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A review by jessicaleza
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz
5.0
Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities. - Benjamin Franklin
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. (5)
Wrongness is a window into normal human nature - into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls. (5-6)
'I told you so.' The brilliance of this phrase (or the odiousness, depending on whether you get to say it or must endure hearing it) derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared,maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right - at any rate, really, extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it. (8)
It is surprisingly difficult to get angry unless you are either convinced that you are correct, or humiliated and defensive about being wrong. (8)
The genius of statistics ... was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them, ... the right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes. - Louis Menand, reflecting on Laplace (34)
Through error, we perceive the truth. (35)
To err is to wonder, and wondering 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. Who really wants to stay home and be right when you can don your armor, spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world? True, you might get lost along the way, get stranded in a swamp, have a scare at the edge of a cliff, thieves might steal your gold, brigands might imprison you in a cave, sorcerers might turn you into a toad - but what of that? To fuck up is to find adventure. (42-43)
Origin of the phrase 'smoke and mirrors' - see p. 63
Dominion over perception is power. (64)
Illusions are a gateway drug to humility. (65)
We can't know where our next error lurks or what form it takes, but we can be very sure that it is waiting for us. (66)
The feeling of knowing something is incredibly convincing and inordinately satisfying, but it is not a very good way to gauge the accuracy of our knowledge. (71)
If anything can rival for sheer drama the demise of a belief that we have adamantly espoused, it is the demise of a belief so fundamental to our lives that we never even registered its existence. (93)
... there is virtually no subject-no matter what domain of life it concerns, how pressing or trivial it may be, and how much or little we know about it-that is not suitable fodder for our theory-happy minds. (97)
We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look at our beliefs and see reality. (107)
Ignorance isn't necessarily a vacuum waiting to be filled; just as often, it is a wall, actively maintained. (107)
By failing to see the world as we do, they actually are undermining its reality and threatening its destruction - at least, unto us. But, of course, we are doing the same to them. Implicitly or explicitly, we are denying that they possess the same intellectual and moral faculties that we do-and denying, too, the significance and value of their life experiences, from which, inevitably, many of their beliefs arise. (109)
... the fair and consistent practice of law hinges, to a huge degree, on developing a fair and consistent relationship to evidence (112)
Descartes defined error not as believing something that isn't true, but as believing something based on insufficient evidence (113). Augustine rejected this conclusion 1,200 years prior when he realized the theological implications (114).
Inductive reasoning:
- guessing based on past experience
- impossible to falsifiable claims made through inductive reasoning (118)
- "the capacity to reach very big conclusions based on very little data" (120)
- probabilistically true, but possibly false (121)
Our mistakes are part and parcel of our brilliance, not the regrettable consequence of a separate and deplorable process. (122)
As a European Communist once said in response to the question of whether he had read any of the criticisms of communism, "a man does not sip a bottle of cyanide just to find out what it tastes like." ... looking for counter evidence often requires time, energy, learning, liberty, and sufficient social capital to weather the suspicion and derision of defenders of the status quo. (130)
women in Switzerland did not get the vote until 1971. Women's suffrage spread across the country haltingly, so that Lise Girardin was able to become the mayor of Geneva, the 2nd largest city, in 1968, but could not vote in the national election. (133-135)
"If we often form our beliefs on the basis of our communities, we also form our communities on the basis of our beliefs. ... We do not just hold a belief; we hold a membership in a community of believers. ... Since communal beliefs are familiar, established, and supported (socially if not factually) hewing to them is both comfortable and efficient." (143) ... What really gets you into trouble with a community isn't holding a belief it scorns; it is abandoning a belief it cherishes. ... a lone dissident can destroy the cohesiveness of an entire community. (155) ... affirming and later rejecting a belief jeopardizes the whole paradigm of truth. (156)
Our mistakes disturb us in part because they call into question not just our confidence in a single belief, but our confidence in the entire act of believing. (156)
This is one of the most defining and dangerous characteristics of certainty: it is toxic to a shift in a perspective. If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people's stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. (164)
As [William] James put it, sometimes unswerving beliefs "help to make the truth which they declare." (166)
"The child learns by believing the adult," Wittgenstein observed. "Doubt comes after belief." (167)
Doubt, it seems, is a skill - and one that ... needs to be learned and honed. Credulity, by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct. (167)
Our dislike of doubt is a kind of emotional agoraphobia. Uncertainty leaves us stranded in a universe that is too big, too open, too ill-defined. (169)
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? - John Maynard Keynes (177)
Our memories often serve the quasi-magical function of causing our mistakes to quietly disappear. (185)
Of the irreversibility of breaking with past beliefs, [al-Ghazali, the Persian philosopher] wrote, "There can be no desire to return to servile conformism once it has been abandoned, since a prerequisite for being a servile conformist is that one does not know [oneself] to be such." But when someone recognizes his former beliefs as false, al-Ghazali continued, "the glass of his servile conformism is shattered-an irreparable fragmentation and a mess which cannot be mended by patching and piecing together." Instead, he concluded, "it can only be melted by fire and newly reshaped." (189)
In the face of radical error, it isn't just the world that suddenly seems uncertain, unknown, and new; it is also the self. ... In fact, perhaps the chief thing we learn from being wrong is how much growing up we still have to do. (191)
"As trust in oneself and in the outer world develop together," she wrote, "so doubt of oneself and of the outer world are also intermeshed." - sociologist Helen Merrel Lynd (191)
Acknowledging our mistakes is an intellectual and (especially) an emotional skill, and as such it evolves in tandem with our cognitive and psychological development. (197)
Our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion. - psychoanalyst Irna Gadd (199)
... if we can't do the emotional work of fully accepting our mistakes, we can't do the conceptual work of figuring out where, how, and why we made them. (207)
We want love to save us from our isolation, from the fundamental and sometimes frightening solitude of being human. (261)
As the 17th-century French writer Francois de la Rochefoucauld observed, "Everyone complains about their memory; no one complains about their judgement." (263)
... the experience of error shows us our own self as both occluded and in flux. ... much of error's emotional force comes from its capacity to unsettle our idea of who we are. (280)
... our errors represent a moment of alienation from ourselves. (281)
... if you want to try to eradicate error, you have top start by assuming that it is inevitable. (302)
If you really want to be right (or at least improve your odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. (302)
If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place. (329)
If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds - from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents - it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people's inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs. ... Put differently, art is an exercise in empathy. Through it, we give the constraints of subjectivity the slip; we achieve, however temporarily, that universal moral aim of seeing the world through someone else's eyes. (332)
"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand." - Picasso (333)
Objectivity, then, is the absence of the self. (333)
Being wrong doesn't just make us human in general; it also helps make each of us the specific person we are. In our inability to get things exactly right, in the idiosyncrasies of our private visions of the world, the outline of selfhood appears. (335)
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. (5)
Wrongness is a window into normal human nature - into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls. (5-6)
'I told you so.' The brilliance of this phrase (or the odiousness, depending on whether you get to say it or must endure hearing it) derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared,maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right - at any rate, really, extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it. (8)
It is surprisingly difficult to get angry unless you are either convinced that you are correct, or humiliated and defensive about being wrong. (8)
The genius of statistics ... was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them, ... the right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes. - Louis Menand, reflecting on Laplace (34)
Through error, we perceive the truth. (35)
To err is to wonder, and wondering 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. Who really wants to stay home and be right when you can don your armor, spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world? True, you might get lost along the way, get stranded in a swamp, have a scare at the edge of a cliff, thieves might steal your gold, brigands might imprison you in a cave, sorcerers might turn you into a toad - but what of that? To fuck up is to find adventure. (42-43)
Origin of the phrase 'smoke and mirrors' - see p. 63
Dominion over perception is power. (64)
Illusions are a gateway drug to humility. (65)
We can't know where our next error lurks or what form it takes, but we can be very sure that it is waiting for us. (66)
The feeling of knowing something is incredibly convincing and inordinately satisfying, but it is not a very good way to gauge the accuracy of our knowledge. (71)
If anything can rival for sheer drama the demise of a belief that we have adamantly espoused, it is the demise of a belief so fundamental to our lives that we never even registered its existence. (93)
... there is virtually no subject-no matter what domain of life it concerns, how pressing or trivial it may be, and how much or little we know about it-that is not suitable fodder for our theory-happy minds. (97)
We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look at our beliefs and see reality. (107)
Ignorance isn't necessarily a vacuum waiting to be filled; just as often, it is a wall, actively maintained. (107)
By failing to see the world as we do, they actually are undermining its reality and threatening its destruction - at least, unto us. But, of course, we are doing the same to them. Implicitly or explicitly, we are denying that they possess the same intellectual and moral faculties that we do-and denying, too, the significance and value of their life experiences, from which, inevitably, many of their beliefs arise. (109)
... the fair and consistent practice of law hinges, to a huge degree, on developing a fair and consistent relationship to evidence (112)
Descartes defined error not as believing something that isn't true, but as believing something based on insufficient evidence (113). Augustine rejected this conclusion 1,200 years prior when he realized the theological implications (114).
Inductive reasoning:
- guessing based on past experience
- impossible to falsifiable claims made through inductive reasoning (118)
- "the capacity to reach very big conclusions based on very little data" (120)
- probabilistically true, but possibly false (121)
Our mistakes are part and parcel of our brilliance, not the regrettable consequence of a separate and deplorable process. (122)
As a European Communist once said in response to the question of whether he had read any of the criticisms of communism, "a man does not sip a bottle of cyanide just to find out what it tastes like." ... looking for counter evidence often requires time, energy, learning, liberty, and sufficient social capital to weather the suspicion and derision of defenders of the status quo. (130)
women in Switzerland did not get the vote until 1971. Women's suffrage spread across the country haltingly, so that Lise Girardin was able to become the mayor of Geneva, the 2nd largest city, in 1968, but could not vote in the national election. (133-135)
"If we often form our beliefs on the basis of our communities, we also form our communities on the basis of our beliefs. ... We do not just hold a belief; we hold a membership in a community of believers. ... Since communal beliefs are familiar, established, and supported (socially if not factually) hewing to them is both comfortable and efficient." (143) ... What really gets you into trouble with a community isn't holding a belief it scorns; it is abandoning a belief it cherishes. ... a lone dissident can destroy the cohesiveness of an entire community. (155) ... affirming and later rejecting a belief jeopardizes the whole paradigm of truth. (156)
Our mistakes disturb us in part because they call into question not just our confidence in a single belief, but our confidence in the entire act of believing. (156)
This is one of the most defining and dangerous characteristics of certainty: it is toxic to a shift in a perspective. If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people's stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. (164)
As [William] James put it, sometimes unswerving beliefs "help to make the truth which they declare." (166)
"The child learns by believing the adult," Wittgenstein observed. "Doubt comes after belief." (167)
Doubt, it seems, is a skill - and one that ... needs to be learned and honed. Credulity, by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct. (167)
Our dislike of doubt is a kind of emotional agoraphobia. Uncertainty leaves us stranded in a universe that is too big, too open, too ill-defined. (169)
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? - John Maynard Keynes (177)
Our memories often serve the quasi-magical function of causing our mistakes to quietly disappear. (185)
Of the irreversibility of breaking with past beliefs, [al-Ghazali, the Persian philosopher] wrote, "There can be no desire to return to servile conformism once it has been abandoned, since a prerequisite for being a servile conformist is that one does not know [oneself] to be such." But when someone recognizes his former beliefs as false, al-Ghazali continued, "the glass of his servile conformism is shattered-an irreparable fragmentation and a mess which cannot be mended by patching and piecing together." Instead, he concluded, "it can only be melted by fire and newly reshaped." (189)
In the face of radical error, it isn't just the world that suddenly seems uncertain, unknown, and new; it is also the self. ... In fact, perhaps the chief thing we learn from being wrong is how much growing up we still have to do. (191)
"As trust in oneself and in the outer world develop together," she wrote, "so doubt of oneself and of the outer world are also intermeshed." - sociologist Helen Merrel Lynd (191)
Acknowledging our mistakes is an intellectual and (especially) an emotional skill, and as such it evolves in tandem with our cognitive and psychological development. (197)
Our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion. - psychoanalyst Irna Gadd (199)
... if we can't do the emotional work of fully accepting our mistakes, we can't do the conceptual work of figuring out where, how, and why we made them. (207)
We want love to save us from our isolation, from the fundamental and sometimes frightening solitude of being human. (261)
As the 17th-century French writer Francois de la Rochefoucauld observed, "Everyone complains about their memory; no one complains about their judgement." (263)
... the experience of error shows us our own self as both occluded and in flux. ... much of error's emotional force comes from its capacity to unsettle our idea of who we are. (280)
... our errors represent a moment of alienation from ourselves. (281)
... if you want to try to eradicate error, you have top start by assuming that it is inevitable. (302)
If you really want to be right (or at least improve your odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. (302)
If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place. (329)
If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds - from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents - it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people's inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs. ... Put differently, art is an exercise in empathy. Through it, we give the constraints of subjectivity the slip; we achieve, however temporarily, that universal moral aim of seeing the world through someone else's eyes. (332)
"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand." - Picasso (333)
Objectivity, then, is the absence of the self. (333)
Being wrong doesn't just make us human in general; it also helps make each of us the specific person we are. In our inability to get things exactly right, in the idiosyncrasies of our private visions of the world, the outline of selfhood appears. (335)