Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

This book is staked on the soundness of that observation: that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.

This idea—that from error springs insight—is a hallmark of the optimistic model of wrongness.

After all, knowing what we don’t know is the beginning (and, in some religious and intellectual traditions, the entirety and end) of wisdom.

“When one admits that nothing is certain,” proposed the philosopher Bertrand Russell, “one must, I think, also add that some things are much more nearly certain than others.”

In the end, though, it is belief that is by far the broader, more complex, and more interesting category.

But it is true (and not coincidental) that belief is also the atomic unit of error.

If we want to understand how we err, we need to look to how we believe.

“the bias blind spot.”

So we look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look at our beliefs and see reality. This is the essence of the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint: every one of us confuses our models of the world with the world itself—not occasionally or accidentally but necessarily.

ignorance isn’t necessarily a vacuum waiting to be filled; just as often, it is a wall, actively maintained.

psychologists and neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition.

This kind of guesswork is also how you learned almost everything you know about the world.

power of inductive reasoning

What makes us right is what makes us wrong.

confirmation bias is the tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than to evidence that challenges them.

The Iraq War also provides a nice example of another form of confirmation bias.

In 1972, the psychologist Irving Janis defined groupthink as, “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

So certainty is lethal to two of our most redeeming and humane qualities, imagination and empathy.

In a practical sense, then, it’s clear that we sometimes behave as if a proposition is true before we have had a chance to evaluate it.

undecided voter.

(For starters, as we saw earlier, that ideal thinker isn’t so ideal in the first place.)

“cognitive dissonance.”

I gestured toward this difficulty in Chapter One, when I noted that we can’t talk about error in the first person present tense. The moment in which we can logically say “I am wrong” simply doesn’t exist;

This is the thing about fully experiencing wrongness. It strips us of all our theories, including our theories about ourselves. This isn’t fun while it’s happening—it leaves us feeling flayed, laid bare to the bone and the world—but it does make possible that rarest of occurrences: real change.

In later years, the part of the state near Miller’s home would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so ablaze with religious conviction that there was scarcely anyone left to convert.

Still, there’s a fine line between explaining our mistakes and explaining them away.

Penny’s sense of horror and responsibility was twofold. The first, obvious, part was that she had helped send a man to prison for eighteen years for a crime he didn’t commit.

the ultimate apology is how you live the rest of your life.

And we saw it in the deepest emotional sense in the chapter on denial and acceptance, when Penny Beerntsen realized that making a horrible mistake did not make her—and does not make anyone—a horrible person.

Ultimately, then, we are transformed by error through accepting it. To be judgmental, we must feel sure that we know right from wrong, and that we ourselves would never confuse the two. But the experience of erring shows us otherwise. It reminds us that, having been wrong in the past, we could easily be wrong again—and not just in the abstract but right now, here in the middle of this argument about pickles or constellations or crumb cake. At the same time, it reminds us to treat other people with compassion, to honor them in their possible rightness as well as their inevitable, occasional wrongness.

That’s important, because, as Harville Hendrix observed, listening is one of the best ways we can make room in our lives for our own fallibility.

Importance of listening

Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds.

As the French philosopher Joseph-Marie de Maistre pointed out, there is no practical difference between a leader who cannot err and a leader who cannot be accused of erring.)

According to Rousseau, then, error could be combated by letting the people vote for their nation’s leaders and policies. According to Jefferson, it could be combated by letting them speak their minds. Direct election and freedom of speech—these are, respectively, the definition and the emblem of democracy.

peace. In keeping with the ethos of the Enlightenment, these thinkers grasped that truth and error are often unrecognizable as such in the moment.

state.* By contrast, multiparty systems are fundamentally error-tolerant. They do not merely permit but actually require competing points of view.

As that suggests, the existence of political parties goes hand-in-hand with the existence of free speech.

I take those words to mean something even stronger: freedom is not freedom if it doesn’t include the right to make mistakes.

Here is our paradox again: the only way to safeguard against error is to embrace it.

Making mistakes as one might make poems, rejecting certainty, deliberately exploring ambiguity and error: this is the optimistic model of wrongness on Ecstasy.

(Scientists, like poets, could fairly claim that, “what we are engaged in … is error.”) In other words, error is central to both the why and the how of science and art: it gives us a reason as well as a means to pursue them.

truth. Countless studies have shown that people who suffer from depression have more accurate worldviews than nondepressed people.