Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

But by definition, there can’t be any particular feeling associated with simply being wrong. Indeed, the whole reason it’s possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it.

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.

the much-debated language instinct,

I thought that debate was over. Who still believes that language is not an instinct?

there is suggestive evidence that babies as young as seven months are already theorizing about basic physical properties such as gravity.

There is also evidence for a "physics instinct". See Pinker.

The brain is wider than the sky, wrote Emily Dickinson, that other great philosopher-saint of selfhood. But, as Augustine observed, it is also wider than itself. We exceed our own boundaries; we are more and other than we know ourselves to be.

It feels mysterious, but the answer is that the mind can only contain a model of itself, like it contains models of other minds. The model of one's own mind is in greater detail, but cannot be a perfect copy. And even if it were a copy, this would imply little about such a model's predictive power, which depends on having the correct reductive abstraction. To have a reductive model of our own minds at all—which we do—means that the reality of our own minds is guaranteed to be mysterious to us. We can’t possibly know ourselves.

Even the lowball estimate makes medical mistakes the eighth leading cause of death in the nation—worse than breast cancer, AIDS, and motor vehicle accidents. It also makes medicine far more error prone, and more dangerously so, than most other high-risk fields. For commercial aviation to take the same toll in the United States as medical errors do, a sold-out 747 would have to crash every three days, killing everyone on board.

Here is Benjamin Franklin, just before appending his name to the most famous piece of parchment in American history: “I confess there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure that I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.” No speech could have been more appropriate for the founding of the United States, a nation established in no small part on the recognition that, for a political system to succeed, a tolerance for error had to be built into its very bones.

When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with aporia: with a sense of doubt, perplexity, and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world.