Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

By indirection, Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query, he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. These are sins of omission, sins of passivity; and they suggest, correctly, that if we want to improve our relationship to evidence, we must take a more active role in how we think—must, in a sense, take the reins of our own minds. To do this, we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically, and crucially, we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it. One person who recognized the value of doing this was Charles Darwin. In his autobiography, he recalled that, “I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.”