Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.

however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.

“fallor ergo sum”: I err, therefore I am.

such as realizing halfway through a lifetime that you were wrong about your faith,

How could you? 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. Instead, what we have mastered are two alternatives to admitting our mistakes that serve to highlight exactly how bad we are at doing so. The first involves a small but strategic addendum: “I was wrong, but…”—a blank we then fill in with wonderfully imaginative explanations for why we weren’t so wrong after all. (More on this in Part Three.) The second (infamously deployed by, among others, Richard Nixon regarding Watergate and Ronald Reagan regarding the Iran-Contra affair) is even more telling: we say, “mistakes were made.” As that evergreen locution so concisely demonstrates, all we really know how to do with our errors is not acknowledge them as our own.

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 your friends and family, but good luck trying to do both.

The first question concerns the stakes of our mistakes. The difference between being wrong about your car keys and being wrong about weapons of mass destruction is the difference between “oops” and a global military crisis—consequences so dramatically dissimilar that we might reasonably wonder if the errors that led to them can have anything in common. The second question is whether we can be wrong, in any meaningful sense, about personal beliefs. It’s a long way from the Mets to the moral status of abortion, and some readers will suspect that the conceptual distance between being wrong about facts and being “wrong” about convictions is unbridgeable. Other readers, meanwhile, will raise a different objection: that we can never be completely sure of the truth, and therefore can’t legitimately describe anything as “right” or “wrong.”

(You can’t define error, Socrates observes in Plato’s Theaetetus, without also defining knowledge; your theory of one hinges entirely on your theory of the other.)

For example, we are usually much more willing to entertain the possibility that we are wrong about insignificant matters than about weighty ones.

In high-stakes situations, we should want to do everything possible to ensure that we are right—which, as we will see, we can only do by imagining all the ways we could be wrong.

That we are able to do this when it hardly matters, yet unable to do so when the stakes are huge, suggests that we might learn something important by comparing...

By examining our sense of certainty and our reaction to error in cases where we turn out to be objectively wrong, we can learn to think differently about our convictions in situations where no one will ever have the final say.

it is wrong to think that the earth is flat,

a long history of associating error with evil—and, conversely, rightness with righteousness.

many moral wrongs are supported and legitimized by factual errors.

Often, our beliefs about what is factually right and our beliefs about what is morally right are entirely inextricable.

It is also a moral solution: an opportunity, as I said earlier, to rethink our relationship to ourselves, other people, and the world.

Take the issue of aesthetics. We all know that matters of taste are different from matters of fact—that standards of right and wrong apply to facts but not to preferences. Indeed, we are somehow able to sort this out very early in life. Even young children understand that it’s not okay if you think the sky is blue and I think the sky is green, but totally okay if your favorite color is blue and my favorite color is green. Yet it is comically easy to find examples of full-grown adults acting like their own taste is the gospel truth.

For better and worse, error is already our lifelong companion. Surely, then, it’s time we got to know it.

These stories involve, among other things, illusions, magicians, comedians, drug trips, love affairs, misadventures on the high seas, bizarre neurological phenomena, medical catastrophes, legal fiascos, some possible consequences of marrying a prostitute, the lamentable failure of the world to end, and Alan Greenspan.

Think about the telling fact that error literally doesn’t exist in the first person present tense: the sentence “I am wrong” describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.

realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time: something else instantly becomes the new right.

That’s part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with ourselves. Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one—a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftermath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought that error could be explained by the fact that we live in time and space; because we are bound to a particular set of coordinates, we can’t rise above them and see reality as a whole, from a bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view.

As different as these explanations seem, all these thinkers and many more conceived of error as arising from a gap: sometimes between the particular and the general, sometimes between words and things, sometimes between the present and the primeval, sometimes between the mortal and the divine—but in every case, and fundamentally, between our own mind and the rest of the world.

but it is also the essence of imagination, invention, and hope. As that suggests, our errors sometimes bear far sweeter fruits than the failure and shame we associate with them.

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. —WILLIAM JAMES, “THE WILL TO BELIEVE

Given that all of us get things wrong again and again, how abnormal, he might have asked, can error possibly be?

The first is that, to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth

The second problem with this goal is that virtually all efforts at eradication—even genuinely well-intentioned ones—succumb to the law of unintended consequences.

it is inseparably linked to other good things, things we definitely do not want to eliminate—like, say, our intelligence.

The final problem with seeking to eradicate error is that many such efforts are not well intentioned—or if they are, they tend in the direction for which good intentions are infamous.

there is a slippery slope between advocating the elimination of putatively erroneous beliefs, and advocating the elimination of the institutions, cultures, and—most alarmingly—people who hold them.

the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error.

And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure.

This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.

will o’ the wisps: mysterious wandering lights that, in folklore, lead unwary travelers astray, typically into the depths of a swamp or over the edge of a cliff.

“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.

But altered states—some of which really can sicken or kill us—frequently enthrall us.

we regard those who seldom remember theirs as, in some small but important way, impoverished.

These questions have haunted our collective imagination from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Matrix (both of which, incidentally, hinge on drug trips).

One of the most consistent answers—and the crucial one, for my purposes—is that the false and the true are reversed: that the unreal is, so to speak, the real real.

Madness is radical wrongness.

Like all equations, this one is reversible. If madness is radical wrongness, being wrong is minor madness.

This narrative of wrongness as rightness might have achieved its apotheosis in King Lear, a play that features a real madman (Lear, after he loses it), a sane man disguised as a madman (Edgar), a blind man (Gloucester), and a fool (the Fool).

the optimistic model of wrongness.

We hear this strangely intimate relationship between error and truth in the double meaning of the word “vision,” which conveys both delusion and revelation.

Don Quixote, who, as both knight errant and utter lunatic, deserves his own special place in the pantheon of wrongology.)

To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is 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.

To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in that spirit that this book is written.