Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [92]
This tendency to skip straight from Right A to Right B illuminates an important fact about how we change our beliefs—and also how we don’t change them. Here is Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, describing the way scientists react when their pet theories are unraveling: “What scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies,” Kuhn wrote, “…. [is] renounce the paradigm that led them into crisis.” Instead, he concluded, “A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.” That is, scientific theories very seldom collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. They topple only when a new and seemingly better belief turns up to replace it.
As with scientists, so too with the rest of us. Sometimes in life we find ourselves between jobs, and sometimes we find ourselves between lovers, and sometimes we find ourselves between homes. But we almost never find ourselves between theories. Rather than assess a belief on its own merits, we choose among beliefs, clinging to our current ones until something better comes along. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this strategy—in fact, it might be the only truly viable one*—but it does narrow the moment of wrongness to mere nanoseconds. We are absolutely right about something up until the very instant that, lo and behold, we are absolutely right about something else.
Occasionally, though we stumble. There we are, trying to leapfrog from before to after, from the solid ground of Right A to the solid ground of Right B, and instead we fall into the chasm between them. This is the terrain of pure wrongness—the abyss we find ourselves in when a belief of ours has fallen apart and we have nothing on hand to replace it. This is not an easy or a comfortable place. It is not (despite my general enthusiasm for error and my effort to rehabilitate its reputation) a place I suggest you spend much time. The condition of having been wrong about something might irk us or confuse us or deflate our ego. But the condition of being wrong—of being stuck in real-time wrongness with no obvious way out—absolutely levels us.
Fortunately, we don’t get stuck in this place of pure wrongness very often. And we don’t get stuck there via the collapse of small or mediumsize beliefs. We get stuck there when we are really wrong about really big things—beliefs so important and far-reaching that we can neither easily replace them nor easily live without them. If our trivial beliefs sometimes burst as lightly as bubbles—just a quick pop of surprise and they’re gone—these gigantic beliefs collapse like stars, leaving only us and a black hole behind. If you mortgaged your family’s future on your faith in Bernie Madoff; if you hitched your whole wagon to a doctrine or a deity you no longer believe in; if you were wrong about someone you loved and the kind of life you thought the two of you would live together; if you have betrayed your own principles in any of the countless dark ways we can surprise ourselves over the course of a lifetime: if any of this or anything like this has happened to you, then you have suffered in the space of pure wrongness.
One person who knows all about this space is Anita Wilson.* When I met Anita, she was a thirty-one-year-old special-education teacher living in New York City. Talking to her, it occurred to me that she must excel at her job. She struck me as calm, empathetic, sane, and kind, and I liked her immediately. But the road she had taken to all these places—to her career, to New York, to serenity and happiness—was both tortuous and torturous.
When Anita was eight years old, her family moved from Chicago to the central valley of California and went from being,