Eternal Alchemy.
Between some looming RL deadlines coming up in a week, Guild Wars 2 Final Beta Weekend, and Steam Summer sales, I find myself distracted from being able to put in sufficient time with The Secret World.
It’ll keep.
Meanwhile, here’s an interim post about me test driving Train Simulator 2012 – something I picked up for the hell of it while it was at 90% off.
—
Simulation games deeply fascinate me with their intense focus on simulating something as close to reality as possible. I also suck at pretty much all of them. Something about not reading the effing manual, I think, nor giving myself time enough to learn all the controls and nuances.
I used to be much better when I was younger – I recall hours and hours on the Amiga playing Silent Hunter, a submarine sim, or Gunship, a helicopter sim, or F-16 Combat Pilot. I think I even gave Flight Simulator a go, though I never quite saw the point in those days of playing something without any missiles. What? Just transport people around from place to place? How boring is that, like a glorified bus driver?
(Then I found a book about Flight Simulator adventures, and Threading The Seattle Space Needle sounded immensely fun…)
Of course, as a kid, the one thing I could never figure out was how to land the fucking airplane without crashing.
(Nor did the virtual Needle ever survive my attempts to fly through it.)
Oops.
I didn’t read the manual then in those days either.
Nor did I really understand all the stuff on the HUD besides basic radar and what weapons were selected. I pretty much just treated the games like toys and had my fun with them regardless, even if true sim grognards would be recoiling in horror.
That is, until an adult neighbor came by for a visit and by chance, I happened to be fooling around with a flight sim. He also happened to be a real pilot.
Intrigued by the realization that personal computers were actually sophisticated enough to run sims (presumably he was more used to practising with full scale aircraft simulator equipment), he asked for a turn with the joystick. While explaining what little keyboard controls I had discovered by trial and error to him, I confessed I had no clue what the hell all the other dials and knobs and lines were, nor could I ever master landing planes.
Laughing, he opened my eyes to the depth of the simulation, “it’s just like a real plane” and explained every single dial, altitude control and what not, while I attempted to pick my jaw off the floor and absorb even a smidgen of the information he was imparting so matter-of-factly. Then he promptly demonstrated landing the plane safe and soundly. He’d barely touched the game for five minutes.
Dayum. (Well, considering he landed real passenger planes as his job, he’d -better- know how to land the things smoothly without a hitch, but as a kid, it knocked my socks off at the time.)
And so began my unrequited love affair with simulator games. (I’d like to get to know them better and they slap me in the face, pretty much.)
—
First things first, this is -not- a review of Train Simulator 2012. Nor is it a first impressions post. It is the ‘first post’ diary of a complete and utter newbie to trains.
(They’re not really my thing. I go for tanks, battleships, gunships, submarines, infantry, airplanes, cars, trains, pretty much in that order. Mechs, spaceships and weird shit like farming or janitorial implements and construction equipment not included in the above rankings.)
The good news, I found, is that it actually has tutorial missions.
The first tutorial explains the simplified controls (another plus!), which basically consisted of a lever to work up and down (up for more acceleration, and down for deceleration) and a button to push to determine if you were going in forward or reverse.
Phew. I can handle that. Thanks for remembering the newbies, developers!
It explains the portion of the interface which shows where your train is in relation to the track, including the destination where you’re trying to stop at, the speed limit indicator, and passenger boarding.
Already, trying to predict and apply the appropriate acceleration/deceleration rate to stop a heavy mass like a train on what essentially seemed like a dime (but was in virtual reality, a station) was proving a challenge worthy of my nub lack of skillz.
I got through the first tutorial, albeit with some embarrassed reversing as I overshot the target, and a new appreciation for subway train drivers, even if most of the trains in my country are completely automated and driverless or run with ATO and a human operator for safety.
Having gotten more or less a grasp on the basics, I decided to try out a scenario with simplified controls for fun. There was a huge list of them, neatly sortable by the type of train or the route, and helpfully labeled with difficulty level and the expected time to complete (some of them running in the hours! Eep.)
Easy difficulty level went without saying for the noob. I was debating between the shortest two, 15 and 20 minutes, when a Coals to Newcastle mission caught my eye. 30 minutes.
Extremely tickled bythe phrase, and the historical link, and with Sting’s Soul Cages and Island of Souls echoing in my brain, I went for it – though I was anticipating a good half hour of extreme boredom since this -was- easy difficulty level, on simplified controls.
I figured I could always try to roleplay it to kill time. (“Roleplay” is used in the sense of this article, which has an amazing paragraph on how you can even roleplay while playing Solitaire.
So how the heck do you roleplay while playing solitaire? There are no adventures or quests in a game of solitaire, no puzzles to solve, no dragons to slay, no princesses to rescue, no character attributes to build up – in short, none of the things we’d expect to find in an RPG. Well, in this type of situation, you have to roleplay in your mind. For example, you might put yourself in the role of a World War II Allied pilot who has been shot down and captured. Now, you’re in a prison camp. You’ve just been thrown into a solitary confinement cell for complaining about not getting enough food. It’s pretty dark, but a bit of light does manage to get in through the small slit window. And when the guards threw you in, they were laughing too hard or they were too lazy to bother searching you. As the result of this great stroke of luck, they didn’t find the dog- eared deck of playing cards that was in your pocket when they came for you. So you play solitaire. You play quietly so as not to alert the guards. And you play with a quiet desperation, not merely to entertain yourself, but to stave off the pangs of hunger – you’re getting even less to eat now – and to maintain your sanity.)
The briefing sets you in the mood already. It’s winter, there’s strikes happening all over, a backlog of freight to clear, and your job is to haul a load of coal to be transferred to a waiting ship. On time, or you won’t have a loading bay to unload in.
Turns out my ignorance of all things train-related yielded moments of skin-crawling anxiety and imaginary terror, mixed in with relatively bored uneventfulness.
I managed to get started okay, accelerating slowly, then fast, listening to the engine make strange noises in reaction and wondering if I was doing anything I shouldn’t. Then I debated with myself on the appropriate speed to maintain and settled on approaching as close to the speed limit as possible.
The glorious coal payload, and accelerating from 10.3mph to approach the 25mph speed limit. Gee, this is going to take a while…
Then the speed limit changed suddenly from 25 to 40. Eh? Er, okay, I’ll go faster.
Then to 85. Oooh er, should I be going that fast? What if I need to stop this thing?!
In retrospect, and as explained by the -second- tutorial mission, the one with the advanced train controls, the speed limits are actually indicated on the interface, highlighted in yellow. But I didn’t realize it then. I just noticed the speed limit changing at seemingly unpredictable moments.
Then there were the lights. The railway signal lights, that is. Remember, I know next to nothing about trains.
The first few lights I passed were facing away from me, but still glowing green. Okay, presumably those don’t apply to me. They must be for other trains and are just scenic ambience.
Then I passed some that were facing me, and green. Okay, green means go, presumably, just like normal traffic. But oh my god, what if they turn red, what do I do, what do I do, this train is moving damn fast, I hope there’s no railroad crossing traffic or an oncoming train switching rails, because it’s not going to be pretty with a noob at the controls. Come on, this is -easy- difficulty level, surely they won’t include such things until intermediate or hard, right?
Adding confusion to the neurotic worrying was the fact that as my train passed the railway signal, they changed from green to red. Oh god, does that mean I should have stopped? Or maybe they’re just indicating that my train is passing…
Wait, that one is yellow, do I slow down, am I supposed to slow down? Hang on, that’s hanging over another rail, there’s one nearer to my rail that is green.
After a while of this, it did seem like all the signals were green, and I decided not to worry about something that I probably didn’t have the current capacity to react to, anyway.
The rest of the journey went by in a mind-numbing haze, punctuated by me humming snippets of the Soul Cages, taking screenshots of passing landmarks, and experimenting with camera views as I succumbed to “What does this button do?” temptation.
Coupling view. Train tracks…passing… fast… Ulp.
I can see my house from here! (Nah, not really.)
At last, after numerous accelerations and decelerations, I reached the target yard. Wherein I discovered that I had no clue how to uncouple the coal wagons, nor where precisely I should be leaving them, and after a bunch of trial-and-error clicks, managed to decouple my engine from the entire string of wagons.
Alas, that didn’t seem to end the scenario – presumably because I was only supposed to leave specific numbered wagons, but had no clue how – and I ended up trundling my lone engine up the track further to no avail. Changed my mind as the 7.50 deadline was approaching, and went into reverse.
The plan was to back up to the abandoned coal wagons and attempt re-hitching and further trial and error. But having only two minutes on the clock made me a tide… hasty.
Going at way too fast a speed to brake appropriately (or rather the speed of a car going what, 30mph?), I careened into the stationary coal wagons and my engine swayed precariously, and promptly derailed.
ROFL. Oops.
Well, that’s one way to bring up the scenario end screen.
—
On checking the tutorial mission list, apparently How to handle freight is numbered tutorial mission 4, though number 3 is not currently showing.
I decided to sit through number 2 first, the advanced train controls, which was slightly more complex with a throttle, brake, and forward/reverse controls.
Alas, I overshot my passenger stop and failed the tutorial, and decided to stop there for the night. Until next time.
Why I Game 