Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [10]
Part of what’s going on here is, in essence, a database-design flaw. Most of us don’t have a mental category called “Mistakes I Have Made.” A close friend of mine, one who knew about this book from its earliest stages, wrote to me two years into the process to say that it had suddenly dawned on her that one of the formative events of her childhood was an experience of dramatic wrongness. My friend hadn’t forgotten about this event during the previous two years, but it was mentally filed away under other labels (in this case, “times I’ve been lonely” and “times I’ve been angry”). As a result—and despite all the vicarious thinking about wrongness she had done on my behalf—the memory hadn’t been accessible to her as a story about error.
Like our inability to say “I was wrong,” this lack of a category called “error” is a communal as well as an individual problem. As someone who tried to review the literature on wrongness, I can tell you that, first, it is vast; and, second, almost none of it is filed under classifications having anything to do with error. Instead, it is distributed across an extremely diverse set of disciplines: philosophy, psychology, behavioral economics, law, medicine, technology, neuroscience, political science, and the history of science, to name just a few. So too with the errors in our own lives. We file them under a range of headings—“embarrassing moments,” “lessons I’ve learned,” “stuff I used to believe”—but very seldom does an event live inside us with the simple designation “wrong.”
This category problem is only one reason why our past mistakes can be so elusive. Another is that (as we’ll see in more detail later) realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time: something else instantly becomes the new right. In light of this new belief, the discarded one can quickly come to seem remote, indistinct, and irrelevant, as if we never took it all that seriously in the first place. This convenient erasure of past errors happens on a societal level as well. Doctors don’t teach medical students the theory of bodily humors, and astronomy professors don’t teach their students to calculate the velocity of the fifty-five concentric spheres Aristotle thought composed the universe. This is practical and efficient pedagogy, but it shores up our tacit assumption that current belief is identical with true belief, and it reinforces our generalized sense of rightness.
What with error-blindness, our amnesia for our mistakes, the lack of a category called “error,” and our tendency to instantly overwrite rejected beliefs, it’s no wonder we have so much trouble accepting that wrongness is a part of who we are. Because we don’t experience, remember, track, or retain mistakes as a feature of our inner landscape, wrongness always seems to come at us from left field—that is, from outside ourselves. But the reality could hardly be more different. Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs. That’s part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with ourselves. Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one—a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftermath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?
These private questions about the origins of error echo a broader public inquiry that has been under