Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [213]
† Teenagers make for an interesting case study in the annals of error, since their relationship to wrongness amounts to the familiar one with the volume turned all the way up. Regardless of age, almost all of us are far more alert to other people’s errors than to our own. But young adults are the unsurpassed masters of this asymmetry, often combining a positively savage disdain for the perceived errors of others with a sublime confidence in their own rightness. I say this with affection, and even admiration. Sometimes the world needs the unblinking conviction of youth: Joan of Arc was a teenager (although not quite in the modern sense), Bob Dylan was in his early twenties when he forged the de facto soundtrack of the civil rights movement, and many of the organizers of and participants in the democratic revolutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been high school and college students. But I also say it with a twinge of rueful identification, and with belated apologies to my parents—and I’m not alone. Almost every adult I talked to about this book made wry acknowledgment of the blistering intensity of their teenage beliefs—beliefs that, in most cases, they softened or simply rejected later in life. It only underscores the main point to observe that teenagers generally regard these later admissions of error as hopeless acts of selling out.
* Others apparently spent their money in different ways. The opening “Talk of the Town” in the very first edition of The New Yorker (dated February 17, 1925) is about the Millerite movement, then a mere three generations in the past. In its now-familiar arch voice, the column noted that, “Two or three hundred thousand of our great-grandparents bought white ascension robes for the event…. Muslin for ascension robes could be bought by the bolt, or in the latest Parisian models.”
* Actually, Anita’s problem and the Millerites’ problem amounted to the same thing. Having no theory at all and having too many theories both suggest that you are in the middle of a crisis of knowledge.
* In theory, the outer limit of wrongness would be the condition of being wrong about absolutely everything. A computer scientist named Keunwoo Lee has given us a name for this hypothetical state: fractal wrongness. Lee defines fractal wrongness as “being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution.” Thus if I’m fractally wrong, I’m wrong about all of my overarching beliefs, wrong about the people who corroborate those beliefs, wrong about the facts I think support those beliefs, wrong about the beliefs that stem from those beliefs…et cetera. As a condition, fractal wrongness is, thankfully, unattainable. As an insult, however, it is incomparable.
* For those with an appetite for more recent real-life excuses for error, Philip Tetlock, the psychology professor and political scientist, provides a concise, informative, and often funny catalog of the Wrong Buts (although not by that name) in his book, Expert Political Judgment.
* The most famous defense of the Better Safe Than Sorry excuse was offered by the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, in what is now known as Pascal’s wager. Pascal pointed out that, if you must be wrong about God, you are much better off believing he exists and being wrong than believing he doesn’t exist and being wrong. Thus the wager: even