Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

Take away our willingness to overestimate ourselves, and we wouldn’t dare to undertake half the things we do. In this sense, all wrongness is optimism. We err because we believe, above all, in ourselves: no matter how often we have gotten things wrong in the past, we evince an abiding and touching faith in our own stories and theories. Traditionally, we are anxious to deny that those stories and theories are stories and theories—that we must rely on our own imperfect representations to make sense of the world, and are therefore destined to err. But, to risk a bit of blasphemy, stories and theories may be all we have that God does not. They are the hallmark of two of our highest human endeavors, art and science, and through them we can imagine new realities. That is why error, even though it sometimes feels like despair, is actually much closer in spirit to hope. We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right the next time. In this optimistic vein, embracing our fallibility is simply a way of paying homage to, in the words of the late philosopher Richard Rorty, “the permanent possibility of someone having a better idea.” The great advantage of realizing that we have told a story about the world is realizing that we can tell a better one: rich with better ideas, better possibilities—even, perhaps, better people.