Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [9]
This is the problem of error-blindness. Whatever falsehoods each of us currently believes are necessarily invisible to us. Think about the telling fact that error literally doesn’t exist in the first person present tense: the sentence “I am wrong” describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.
Error-blindness goes some way toward explaining our persistent difficulty with imagining that we could be wrong. It’s easy to ascribe this difficulty to various psychological factors—arrogance, insecurity, and so forth—and these plainly play a role. But error-blindness suggests that another, more structural issue might be at work as well. If it is literally impossible to feel wrong—if our current mistakes remain imperceptible to us even when we scrutinize our innermost being for signs of them—then it makes sense for us to conclude that we are right. Similarly, error-blindness helps explain why we accept fallibility as a universal phenomenon yet are constantly startled by our own mistakes. The psychologist Marc Green has observed that an error, from the point of view of the person who makes it, is essentially “a Mental Act of God.” Although we understand in the abstract that errors happen, our specific mistakes are just as unforeseeable to us as specific tornadoes or specific lightning strikes. (And, as a result, we seldom feel that we should be held accountable for them. By law, after all, no one is answerable for an Act of God.)
If our current mistakes are necessarily invisible to us, our past errors have an oddly slippery status as well. Generally speaking, they are either impossible to remember or impossible to forget. This wouldn’t be particularly strange if we consistently forgot our trivial mistakes and consistently remembered the momentous ones, but the situation isn’t quite that simple. I can never come across the name of the German writer Goethe without remembering the kindly but amused correction delivered to me by a college professor the first time I said it out loud, as Go-eth. As in pride goeth before a fall. (For readers in my erstwhile boat, it comes closer to rhyming with the name Bertha, minus the H. And the R.) This was a trivial and understandable mistake, yet I seem destined to go to my grave remembering it.
Compare that to an experience recounted by Sigmund Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (itself a book about erring). Once, while settling his monthly accounts, Freud came upon the name of a patient whose case history he couldn’t recall, even though he could see that he had visited her every day for many weeks, scarcely six months previously. He tried for a long time to bring the patient to mind, but for the life of him was unable to do so. When the memory finally came back to him, Freud was astonished by his “almost incredible instance of forgetting.” The patient in question was a young woman whose parents brought her in because she complained incessantly of stomach pains. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer.
It’s hard to say which is stranger: the complete amnesia for the massive error, or the perfect recall for the trivial one. On the whole, though, our ability to forget our mistakes seems keener than our ability to remember them. Over the course of working on this book, when I had occasion to explain its subject matter to strangers, a certain percentage would inevitably respond by saying, “You should interview me, I’m wrong all the time.” I would then ask for an example and, almost as inevitably, their brows would furrow, they would fall silent, and after a while, with