Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

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Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 · rating details · 1,070 ratings · 229 reviews

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken, and why do we react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness, and shame?

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Hardcover, 416 pages

Published June 8th 2010 by Ecco (first published May 2nd 2009)

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Jul 07, 2010 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010, disappointing

I am not a particularly violent person. But there were so many places in this book where I wanted to sit the author down, smack her briskly and scream at her "What were you thinking? It started with the very first word in the book, freshly minted for the occasion by the author. You read it and experience an involuntary recoil of revulsion at the sheer tin-eared ugliness of it. For God's sake, Kathryn Schulz, please don't title your opening chapter "Wrongology". If the first word in your book alr...more I am not a particularly violent person. But there were so many places in this book where I wanted to sit the author down, smack her briskly and scream at her "What were you thinking? It started with the very first word in the book, freshly minted for the occasion by the author. You read it and experience an involuntary recoil of revulsion at the sheer tin-eared ugliness of it. For God's sake, Kathryn Schulz, please don't title your opening chapter "Wrongology". If the first word in your book already makes my flesh crawl, that's hardly a good sign.

I chose this book based on a fawningly positive NY Times review by Dwight Garner, who obviously suffers from some kind of unhealthy crush
on Kathryn Schulz. According to Dwight, KS "flies high in the intellectual skies, leaving beautiful sunlit contrails". Now, I get off on the ozone rush of huffing a beautiful intellectual contrail as much as the next reader, but I'm afraid in this case Dwight is letting his slobbering fanboy worship cloud his judgement. Kathryn Schulz is not stupid, but she's certainly no intellectual goddess. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but given the direction she chose to take her investigation in this book, the reader begins to wonder if her choice was a wise one and (I hate to say it) if she really has the intellectual chops for the task she sets herself.

I think it would have been a perfectly straightforward matter to come up with a reasonable working definition of "being wrong", one would that cover the great majority (say 95%) of situations that are of practical interest. Had Kathryn Schulz chosen to adopt this kind of pragmatic approach, she would have written a considerably shorter book and, I think, a much better one. Unfortunately, she has chosen instead to wax philosophical about epistemological difficulties in coming up with appropriate definitions of concepts such as "knowledge", "being right", "error", and if one wants to bump it up a meta-level, knowledge of errors (one's own and those of others). Not surprisingly this turns out to be a rabbit hole, and not a particularly interesting one. Schulz's choice to explore these questions has the immediate effect of lengthening the book considerably and burdening whole sections with the kind of jargon only a professional philosopher could love. A case in point: the First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation , which is apparently the phrase philosophers use for the phenomenon that anyone pressed to defend his/her beliefs will say that it's because they are true. Flawed logic, conflict of interest, reason clouded by emotion -- these problems may be immediately evident to other people, but we are notoriously bad at detecting them in our own thinking. To her credit, the author acknowledges the clunkiness of the philosphical jargon; I just wish the replacement she proposes - the 'Cuz It's True Constraint didn't set my teeth on edge with the faux-folksiness of that 'cuz. But this reflects a problem with Schulz's style that bothered me throughout the book. Maybe it's a consequence of her time as a reporter for Rolling Stone, but she never seems to find a consistent register. As she flips back and forth from discussing scientific results to illustrations from popular culture, this failure to establish an appropriate register becomes jarring. Whether it's her choice to write "fuck up" when "screw up" would clearly have been more appropriate, or sentences like this one, about Hamlet: "It's not as if the prince dillydallies for fourteen scenes over whether to order the BLT or the chicken salad", I just did not enjoy Schulz's writing style.

Which is a shame, really, because buried in there among the superfluous philosophical baggage and the rambling mess of her own prose, she has some genuinely interesting points to make. In particular, her observation that making mistakes is an intrinsic part of human nature, and is an essential component of scientific enquiry, is important, if not particularly novel. However, Schulz is not the first person to have considered the questions in her book. A considerably clearer, more focused, discussion can be found in the excellent "Mistakes Were Made" by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The rambling undisciplined character of Schulz's writing prevents me from giving her book more than two stars. The disappointment is that, with some decent editing, she could have written a far better book.
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Jun 10, 2010 Reese rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads, gr-finds

My copy of BEING WRONG: ADVENTURES IN THE MARGIN OF ERROR was a gift -- a Goodreads giveaway. My being wrong -- occasionally, frequently, perhaps consistently -- is a "gift" from our Creator and/or my creators. The ways in which I experience being wrong are probably also "gifts" from my creators, teachers, friends, et al. As a parent, I have passed on the "gift" of intermittent or perpetual wrongness and promoted certain reactions to being wrong. When my son was a young child, he would respond t...more My copy of BEING WRONG: ADVENTURES IN THE MARGIN OF ERROR was a gift -- a Goodreads giveaway. My being wrong -- occasionally, frequently, perhaps consistently -- is a "gift" from our Creator and/or my creators. The ways in which I experience being wrong are probably also "gifts" from my creators, teachers, friends, et al. As a parent, I have passed on the "gift" of intermittent or perpetual wrongness and promoted certain reactions to being wrong. When my son was a young child, he would respond to "What time is it?" with answers such as "It's approximately 3:27." If from this anecdote you have concluded that being right is very important in the family that I helped to create, you are -- I believe -- not wrong. Half-jokingly, my son would announce scores in the family's never-ending game of I'm-Right-You're-Wrong. While I used to think that our determination to avoid being wrong was extreme, Schulz's book has enabled me to see that our responses to wrongness are not unusual. For that reason alone, I can say that reading BEING WRONG was not a waste of my time.

Nevertheless, I believe that I am not the "right" audience for this book. Too much information for an old woman with a fairly narrow range of interests and an old woman already familiar with Schulz's most important points. Other readers, too, if they get as far as the book's midpoint, are likely to decide that the work was not intended for them. If it happens to land in a bookstore's self-help section, heaven help the customer service staff of any bookstore that doesn't give refunds. I can imagine certain chapters of BEING WRONG showing up in rhetoric/readers and anthologies of nonfiction prose. And I can see the title of this book on syllabi for interdisciplinary studies courses. Schulz discusses history, philosophy, psychology, logic, sociology, theology, literature, and various sciences. Even if readers ignore the forty-five pages of endnotes, the number and length of her footnotes may cause some to wonder: "Am I reading a marketable version of the author's dissertation?" In many ways, the work is a textbook -- a well-written text, a valuable text. Its greatest value is in its potential to influence students -- young voters -- who need to understand the dangers of absolutism and to recognize that, unlike a rose, "a truth is not a truth is not a truth." How different our world would be if most people did not confuse beliefs and interpretations with facts. How different our world would be if most people acknowledged their mistakes and consciously used them to develop a new attitude, a better system, a higher standard of conduct.

Suppose that all that I've written about Schulz's book is wrong -- and it may be -- so what? I've only presented beliefs -- I think. Can my beliefs be wrong? I don't know. Do you know? Do you believe that you know? Will you know tomorrow? If I'm wrong, will you laugh?
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Dec 20, 2011 Jane rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: psychology

This is really a must-read. Do you realize how little we can trust ourselves to perceive the truth? This is a great analysis of how we get things wrong, why it matters, and why errors can be a good thing in the journey of life. Plus, its analysis of Hamlet is spot on. I mean, if the only evidence of murder you have is a ghost's message, don't you think you'd better try to vet the facts a bit before taking justice in your own hands?-g

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Apr 17, 2013 Abdulrahman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

so yes.

this is NOT a light read, as a start.. considering that I had to translate/comprehend/critic the ideas all at once. It kinda took me 2 hours to finish 30 pages or so.. *english is my 2nd language here*..
The book starts so well into its core concept and it keeps going so thoroughly discussing the ideas and concepts. sometimes it goes all the way to the core of philosophy and logic and all these mind twisting concepts of error and wrong and emotion and perception..
At other chapters you fee...more

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Jun 18, 2012 Ed rated it 5 of 5 stars

Absolutely loved this book, which really does uncover the extent to which we deny our mistakes and how much we would gain by admitting them, at least to ourselves. There is also an art to understanding that doubt is good so long as it does not paralyze us.

The author found that when she told people that she was writing about mistakes, they all said: 'Oh I have made tons of mistakes in my life'. She would reply: 'Oh it would really help my research if you could tell me about a few of them.' And...more

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Feb 02, 2013 Jack Hart rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: decision-theory

This is, to my way of thinking, an extraordinary book about a great topic. Although, if you're not an intellectually ambitious person the book may seem to have, as several Good Reads reviewers opined, too damn many words.

But I like Kathryn Schulz's prose. She knows her western canon and cites it deftly. In the course of elaborating her ideas about the experience of wrongness she'll even uncover a novel point here and there about the literature and philosophy she so clearly loves.

I also like tha...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Stewart rated it 5 of 5 stars

Over many years I have grappled with the related issues of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. When measured against what there is to know, what we humans do in fact know is in the order of zero-point-several zeroes. No matter how well-read, well-traveled, or well-informed we think we are, our ignorance is immense. We have to make decisions – most trivial, many of them life-changing, a few of them life-and-death – based on a trifling amount of information, the vast majority second- or third-hand...more Over many years I have grappled with the related issues of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. When measured against what there is to know, what we humans do in fact know is in the order of zero-point-several zeroes. No matter how well-read, well-traveled, or well-informed we think we are, our ignorance is immense. We have to make decisions – most trivial, many of them life-changing, a few of them life-and-death – based on a trifling amount of information, the vast majority second- or third-hand. Because the amount of information we use to make everyday decisions ranges from minute to microscopic, we often make mistakes and miscalculations. We suffer misunderstandings. Unaware of so much in the universe, we get buffeted and in some cases crushed by its forces. To err is indeed human.
Thus when I found a book on error in a recent Daedalus book catalog, I quickly ordered it. And I wasn’t disappointed. "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Shulz is an amazingly insightful, humorous, and quotable book, drawing on philosophy, science, history, politics, literature, and pop culture.
That I hadn’t heard of this 2010 book or seen a review in the many newspapers and magazines I read shows the ignorance in which I am immersed, despite thinking I am a well-read individual. It seems this worthwhile book somehow got lost in the shuffle among the tens of thousands of books published every year in English.
Shulz, a newspaper and magazine journalist and author, looks at error in many of its forms – the personal, political, religious, philosophical – and our efforts to deny our mistakes and deflect blame. She examines the success in lessening error in the life-and-death areas of aviation and hospitals. She spends a lot of time on inductive reasoning, our way of making sense of the world, and its limitations. She looks at error in romantic love and the rare cases of radical shifts of belief that people have made.
There is so much that is wise and quotable in this book that I couldn’t begin to list all the passages.
Although Shulz spends many pages discussing the larger issues people can be wrong about – religion, philosophy, science, world politics – she also spends a lot of time talking about situations closer to home, including relationships. “Our default attitude toward wrongness, then – our distaste for error and our appetite for being right – tends to be rough on relationships. This applies equally to relationships among nations, communities, colleagues, friends, and (as will not be lost on most readers) relatives. Indeed, an old adage of therapists is that you can either be right or be in a relationship: you can remain attached to Team You winning every confrontation, or you can remain attached to friends and family, but good luck trying to do both.
“If insisting on our rightness tends to compromise our relationships, it also reflects poorly on our grasp of probability.” We have thousands, if not tens of thousands of beliefs, ranging from the trivial (Joe’s Pizza Place closes at 9 p.m. on Fridays) to the complex and interlocking system of religious, political, and philosophical beliefs through which we experience the world. That all of these myriad beliefs are correct and reflective of the real world is exceedingly unlikely.
Shulz opines that the world would be a better place if we admitted how commonplace error is, in general and in our specific cases.
“As a culture, we haven’t even mastered the basic skill of saying ‘I was wrong.’ This is a startling deficiency, given the simplicity of the phrase, the ubiquity of error, and the tremendous public service that acknowledging it can provide.”
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May 26, 2012 Joy H. marked it as keep-in-mind

Shelves: non-fiction, psychology

_Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error_ (2009) by Kathryn Schulz.
Added 5/26/12.
I came across the mention of this book in a NY Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/boo...

In the article, Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, says the following in answer to the question: "Is there any book you wish all incoming freshmen at Harvard would read?":
===================================================
"Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong advocates doubt as a skill and prai...more

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Dec 13, 2011 Steve Penner rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Being Wrong" was a wonderful and fascinating plunge into the world of wrongology. It covers a wide-ranging host of topics on error, how it happens and particularly how we respond to being wrong. Her basic premise is that there are two models of error. One model propounds error as something to be avoided at all costs as it provides no benefits, only embarrassment and shame. The second, which Schulz celebrates, is that error is common and natural. It's benefit is that we can learn, grow and chang...more

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Jun 03, 2011 Nikitabanana rated it 3 of 5 stars

I consider myself the consummate fuckup. Even when I succeed in accomplishing something difficult, once the warmth of self-congratulatory celebration dissipates I can’t help thinking about every screw up and each way they’ll likely weigh me down during the course of my life the rest of my life and preclude me from divinity and the promises of pennies from heaven. I know a lot of people who think like this while we know that this manner of thinking is stupid and counterproductive, every time we t...more I consider myself the consummate fuckup. Even when I succeed in accomplishing something difficult, once the warmth of self-congratulatory celebration dissipates I can’t help thinking about every screw up and each way they’ll likely weigh me down during the course of my life the rest of my life and preclude me from divinity and the promises of pennies from heaven. I know a lot of people who think like this while we know that this manner of thinking is stupid and counterproductive, every time we try to mentally put our mistakes into perspective and balance them with our accomplishments, the inner asshole that we all have in our head won’t let us accept them, and gleefully drowns out rationality by reciting a grocery list of all our screw ups. How could we make all those mistakes?

Being Wrong provides an absorbing counterpoint to the notion that making a mistake somehow diminishes you as a person. “Twelve hundred years before Rene’ Descartes penned his famous ‘I think, therefore I am,’ the philosopher Augustine wrote ‘fallor ergo sum.’” – I err therefore I am. We shouldn’t fear error; rather, we should embrace it because it’s our capacity for making mistakes that makes us who we are. Schulz explores the nature of error: are big mistakes fundamentally different from small mistakes, or are they all essentially the same? How much does peer pressure, or crowd response, affect our capacity to blunder? Why do we remember relatively insignificant mistakes for the rest of our lives, long after they have ceased to be relevant to anything? And why do we take being wrong so personally. As Molière said, “It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.”

Shultz is a witty and dynamic writer, capable of quoting everyone from Aristotle, to Pliny the Elder, to Hamlet and Beyonce. She argues in “Being Wrong” that, of all the things we’re wrong about, our ideas about error are probably our “meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.” She continues, “Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.” She is full of stories and anecdotes but avoids turning the book into a “wrongology slide-show”. The stories include everything from Alan Greenspan’s firm faith in the economy proved wrong, a doomsday prophet whose apocalypse wasn’t now, a sexual assault victim whose mistaken testimony jailed an innocent man and a Klansman who became an unlikely advocate for civil rights. Shultz argues that when people are confronted with their wrongness, they can either must accept it, deny it or be transformed by it.

However, her book still doesn’t read like a book; more like a collection of essays on the theory of wrongness. The book is fascinating from chapter to chapter, but there isn’t a theory that encapsulates the whole book, except that we shouldn’t worry about making mistakes. At the beginning of the book, she calls the book a study of “wrongology” but never builds the systematic arguments that “¬-ology” requires. Instead we get a “wrongologue” — a series of observations and insights that leave us feeling that we’ve had all the good thoughts one could possibly have about wrongness, but that we still don’t know which ones are . . . well, right. There’s none of the necessary conclusions about being wrong, so the book is a fascinating and compelling read, but not life-changing or groundbreaking.
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Mar 19, 2011 Chris Walker rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great stuff. This is what writers are for. To set down in language what you feel but can't necessarily enunciate well yourself. Take this example: "Fortunately, we don't get stuck in this place of pure wrongness very often. And we don't get stuck there via the collapse of small or medium-size beliefs. We get stuck there when we are really wrong about really big things - beliefs so important and far-reaching that we can neither easily replace them nor easily live without them. If our trivial beli...more Great stuff. This is what writers are for. To set down in language what you feel but can't necessarily enunciate well yourself. Take this example: "Fortunately, we don't get stuck in this place of pure wrongness very often. And we don't get stuck there via the collapse of small or medium-size beliefs. We get stuck there when we are really wrong about really big things - beliefs so important and far-reaching that we can neither easily replace them nor easily live without them. If our trivial beliefs sometimes burst as lightly as bubbles - just a pop of surprise and they're gone - these gigantic beliefs collapse like stars, leaving only us and a black hole behind. If you mortgaged your family's future on your faith in Bernie Madoff; if you hitched your whole wagon to a doctrine or a deity you no longer believe in; if you were wrong about someone you loved and the kind of life you thought the two of you would live together; if you have betrayed your own principles in any of the countless dark ways we can surprise ourselves over the course of a lifetime: if any of this or anything like this has happened to you, then you have suffered in the space of pure wrongness." Yes, the author gets a bit irritating from time to time with her too hip style of writing, meandering tone and personal intrusion in the pages (a bit like, but much more than, Malcolm Gladwell). Yes, there are too many footnotes where she wanders off on tangents (although usually interesting ones). But if you are interested in what the philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have to say about error in the many facets of our lives, she's done the work for you. And there's so much good content here to ponder - some of it is revelatory like glimpsing the Matrix - I think I'll have to read it again (and I don't say that lightly, given the pile of books to read beside my bed). This is above all else a comforting book. While she argues that those who are depressed may just be seeing existential matters more clearly than the rest of us, the book concludes that: "No matter how often we have gotten things wrong in the past, we evince an abiding and touching faith in our own stories and theories. Traditionally, we are anxious to deny that those stories and theories are stories and theories - that we must rely on our own imperfect representations to make sense of the world, and are therefore destined to err. But ...[ultimately these are also]... the hallmark of two of our highest human endeavours, art and science, and through them we can imagine new realities." (less)

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Sep 14, 2010 Elizabeth Hunter rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, brain-mind

I found Being Wrong slow going, not because I wasn't enjoying it--although I do think that the first couple of chapters are the most dense--but because I needed to stop and digest and think about how what Schulz says resonates with my own experiences.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book, was Schulz' examination and concise rendering of questions I've often pondered. She looks at why we're wrong so often, why we have trouble admitting that and go to great lengths to stay on the "right...more

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Sep 02, 2010 Cathy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, non-fiction

I don't know about you but I'm rarely, if ever, wrong. No, really! I'm almost always right and the same is probably true of you. As Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong; Adventures in the Margin of Error, explains, it's almost hardwired in humans to dislike being mistaken. Being wrong, even about minor things, makes almost everyone so incredibly, throughly uncomfortable that we often can't admit to ourselves that we've made a mistake. Yet, being wrong is also a key to growth and essential to ou...more

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Jul 23, 2010 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: engaging-nonfiction

Interesting how polarizing this book is. I think an open mind and a willingness to be wrong are helpful as you read; there's a lot to be gotten from the psychological delving. An excellent examination of the psychological and physiological aspects of "being wrong." The first 1/2-2/3 of the book are dedicated to explaning WHY we are wrong, and why we usually think we are right! The rest of the book talks about acknowledging when we are wrong and why being wrong can is a good thing, and indeed an...more

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May 30, 2012 Erika RS rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book explores the psychology of being wrong. Schulz's thesis is that while being wrong can sometimes be bad, even tragic, our attitudes toward wrongness are more negative than they should be. Although being wrong can lead to problems from embarrassment to death, most instances of being wrong provide an opportunity for learning and growth. Being wrong, or at least the psychological pattern of being wrong, is the basis of much humor and art. Humor often works by setting up an expectation and...more

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May 27, 2011 Forrest rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: cbriii

It would be easy to simply say that reading Being Wrong is a small but powerful life changing experience. It very much is, but just saying that is a bit of a cop-out. The book is a brilliantly written examination of the concept of error from every perspective imaginable. Schulz explores wrongness as an outside observer, a philosopher, a victim and a compassionate friend. By so fully embracing the idea on every level, she synthesizes a unified thesis from many disparate parts and supports every c...more It would be easy to simply say that reading Being Wrong is a small but powerful life changing experience. It very much is, but just saying that is a bit of a cop-out. The book is a brilliantly written examination of the concept of error from every perspective imaginable. Schulz explores wrongness as an outside observer, a philosopher, a victim and a compassionate friend. By so fully embracing the idea on every level, she synthesizes a unified thesis from many disparate parts and supports every conclusion she draws with the best in logic and anecdote.

At the core of Being Wrong is a suggestion. Not advice, so much as a recommendation for people interested in living a little better. Embrace your mistakes. It’s not about making mistakes and not feeling bad about it. Schulz wants us all to live with our errors a little more and not shove them away in a flurry of denial and justification. She goes on to examine the reasons why we are so adverse to being wrong, from the biological, (it doesn’t make evolutionary sense to be uncertain about anything) to the social, (our culture rejects leader figures who are indecisive) to the psychological. (depressed people have much more accurate worldviews than balanced personalties)

Schulz is at her strongest when she is telling a story. The highlights of the books are the anecdotes she uses to set up each of her chapters. The stories include everything from Alan Greenspan’s unwavering faith in the economy proved wrong, to the touching story of an Exalted Cyclops of the KKK becoming one of the frontline fighters in the war for desegregated schools. Schulz has a deft hand for splicing these stories with the philosophical and scientific meat that connect them back to the reader’s everyday experience. She does tend to get bogged down in some of the dense history of the topic, but the frequent footnotes and witty asides help to break these thick sections up a little.

The text itself induces stumbling, at least for me. It’s probably because the subject matter makes me paranoid that I’ve missed something, or misinterpreted a critical conclusion. To that end, I’d really recommend reading this book in chapters, rather than tackling the entire thing all at once. The writing lends it self to easy sectioning and while reading order is important, the ideas are all pretty sticky, which makes it easier to spread over time.

Close to the end of the third section, Schulz examines the story of Penny Beerntsen, a woman who was raped and ended up falsely accusing another man of the crime. He was eventually proved innocent, but in the interim the woman had struggled to get closure in other ways. She wanted to understand the reasons people did horrible things to each other. To do this, she volunteered in prisons and really got to know the realities of being a convicted criminal in the United States. When the verdict came down proving that she had identified the wrong man, she was horrified, but she instantly accepted her mistake and wanted to somehow make up for it. Rather than try to deny her fault, she only sought to improve the life of the man she had thrown into prison unjustly.

While this is an extreme example, I can’t think of a better example of being a truly human person. It would be an exaggeration to say I want be like Penny, but her example is one that I can value as someone who can be wrong and can be stupid about it. And really, we all fall into that category sometimes. Anyone who has ever been a critic of any kind knows the giddy thrill of being unquestionably right. (you cannot successfully argue against opinion) It is never a bad thing to gain a little perspective on that feeling, and that’s just what this book has allowed me to do.(less)

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Jun 06, 2010 Sarah rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

Being Wrong. Kathryn Schulz. 2010. Ecco. 400 pages. ISBN 9780061176043.

Being Wrong is an exploration of how and why making errors is a crucial, natural and necessary component of being human, and how we must embrace being wrong to grow as people.

Falling into the psychology versus scientific realm, Being Wrong provides an interesting history of wrongness using numerous examples of pop-culture incidents; if you can consider an intricate look at being wrong an interesting subject, that is.

Schulz's...more Being Wrong. Kathryn Schulz. 2010. Ecco. 400 pages. ISBN 9780061176043.

Being Wrong is an exploration of how and why making errors is a crucial, natural and necessary component of being human, and how we must embrace being wrong to grow as people.

Falling into the psychology versus scientific realm, Being Wrong provides an interesting history of wrongness using numerous examples of pop-culture incidents; if you can consider an intricate look at being wrong an interesting subject, that is.

Schulz's voice is very eccentric, and the book will flood you with a barage of examples on how being wrong has transformed people and generated numerous events and mis-adventures since the beginning of time. Schulz also uses the experiences of past leaders and world-renowned figures as examples in terms of how being wrong has been significant in history.

Being Wrong reads very much like a narrative, and we can really hear Schulz's opinions on the matter. Because the book has this particular tone, it tends to be quite long, drawn-out, and somewhat boring in most places.

If the book had been written more to cater to the common audience using layman's terms, it would have been infinitely more interesting and appealing. I also noticed there are no definitions to some terms, phrases and words that the majority of readers will fail to understand. It's great when I can learn new words throughout the course of a book, but needing a dictionary several times in one paragraph tends to become more work then enjoyment. You can open Being Wrong to any random page in the book and immediately be able to pinpoint a sentence that requires assistance in some way, shape, or form to understand. To provide an example, I can open the book to a random page in Chapter 4 and find the following sentence,

"For us, as for those shoppers, something in the alchemy of the interaction often causes our half-baked hypotheses to congeal on the spot."

What does that MEAN??!! What exactly is a "half-baked hypothesis"?

As it stands, I don't think Being Wrong will be a great experience for someone who isn't a psychologist or even mildly interested in the subject of being wrong. I give kudos to those readers who can interpret and enjoy Being Wrong.

For more book reviews by DreamSE22 visit http://dreamworldbooks.com.(less)

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Jun 22, 2012 Ryan Holiday rated it 3 of 5 stars

I should have liked this more than I did. Having sat on it a bit, I kept going back to thinking how much I like the author. The book's a bit long at times and redundant, and I don't think it's organized well, but it's the right kind of book. There's actually a saying in the The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Interviews with Pierre Hadot -- that real philosophical dialog sets out to form rather than inform. That's what this book does. Most of these psychology books try to teach you a bunch of st...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A very enlightening book and a fun read once you get past the first couple chapters which I found very hard to get through. A celebration of error: why we err, how we do it, and how we react to it.

An early quote that says much about the book: " we love to know things, but ultimately we can't know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing we don't know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up. All this serves to render the category of 'knowledge' unreliable".

We don't...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Kirsty Darbyshire rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: kindle

As fascinating a book as I've read for a long time. The writing style is rather quirky, and I can see it could annoy a reader but I liked it all the more for not being afraid to have an individual voice. I seem to have read a lot of books in the vague 'popular science'ish genre that regurgitate the same examples, the same psychological experiments, each time. Either this book was just different enough to what I've read before or the author had made a real effort to find new and interesting examp...more As fascinating a book as I've read for a long time. The writing style is rather quirky, and I can see it could annoy a reader but I liked it all the more for not being afraid to have an individual voice. I seem to have read a lot of books in the vague 'popular science'ish genre that regurgitate the same examples, the same psychological experiments, each time. Either this book was just different enough to what I've read before or the author had made a real effort to find new and interesting examples, whichever, I was grateful not to feel like I was reading a rehash of the same things once more.

I tended to think of the book as being not about being wrong, but the inverse, about how we know when we are right and when we should reconsider. I've been concerned about issues like confirmation bias (where basically you think evidence that agrees with you is good and that which disagrees with you is bad, so you only ever get more entrenched in the view you first held) for some years now, and I was pleased to find some useful discussion of how to counter it in this book.

Some quotes that stood out for me:

As soon as we think we are right about something, we narrow our focus, attending only to details that support our belief, or ceasing to listen altogether.

You don’t need to be one of history’s greatest scientists to combat your inductive biases. Remembering to attend to counterevidence isn’t difficult; it is simply a habit of mind. But, like all habits of mind, it requires conscious cultivation.

“The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them,” the writer Louis Menand observed. “… The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.”

Doubt, it seems, is a skill—and one that, as we saw earlier, needs to be learned and honed. Credulity, by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct.

Our commitment to an idea, he concluded, “is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.”

Definitely a book I will return to and one that made me think.(less)

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Mar 13, 2012 Manuel Palacio rated it 5 of 5 stars

i love this book so far. one of my favorite is the quote: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.”
― Philip Roth

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Jun 04, 2010 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

Two truths readily acknowledged: being right feels oh so good, and being wrong feels just awful. Nuff said? No! As it turns out, there's a lot more to be said, and Ms. Schulz says it quite elegantly, entertainingly, and movingly.

With examples ranging from the mundane to the tragic, she carefully explains precisely how errors come about and why we feel about them as we do. Along the way, she makes the point that error not only has the capability to embarrass us, but also can have the power to te...more

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Dec 09, 2010 George Musser rated it 3 of 5 stars

A worthwhile read that gives me much to think about in my own life. Schulz's broad point is that the fear of committing an error is often worse than the error itself -- it fills us with a fear of exploration and prevents us from acknowledging, correcting, and learning from our mistakes. The risk of error is often a necessary tradeoff for creativity and growth. I think Schulz convincingly makes her case. I vow to ease up on screwups, whether mine or others'. To err is human; to forgive, humane.

Bu...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Charlie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really really liked this book. It was wonderfully written, and had tons of interesting insights, anecdotes, and interesting if not always persuasive arguments. My only problem is that as much nuance as the book gave to being wrong, and all of the small and big ways in which we can be wrong, it seemed to present a pretty simple and straightforward account of truth, where truth was mostly understood in a straightforwardly scientific sense. I don't think this is the only way of thinking about tru...more

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Jul 07, 2011 Richard Stephenson rated it 3 of 5 stars

So, have you wanted to REALLY get a good look at just how wrong people can be? How really, deeply seeded in error (and denial) a person can go before coming up for air? Hopefully learning a lesson along the way. Some do... some don't.

Being Wrong will make you think, question your self, your judgments, and maybe even your past to date. The details, and sometimes over-analyzing or mis-analyzing, might bog you down a bit, but this book really will turn the light on our less-than-finer sides.

...for...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Nolivienne Ermitaño rated it 4 of 5 stars

Considering this book by Shulz as a serendipitous discovery at local bookstore I hardly visit, I must say that it was, for me, a surprisingly wise investment: I learned, with greater profundity, the psychology and philosophy of self-righteousness gone amok. And just as importantly, I realized that what Shulz colloquially refers to as the 'error of blindness' is virtually synonymous to what I call the 'delusion of infallibility,' which is an affliction that, I think, usually infects people in aut...more

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Jan 25, 2012 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars

A fabulous non-fiction book about the core trait of making mistakes and learning from them - and why it makes us feel so bad.

Details: Schultz takes us through the human experience starting with using common tricks like visual illusions to explain our misperceptions. She quickly moves into a deep exploration of why we hate being wrong (and why we enjoy it when others are). She is very sensitive in how she explains her own errors of the past and why some are still memorable many years later.

If you...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Rick Gilson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: change-inspiration, self-leadership, books-i-own

Picked it up while visiting the campus at Harvard last summer (2012) noted that the President of Harvard suggested it was the one book all Harvard students should read. Challenges the reader to reflect upon their thoughts and actions, particularly to consider that being wrong is not the problem so much as refusing to respond in a positive manner on those occasions when we are wrong that is key. I enjoyed the conversation on how much we struggle as a society to support each other in learning from...more

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Mar 01, 2013 Anna Swartz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kathryn Schulz argues passionately for the value of error. She shows us that not only is 'being wrong' a given in life, it is also a gift that has the power to transform our worldviews, our relationships, and ourselves. By drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, psycholoanalysts and a bit of common sense, she charts out the intellectual history of the shifting definitions and attitudes ascribed to being wrong and masterfully combines it with relevant & relatable examples from the present day. S...more

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Mar 21, 2013 JohnR rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology

I loved this book. It was funny, interesting, informative and I quite definitely now fancy Kathryn Schulz, but it did go on a bit.

I feel bad saying that. It’s very readable, nicely structured and has certainly made me think about the role of error in my life and more generally, but, despite my now fancying Kathryn Schulz, I have to admit that it did somewhat labour its point.

The book is about how error is not just an inevitable part of being human, it can actually be a positive part of being hu...more

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About Kathryn Schulz

Kathryn Schulz is a journalist, author, and public speaker with a credible (if not necessarily enviable) claim to being the world's leading wrongologist. Her freelance writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, the Boston Globe, the "Freakonomics" blog of The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publicat...more

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Quotes from Being Wrong: Adventure...

“To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling and sometimes even dangerous but in the end it is a journey and a story. Who really wants to stay at home and be right when you can don your armor spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world True you might get lost along get stranded in a swamp have a scare at the edge of a cliff thieves might steal your gold brigands might imprison you in a cave sorcerers might turn you into a toad but what of what To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in the spirit that this book is written.” — 12 people liked it

“...[W]hen we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.” — 7 people liked it

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