Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Kathryn Schulz
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0061176052
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Both wise and clever, full of fun and surprise about a topic so central to our lives that we almost never even think about it.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
In the tradition of The Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational comes Being Wrong, an illuminating exploration of what it means to be in error, and why homo sapiens tend to tacitly assume (or loudly insist) that they are right about most everything. Kathryn Schulz, editor of Grist magazine, argues that error is the fundamental human condition and should be celebrated as such. Guiding the reader through the history and psychology of error, from Socrates to Alan Greenspan, Being Wrong will change the way you perceive screw-ups, both of the mammoth and daily variety, forever.
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explain. On the other hand, 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. These competing ideas of error crop up in efforts to define the term, as we saw when we tried to do so ourselves. In the 1600s, France’s Larousse dictionary
Occasionally, though, the quirks of our perceptual system leave us vulnerable to more serious errors. Take, for instance, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. There is a rather amazing experiment—which I’m about to ruin for you—in which subjects are shown a video of a group of people playing a fast-paced ball game and are asked to count how many times the ball is passed back and forth. At some point during the video, a gorilla (more precisely, a person in a gorilla costume) wanders into
error as they initially seem, perceptual failures turn out to showcase virtually the entire practical and emotional range of our mistakes. That’s one reason why I claimed earlier that they are the paradigmatic form of wrongness. But another and more important reason is this: 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
that our own beliefs are simply, necessarily true.† Why do we do this? The most obvious answer is that we’re so emotionally invested in our beliefs that we are unable or unwilling to recognize them as anything but the inviolable truth. (The very word “believe” comes from an Old English verb meaning “to hold dear,” which suggests, correctly, that we have a habit of falling in love with our beliefs once we’ve formed them.) There’s a lot to be said for that answer, and much of it will get said in
all-male tradition of the Landsgemeinde and everything it stood for. Ironically, one of the things it stood for was Switzerland’s unusually long and rich relationship to democracy. The feeling among antisuffragists, said Lee Ann Banaszak, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University who studied the Swiss suffrage movement, was that “there was this unique political and historical institution that was very important, that represented the origins of direct democracy, and that would
