Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [0]
Adventures in the Margin of Error
Kathryn Schulz
For my family,
given and chosen
And for Michael and Amanda,
at whose expense
I wrote about what I knew
Contents
Part I The Idea of Error
1 Wrongology
2 Two Models of Wrongness
Part II The Origins of Error
3 Our Senses
4 Our Minds, Part One: Knowing, Not Knowing, and Making It Up
5 Our Minds, Part Two: Belief
6 Our Minds, Part Three: Evidence
7 Our Society
8 The Allure of Certainty
Part III The Experience of Error
9 Being Wrong
10 How Wrong?
11 Denial and Acceptance
12 Heartbreak
13 Transformation
Part IV Embracing Error
14 The Paradox of Error
15 The Optimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything
Notes
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
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, Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practiced in Paris (1784)
MAN: You said pound cake.
WOMAN: I didn’t say pound cake, I said crumb cake.
MAN: You said pound cake.
WOMAN: Don’t tell me what I said.
MAN: You said pound cake.
WOMAN: I said crumb cake.
MAN: I actually saw the crumb cake but I didn’t get it because you said pound cake.
WOMAN: I said crumb cake.
MAN: Well, I heard pound cake.
WOMAN: Then you obviously weren’t listening. Crumb cake doesn’t even sound like pound cake.
MAN: Well, maybe you accidentally said pound cake. Woman: I said crumb cake.
—overheard in Grand Central Station, November 13, 2008
PART I
THE IDEA OF ERROR
1.
Wrongology
It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.
—MOLIÈRE
Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights—chocolate, surfing, kissing—it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. We can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don’t seem to matter much; it’s more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be equally pleased about correctly identifing an orange-crowned warbler or the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we can enjoy being right even about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.
Like most pleasurable experiences, rightness is not ours to enjoy all the time. Sometimes we are the one who loses the bet (or the hotel). And sometimes, too, we are plagued by doubt about the correct answer or course of action—an anxiety that, itself, reflects the urgency of our desire to be right. Still, on the whole, our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right is matched by an almost equally indiscriminate feeling that we are right. Occasionally, this feeling spills into the foreground, as when we argue or evangelize, make predictions or place bets. Most often, though, it is just psychological backdrop. A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right,