Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [206]
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* Western culture has another mechanism for admitting mistakes, but its extreme obscurity only underscores the point that such devices are woefully rare. In poetry, there is an entire form, the palinode, dedicated to retracting the sentiments of an earlier poem. (In Greek, palin means “again,” and d means “song,” making a palinode linguistically identical to a recantation: to “recant” means to sing again. We invoke this same idea when we say that someone who has shifted positions on an issue is “singing a different tune.”) The most famous palinode—which isn’t saying much—was written by the seventh-century poet Stesichorus, and serves to retract his earlier claim that Helen of Troy was solely responsible for the carnage of the Trojan War. My personal favorite example, however, comes from Ogden Nash. Having famously observed that “Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker,” and apparently living to regret it, Nash followed up with this: “Nothing makes me sicker / Than liquor / And candy / Is too expandy.”
* If Laplace helped catapult the bell curve into fame, another astronomer, the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet, helped it achieve something closer to infamy. Quetelet gathered data about people—about our heights and criminal records and number of children and age at death—and graphed them the way Laplace had graphed the stars. In the theory of the distribution of errors, he realized, the particular quirks and characteristics of any given human represented the errors: deviations from a norm that only became visible when all those quirks were aggregated. This innovation solidified an association, implicit since antiquity, between being deviant and being wrong—and, conversely, between being normal and being right. (It was Quetelet who came up with that stock character of statistics, the “average man.”) For more on the potential insidiousness of this innovation, I refer the reader to the notes.
* Here, too, we can detect the intertwined histories of wrongness and madness. The word “hallucinate” comes from the Latin meaning to wander mentally, while “raving” comes from “roving.”
* History’s largest recorded mirage is of an entire continent. In 1906, the American explorer Robert Peary was exploring far northern Canada on foot when he looked out to sea and saw, at a distance he estimated to be 120 miles, a land mass that spanned so much of the horizon that he concluded that it must be a continent. The nomenclature of polar exploration gets rather confusing at this point, because Peary (not to be confused with Parry, John Ross’s second-in-command) named the place he saw Crocker Land (not to be confused with Ross’s Croker Mountains). Peary reported the discovery upon his return to the United States, and, seven years later, one of his former lieutenants, Donald MacMillan, set forth to explore the new continent. MacMillan made camp in the Canadian Arctic, and, once the Polar Sea had frozen, set across it. After slogging almost 600 miles by foot and dogsled, he and his men spotted a vast terrain that perfectly matched Peary’s description. But as they continued toward it, the land seemed to change, and when the sun dropped down in the night sky, it disappeared entirely. The men pressed on anyway, past the point where they should have reached the mysterious continent, but they never encountered land. Since, as we now know, no vast continent lurked a few hundred miles further on, this was not precisely an arctic mirage, but rather a fata morgana—an illusion of magnification and distortion. The explorers were actually seeing only the corrugated surface of the frozen sea itself, thrown radically out of proportion by the capricious polar light.
* I’m focusing here on universal perceptual mistakes, but our senses can also err in individual, idiosyncratic ways. One person who thought seriously about this was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.