Pips is a daily puzzle from The New York Times, one of the top video game companies on the planet (they also meddle in journalism). It’s fun, frustrating, and recently taught me something important.
In Pips you need to place a number of dominos on a board while following certain rules. Some groups of spots need to add up to a particular amount, for example, and there are individual spots that require a specific number.
To win the game, particularly on the hard puzzles, you typically need to look at the dominos you have and find pieces that, logically, have to go in a particular place. If there’s only one six, for example, and there’s a place on the board that requires a six, you know your six needs to go there. Placing one piece allows you to find another piece that logically has to go somewhere, which eventually cascades until you place the final piece.
The best games make you feel smart—Pips excels at this. Working out why a particular piece has to go somewhere is extremely satisfying, especially when doing so requires thinking ahead.
But sometimes it feels just as good to be wrong.
Anyone who plays Pips has, at some point, made a confident assumption about where a particular piece must go. It gives you the exact same feeling—of progress and of being smart. For a while.
What’s actually happening is that your initial bad assumption is cascading into more bad assumptions, until you get to the final few pieces and realize you’ve played yourself into a corner. Then you need to figure out where you went wrong, go back to that point, and work out the actual way forward.
In the short term, being confidently wrong about something feels just as good as actually being correct.
Life isn’t as clear-cut as a Pips board, unfortunately—sometimes being confidently incorrect is rewarded seemingly indefinitely (insert your own political joke here). Generally, though, bad assumptions lead to bad outcomes, even if they feel useful for a time. Eventually you need to look back and figure out where you went wrong, then correct for that.
This idea goes against the grain at the moment. American society believes that backing down on something you believe is weak, even if it turns out your belief isn’t true. But changing your mind when bad ideas don’t work isn’t weakness—it’s strength. It’s how you learn to be better. It’s a skill we’re all going to need.