Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

That is the goal of this book: to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility, to expand our vocabulary for and interest in talking about our mistakes, and to linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong.

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.

If anything can rival for sheer drama the demise of a belief that we have adamantly espoused, it is the demise of a belief so fundamental to our lives that we never even registered its existence.

Our beliefs, then, are models of the world—but they aren’t just models for models’ sake. Like economic models, our mental ones exist to help us make predictions and policies. In the words of William James, beliefs “are really rules for action.”

(The very word “believe” comes from an Old English verb meaning “to hold dear,” which suggests, correctly, that we have a habit of falling in love with our beliefs once we’ve formed them.)

That’s why, as we are about to see, so many of our strongest beliefs are determined by mere accidents of fate: where we were born, what our parents believed, what other information shaped us from our earliest days. Once that initial evidence takes hold, we are off and running. No matter how skewed or scanty it may be, it will form the basis for all our future beliefs. Inductive reasoning guarantees as much. And it guarantees, too, that we will find plenty of data to support us, and precious little to contradict us. And that, in turn, all but guarantees that our theories will be very, very difficult to fell.

Aside from scoring a point for Spinoza, this research sheds some light on the cognitive basis for why certainty comes so much easier to us than doubt. But if this is a neurological truth, it is also, and more self-evidently, an emotional one. Certainty might be a practical, logical, and evolutionary necessity, but the simplest truth about it is that it feels good. It gives us the comforting illusion that our environment is stable and knowable, and that therefore we are safe within it. Just as important, it makes us feel informed, intelligent, and powerful. When we are certain, we are lords of our maps: the outer limits of our knowledge and the outer limits of the world are one and the same.

Seen in this light, our dislike of doubt is a kind of emotional agoraphobia. Uncertainty leaves us stranded in a universe that is too big, too open, too ill-defined.