Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. This set of associations was nicely summed up by the Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who noted that we err because of (among other things) “inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance,…ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.”

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.

As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.

if fallibility is built into our very name and nature, it is in much the same way the puppet is built into the jack-in-the-box: in theory wholly predictable, in practice always a jarring surprise.

The first question concerns the stakes of our mistakes.

The second question is whether we can be wrong, in any meaningful sense, about personal beliefs.

The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch once observed that no system of ethics can be complete without a mechanism for bringing about moral change.

Socrates was right: no theory of error can exist entirely outside a theory of truth.

Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks.

Rather than thinking of being wrong as believing something is true when it is objectively false, we could define it as the experience of rejecting as false a belief we ourselves once thought was true—regardless of that belief’s actual relationship to reality, or whether such a relationship can ever be determined.

her beliefs are at odds with the real state of the world.

there is no experience of being wrong. There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course.

So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right.

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.

What with error-blindness, our amnesia for our mistakes, the lack of a category called “error,” and our tendency to instantly overwrite rejected beliefs, it’s no wonder we have so much trouble accepting that wrongness is a part of who we are.

We already saw that “seeing the world as it is not” is pretty much the definition of erring—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.

“To alienate” means to make unfamiliar; and to see things—including ourselves—as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew.

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.

I encourage us to see error as a gift in itself—a rich and irreplaceable source of humor, art, illumination, individuality, and change.

This book opened with the pleasure of being right, but it will conclude with the more complicated, more interesting, and ultimately more revelatory pleasure of being wrong.

Surprise, bafflement, fascination, excitement, hilarity, delight: all these and more are a part of the optimistic understanding of error.

if you believe that truth is not necessarily fixed or knowable, and that the human mind, while a dazzling entity in its own right (in fact, because it is a dazzling entity in its own right), is not reality’s looking glass—if you believe all of that, as James did, then error is both explicable and acceptable.

But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. Thus, the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet.

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

In other words, error in extremis—extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar—becomes insanity. Madness is radical wrongness.

If madness is radical wrongness, being wrong is minor madness.

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.

Protagoras deserves recognition for being the first philosopher in Western history to explicitly address the problem of error, if only by denying its existence.

Perception, in other words, is the interpretation of sensation.

Because we can’t perceive these processes in action, and thereby take note of the places where error could enter the picture, we feel that we cannot be wrong. Or, more precisely, we cannot feel that we could be wrong. Our obliviousness to the act of interpretation leaves us insensitive—literally—to the possibility of error.

In studying illusions, scientists aren’t learning how our visual system fails. They are learning how it works.

This point merits some emphasis: being wrong is often a side effect of a system that is functioning exactly right.

illusions teach us how to think about error. Intellectually, they show us how even the most convincing vision of reality can diverge from reality itself, and how cognitive processes that we can’t detect—and that typically serve us quite well—leave us vulnerable to mistakes. Emotionally, illusions are a gateway drug to humility. If we have trouble acknowledging our own errors and forgiving those of others, at least we can begin by contemplating the kind of mistakes to which we all succumb.

In defiance of the pessimistic model of error—which can’t account for illusions, and therefore claims that they don’t count—we experience these sensory errors as fun, and pleasurable, and just about endlessly fascinating. This fascination begins very young (optical illusions, like knock-knock jokes, are a particular passion of elementary school kids) and doesn’t appear to diminish with age. In other words, illusions are not just universally experienced. They are universally loved.

it is easy, at least comparatively, to find pleasure in error when there’s nothing at stake. But that can’t be the whole story, since all of us have been known to throw tantrums over totally trivial mistakes. What makes illusions different is that, for the most part, we enter into them by consent. We might not know exactly how we are going to err, but we know that the error is coming, and we say yes to the experience anyway.

In a sense, much the same thing could be said of life in general. We can’t know where our next error lurks or what form it will take, but we can be very sure that it is waiting for us. With illusions, we look forward to this encounter, since whatever minor price we pay in pride is handily outweighed by curiosity at first and by pleasure afterward. The same will not always be true as we venture past these simple perceptual failures to more complex and consequential mistakes. But nor is the willing embrace of error always beyond us. In fact, this might be the most important thing illusions can teach us: that it is possible, at least some of the time, to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found in being right.

“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.” —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, ON CERTAINTY

We know, or think we know, innumerable things, and we enjoy the feeling of mastery and confidence our knowledge gives us.

In sum: we love to know things, but ultimately we can’t know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing when we don’t know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up. All this serves to render the category of “knowledge” unreliable—so much so that this chapter exists largely to convince you to abandon it (if only temporarily, for the purpose of understanding wrongness) in favor of the category of belief.

knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials,

it is very difficult to figure out what, if anything, you can rightly claim to know.

You don’t feel surprised: this is the defining emotional absence in dreams. Surprise is a response to the violation of our expectations, an emotional indicator that our theories were in error.

At first, this experiment seems to demonstrate a strange but basically benign quirk of human cognition: we like to explain things, even when the real explanation eludes us.

As with our individual and collective difficulty with saying “I was wrong,” we aren’t very good at saying, “I don’t know.”

“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.”

What makes these additional beliefs seem so strange—what makes them seem, in fact, so unbelief-like—is that there is no experience associated with holding them. Believing that my mattress is solid doesn’t feel like believing in God, largely because believing that my mattress is solid doesn’t feel like anything. I am completely unaware of believing it. Left to my own devices, I’m extremely unlikely to characterize it as a belief, and, if I’m called upon to defend it, I will be both baffled as to why I should do so and at a loss as to how to go about it. In other words, almost everything we normally associate with the experience of believing—consciousness, conviction, emotion, explanation—is absent from these other, implicit beliefs.

Psychologically, then, the everyday concept of belief and the philosophical one differ from each other in the most salient way imaginable: in how we experience them. Functionally, however, they are virtually indistinguishable. Whether we are aware of our beliefs or not, they are all, like Greenspan’s free-market philosophy, models of the world. In the literal sense, a model of the world is a map, and that’s basically what beliefs are, too: mental representations of our physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and political landscapes. My explicit belief that my father-in-law dislikes me is crucial to my mental representation of my family, just as my implicit belief that my mattress is solid is crucial to my mental representation of my bedroom. Both serve the same maplike function of helping me figure out where I might or might not want to sit when I enter a certain room. Both, in other words, are necessary pixels in my picture of the world. Whether or not I can feel that pixel light up in my head is irrelevant.