Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [195]
“opened our culture to ideas from everyone.” See GE’s report, “What is Six Sigma? The Roadmap to Customer Impact” (1999), available online at http://www.ge.com/sixsigma/SixSigma.pdf.
“management by fact”…“opinions and assumptions.” Pande et al., 15–16.
the open-source movement (FN). The information here comes from the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org/), especially Michael Tiemann, “History of the OSI,” Sept. 19, 2006 (http://www.opensource.org/history).
“[the surgeon] simply felt that he was on the correct side.” Stephen Smith, “Surgeon Operates on Patient’s Wrong Side.”
Motorola reported savings of more than $17 billion. “About Motorola University: The Impact of Six Sigma,” http://www.motorola.com/content.jsp?globalObjectId=3081.
annual legal fees dropped from $3 million to $1 million. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, “Making Patient Safety the Centerpiece of Medical Liability Reform,” The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 354, No. 21 (May 25, 2006): 2205–2008.
medical mistakes cost the United States. Linda T. Kohn, et al., To Err is Human, 1–2.
we learn the word “maybe.” Tetlock, 228
regard the world as a place of absolutes (FN). See e.g., “Borderline Personality Disorder: Splitting Countertransference,” Psychiatric Times, Vol. 15, No. 11 (Nov. 1, 1988).
“self-subversive thinking.” Tetlock, 214.
doctors interrupt their patients. Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 17.
John Francis. Mark Hertsgaard, “John Francis, a ‘Planetwalker’ Who Lived Car-Free and Silent for 17 Years, Chats with Grist,” Grist, May 10, 2005. Francis’s book is Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time (Elephant Mountain Press, 2005). The quotation appears on p. 44.
Joseph-Marie de Maistre. Bates, 203.
“the general will cannot err.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Lester G. Crocker, ed. (Simon and Schuster, 1973). See especially Chapter III, “Whether the General Will Can Err,” 30–32.
“that truth is great.” This widely quoted passage is from the first section of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson wrote in 1779.
“error could be endured.” Hofstadter, 56.
“intrinsically subversive and illegitimate.” Hofstadter, 7.
“Dictators, large and small” (FN). Sunstein, 68.
“Freedom,” Gandhi argued. The quotation is omnipresent, although I was unable to definitively identify its origin.
the Evil Genius. Descartes lays out this argument in his Meditations on First Philosophy, John Cottingham, ed. and trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
“what we do not doubt in our hearts.” I came across this quotation in Jay F. Rosenberg’s Thinking About Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2002), 14.
CHAPTER 15 THE OPTIMISTIC META-INDUCTION FROM THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING
The discussion of humor in this chapter is especially indebted to Sypher, ed. (see above); and to Ward Jones’s “The Function and Content of Amusement,” South African Journal of Philosophy 25, Vol. 2 (2006): 126–137.
superiority theory of comedy. See Jones (the Hobbes quotation is on p. 131) and John Morreall, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (State University of New York Press, 1987) (the Hobbes quotation is on p. 129). Similar ground is covered in Sypher’s commentary in Comedy, “The Meaning of Comedy”—including, again, the Hobbes quotation, which can be found on p. 203.
“an imitation of the common errors of our life.” I came across this quotation in Harry Levin’s introduction to the 1989 Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, p. xxv.
“the duty of comedy.” The line is from a petition Molière sent to Louis XIV for permission to perform Tartuffe (“First Petition Presented to the King Concerning the Comedy Tartuffe”), the text of which was included in the third printing of the play.
the incongruity theory of humor. See “Humor,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aaron Smuts,