Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. If we have developed formal methods for doing so, it is because, as I have shown, our hearts are bad at it. And we pay a price for this weakness. I don’t just mean we make mistakes we could avoid if we tempered our beliefs with doubt. It’s true that those mistakes can be costly, but the price of ignoring our fallibility goes well beyond that. It extends, in fact, to our overall outlook on the world. 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. If we are unable to embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt. This isn’t Hamlet’s doubt—that of agony in the face of a difficult decision. Nor is it the doubt of insecurity, apprehension, or indifference. This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn’t divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can’t embrace error—the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder.