Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

there is no good side to medical error.

more troubling, though, is the medical profession’s traditional response to them,

honest disclosure is “so far from the norm as to be ‘uncommon.’”*

is the paradox that lurks at its heart: if you want to try to eradicate error, you have to start by assuming that it is inevitable.

is the paradox that lurks at its heart: if you want to try to eradicate error, you have to start by assuming that it is inevitable. Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (p. 302). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

“Our view,” Paul Levy told me, “is that if you don’t acknowledge that mistakes occurred, you’ll never eliminate the likelihood that they’ll occur again.”

If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them.

we know from our own experience that one way we err is through the failure of tasks that are so obvious or automated that we seldom bother to double-check them.

Relying on hard data, committing to open and democratic communication, acknowledging fallibility: these are the central tenets of any system that aims to protect us from error.

construct countless verbal strategies for accommodating uncertainty and error.

we multiply ourselves to make room for competing beliefs.