Being Wrong Quotes

“To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling and sometimes even dangerous but in the end it is a journey and a story. Who really wants to stay at home and be right when you can don your armor spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world True you might get lost along get stranded in a swamp have a scare at the edge of a cliff thieves might steal your gold brigands might imprison you in a cave sorcerers might turn you into a toad but what of what To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in the spirit that this book is written.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“...[W]hen we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes."


Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds.


To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Granted it is easy at least comparatively to find pleasure in error when there's nothing at stake. But that can't be the whole story since all of us have been known to throw tantrums over totally trivial mistakes. What makes illusions different is that for the most part we enter in them by consent. We might not know exactly how we are going to err but we know that the error is coming and we say yes to the experience anyways.


In a sense much the same thing could be said of life in general. We can't know where your next error lurks or what form it will take but we can be very sure that it is waiting for us. With illusions we look forward to this encounter since whatever minor price we paid in pride is handily outweighed by curiosity at first and by pleasure afterward. The same will not always true when we venture past these simple perceptual failures to more complex and consequential mistakes But nor is willing the embrace of error always beyond us. In fact this might be the most important thing that illusions can teach us: that is is possible at least some of the time to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction then we would have found being right.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. “The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them,” the writer Louis Menand observed. “…The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“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.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all—if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own—we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“The certainty of those with whom we disagree—whether the disagreement concerns who should run the country or who should run the dishwasher—never looks justified to us, and frequently looks odious. As often as not, we regard it as a sign of excessive emotional attachment to an idea, or an indicator of a narrow, fearful, or stubborn frame of mind. By contrast, we experience our own certainty as simply a side-effect of our rightness, justifiable because our cause is just. And, remarkably, despite our generally supple, imaginative, extrapolation-happy minds, we cannot transpose this scene. We cannot imagine, or do not care, that our own certainty, when seen from the outside, must look just as unbecoming and ill-grounded as the certainty we abhor in others.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Properly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain. —CHARLES RENOUVIER, ESSAIS DE CRITIQUE GÉNÉRALE”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“[There] is . . . a problem that bedevils all of us as members of communities of believers. I call this problem our disagreement deficit, and it comes in four parts.
. . . First, our communities expose us to disproportionate support for our own ideas. Second, they shield us from the disagreement of outsiders. Third, they cause us to disregard whatever outside disagreement we do encounter. Finally, they quash the development of disagreement from within.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds. We can create open and transparent environments instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak up when they see the potential for error.
These measures might be a prescription for identifying and eliminating mistakes, but they sound like something else: a prescription for democracy. That's not an accident. Although we don't normally think of it in these terms, democratic governance represents another method—this time a political rather than an industrial or personal one—for accepting the existence of error and trying to curtail its more dangerous incarnations.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“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.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“The fact is, with the exception of our own minds, no power on earth has the consistent and absolute ability to convince us that we are wrong. However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“It’s as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“In 1972, the psychologist Irving Janis defined groupthink as, “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” Groupthink most commonly affects homogenous, close-knit communities that are overly insulated from internal and external criticism, and that perceive themselves as different from or under attack by outsiders. Its symptoms include censorship of dissent, rejection or rationalization of criticisms, the conviction of moral superiority, and the demonization of those who hold opposing beliefs. It typically leads to the incomplete or inaccurate assessment of information, the failure to seriously consider other possible options, a tendency to make rash decisions, and the refusal to reevaluate or alter those decisions once they’ve been made.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“The best eyewitnesses got more than 25 percent of the facts wrong. The worst erred 80 percent of the time.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“It is not about living idyllically in our
similarities, but about living peacefully and pleasurably in
our differences.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest if the brain.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Compounding the problem of insufficient information is the problem of bad information. Children believe in things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy not because they are particularly credulous but for the same reasons the rest of us believe our beliefs. Their information about these phenomena comes from trusted sources (typically, their parents) and is often supported by physical evidence (cookie crumbs by the chimney, quarters under the pillow). It isn’t the kids’ fault that the evidence is fabricated and that their sources mislead them. Nor is it their fault that their primary community, outside of their family, generally consists of other children, who tend to be equally ill-informed.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“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.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“The whole reason it’s possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it. When you are simply going about your business in a state you will later decide was delusional, you have no idea of it whatsoever. You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has gone off the cliff but before he has looked down. Literally in his case and figuratively in yours, you are already in trouble when you feel like you’re still on solid ground. So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“[We] are usually much more willing to entertain the possibility that we are wrong about insignificant matters than about weighty ones. This has a certain emotional logic, but it is deeply lacking in garden-variety logic. In high-stakes situations, we should want to do everything possible to ensure that we are right--which, as we will see, we can only do by imagining all the ways we could be wrong. That we are able to do this when it hardly matters, yet unable to do so when the stakes are huge, suggests that we might learn something important by comparing these otherwise very different experiences.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error