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Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 695 reviews

Will Byrnes

1,342 reviews121k followers

August 4, 2022

I have a very strong memory of the day my youngest was born. I can still summon the piercing scent of puddled broken water in a middle room of the second floor of our house. Problem is that my daughter was born before we moved into that house. Yet I, and hopefully everyone else who comes up short in a quest for recollection perfection, can take solace from this outstanding book.

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Kathryn Schulz - image from TED

Schulz coins the term “wrongology” as a tag for her view that being wrong can, in the scheme of things, be a pretty good thing, that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, that mistakes involve motion while perfect success implies stasis. In terms of the sheer volume of concepts raised in Being Wrong, this is a hefty work. It could have become a bit too heavy, but Schulz presents her case and her research with such puckish good humor that it all goes down very smoothly indeed.

First of all, Schulz is a journalist, not a scientist, historian, philosopher or a linguist. Yet, all these viewpoints, and others, are well represented in this impressive work.

This is not a fast read. Don’t bring it to the beach looking for a quick diversion. I tend to take notes in books of this sort, marking passages that hold particular appeal. I was kept quite busy while reading Being Wrong, noting, then typing out many, many passages that called my name. One measure for me of how rich a non-fiction read is can be found in how much time I spend typing out marked items. My hunt-and-peck time was considerable here. So many worthwhile observations, so much interesting material to be absorbed. Mother’s milk. You will learn a lot from reading this book, and will be entertained while doing so.

I have a few quibbles. I suppose I was hoping for some familiar examples of error. Perhaps adding the Titanic to her trove of error evaluation chestnuts would be asking too much. And the most obvious and germane big-picture example of error, DNA mutation that results in evolution, receives only a passing mention near the end.

Yet, not taking Schultz up on this challenge to look into her analysis of error would be…well, a mistake. To err is human but to read Being Wrong is divine.

Review first posted - 2010

Published - June 8, 2010

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

And here is her wonderful TED talk

A list of Schulz’s articles in New York Magazine

brain-candy nonfiction psychology

David

865 reviews1,551 followers

July 8, 2010

I am not a particularly violent person. But there were so many places in this book where I wanted to sit the author down, smack her briskly and scream at her "What were you thinking? It started with the very first word in the book, freshly minted for the occasion by the author. You read it and experience an involuntary recoil of revulsion at the sheer tin-eared ugliness of it. For God's sake, Kathryn Schulz, please don't title your opening chapter "Wrongology". If the first word in your book already makes my flesh crawl, that's hardly a good sign.

I chose this book based on a fawningly positive NY Times review by Dwight Garner, who obviously suffers from some kind of unhealthy crush
on Kathryn Schulz. According to Dwight, KS "flies high in the intellectual skies, leaving beautiful sunlit contrails". Now, I get off on the ozone rush of huffing a beautiful intellectual contrail as much as the next reader, but I'm afraid in this case Dwight is letting his slobbering fanboy worship cloud his judgement. Kathryn Schulz is not stupid, but she's certainly no intellectual goddess. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but given the direction she chose to take her investigation in this book, the reader begins to wonder if her choice was a wise one and (I hate to say it) if she really has the intellectual chops for the task she sets herself.

I think it would have been a perfectly straightforward matter to come up with a reasonable working definition of "being wrong", one would that cover the great majority (say 95%) of situations that are of practical interest. Had Kathryn Schulz chosen to adopt this kind of pragmatic approach, she would have written a considerably shorter book and, I think, a much better one. Unfortunately, she has chosen instead to wax philosophical about epistemological difficulties in coming up with appropriate definitions of concepts such as "knowledge", "being right", "error", and if one wants to bump it up a meta-level, knowledge of errors (one's own and those of others). Not surprisingly this turns out to be a rabbit hole, and not a particularly interesting one. Schulz's choice to explore these questions has the immediate effect of lengthening the book considerably and burdening whole sections with the kind of jargon only a professional philosopher could love. A case in point: the First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation , which is apparently the phrase philosophers use for the phenomenon that anyone pressed to defend his/her beliefs will say that it's because they are true. Flawed logic, conflict of interest, reason clouded by emotion -- these problems may be immediately evident to other people, but we are notoriously bad at detecting them in our own thinking. To her credit, the author acknowledges the clunkiness of the philosphical jargon; I just wish the replacement she proposes - the 'Cuz It's True Constraint didn't set my teeth on edge with the faux-folksiness of that 'cuz. But this reflects a problem with Schulz's style that bothered me throughout the book. Maybe it's a consequence of her time as a reporter for Rolling Stone, but she never seems to find a consistent register. As she flips back and forth from discussing scientific results to illustrations from popular culture, this failure to establish an appropriate register becomes jarring. Whether it's her choice to write "fuck up" when "screw up" would clearly have been more appropriate, or sentences like this one, about Hamlet: "It's not as if the prince dillydallies for fourteen scenes over whether to order the BLT or the chicken salad", I just did not enjoy Schulz's writing style.

Which is a shame, really, because buried in there among the superfluous philosophical baggage and the rambling mess of her own prose, she has some genuinely interesting points to make. In particular, her observation that making mistakes is an intrinsic part of human nature, and is an essential component of scientific enquiry, is important, if not particularly novel. However, Schulz is not the first person to have considered the questions in her book. A considerably clearer, more focused, discussion can be found in the excellent "Mistakes Were Made" by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The rambling undisciplined character of Schulz's writing prevents me from giving her book more than two stars. The disappointment is that, with some decent editing, she could have written a far better book.

disappointing read-in-2010

333 reviews38 followers

June 18, 2012

Absolutely loved this book, which really does uncover the extent to which we deny our mistakes and how much we would gain by admitting them, at least to ourselves. There is also an art to understanding that doubt is good so long as it does not paralyze us.

The author found that when she told people that she was writing about mistakes, they all said: 'Oh I have made tons of mistakes in my life'. She would reply: 'Oh it would really help my research if you could tell me about a few of them.' And people couldn't remember a single example in most cases. :)

Given this challenge, and being whom I am, of course, I could not resist then listing 70 major mistakes I had made in my life and sending them in an email to my wife for the record, as she is very kind! The mistakes covered relationships, friendships, financial, subjects I studied, career, housing. My goodness, that was pretty heavy, but I learned a lot. Try it sometime. It is oh so liberating if you can do it honestly, and then ask; 'OK so what might I do differently going forward'. Above all keep saying the Taoist phrase: 'no blame', just learn from the mistakes and don't beat up on yourself.

Trish

1,397 reviews2,655 followers

May 4, 2015

Schultz' review of H is for Hawk in the New Yorker magazine this spring really made me take notice not only of Macdonald's book but also of the art of reviewing. Schultz's review was as gorgeous and thoughtful as Macdonald's book. I set out to see what else Schultz wrote.

I really like Schultz' premise on this one: we feel badly when we make mistakes, but everyone does it. As Schultz points out, before Descartes ("I think, therefore I am") was St. Augustine ("I err, therefore I am" or "To err is human"). The thing is, while some errors are small ones, or funny ones (and Schultz gives examples) some folks make big ones (like Bush and his weapons of mass destruction or putting the wrong man in jail for life).

What is clear from our own experience is that being wrong is so painful that we often just carry on as though we were right after all. We stick to our guns, as they say, and harden our position. Schultz points out that only with long experience in living do we come to the "wisdom" phase..."no one can be right all the time," so we should embrace error as the path to perfectibility.

This discursive work is filled with anecdotes and case studies, experiments and examples. I think it is for this reason that I leapfrogged through it. Wrong of me, no doubt. I had to go back now and again to pick out useful pieces that encapsulated her thoughts. And this is where I found the problem, at least for me: I like examples pointing to conclusions, but the conclusions were less finely drawn than I would like and the examples perhaps too many and divergent. But we do get conclusions at the end, and it brings to mind Shambhala studies and democracy:

"Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to one another 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."

Schultz gave two TED talks in the aftermath of her book publication. Both are interesting, but the one on regret rang a bell, or a symphony, more like.

nonfiction political-science psychology

Thomas Edmund

1,039 reviews77 followers

February 13, 2019

At the time I grabbed it, Being Wrong was just an interest book in my non-fiction wishlist, something that I would little away a few minutes on Kindle when waiting at the bus-stop, for dinner, or for friends to show up.

Before I knew it I was jumping into the world of "Wrongology" for my daily fix. In her own words Schulz did not want to write an encyclopedia of Wrong, meaning the book isn't simply a long laundry list of different examples or major incidents of wrongness throughout history. Rather Schulz tackles the idea of Wrongness from several different angles, discussing our cognition, culture, and philosophies of error.

The result is a piece that gets deep AF. Talking about how error rattles us not just because of our fragile egos, but because being shown to be wrong is to show us that reality is different than we truly though it was. Schulz even dives into humour and art, and the relationship with error.

So if you're worried that this book is going to be a dry or sarcastic take on being mistaken, that isn't quite the ride you'll be in for. At times Being Wrong covers such diverse and in depth topics, I found myself getting lost (ironically I suppose) in exactly what subject I was reading about, but I was never bored or disinterested. I actually found Being Wrong to be more helpful than most other self-help or improvement type books by broadening my understanding of myself and others "Wrongness"

Daniel Chaikin

594 reviews65 followers

September 21, 2020

I wrote this 2014, and just came across it. It's one of favorite books. In my review there is a "things I learned" part that I think is very apt for today. So, sharing here on GR.

42. Being Wrong : Adventures in the Margin of Error (Audio) by Kathryn Schulz, read by Mia Barron (2010, 14 hours, 17 minutes, 420 pages in paper format, Read July 10-25)

I thought about my job the entire time I listened to this. Not sure that comes across as a compliment. It’s just that I’m wrong a lot. And this book has me thinking about that, about how often I am surprised when I discover, for sure, I was wrong, and about how valuable that is, how much I learn from it and get better at what I do because of it.

It’s long book, that covers a lot of topics and then goes on and on about them. So, it’s good thing I found so many topics interesting.

Things I learned:

That being wrong is a human problem. Animals and computers are never in state of awareness that they were wrong (probably arguable with animals). But humans are never in a state of knowing they are wrong, only that they were wrong. We always assume we are right about everything. Once we are aware we are wrong, we instantly know we are right that we were wrong, so maintain our permanent sense of rightness.

Our power of inductive reasoning. How we make vast conclusions on the tiniest amount of information. Typically we make our conclusion from the first bits of data, and then take the remaining data only with a sense of confirmation bias, looking for proof our initial conclusion was right. We need to do this to get through day-to-day life and it’s actually a very impressive thing. Computers can’t do inductive reasoning. But it’s also, naturally, error prone.

About the emotional disaster of transition - which is kind of like being in a state of wrongness. For example, if you have a strong belief and it is suddenly shown to be wrong, and you don't have another belief to replace it, you are left in difficult state. Belief is critical to our confidence that the world is as we think it is, even at the most basic lever. The transition state results in a loss of confidence.

About the mechanisms we use to avoid being proven wrong. How the less secure we feel about a belief, the more ardently we fight for it. And how some of us are so stubborn as to refuse to see the wrongness, including going through exaggerated states of denial of confabulation.

About confabulation - or making things up. How we all do it even when we think we are simply explaining what we are doing. How stubborn people tend to confabulate more.

On the separation in our minds between the parts that confabulate and the parts that fact check. We make stuff up first; it’s a critical part of our imagination. Then we fact check it second. Except that when we dream, we aren’t able to fact check. It’s the only time our imagination can run loose.

And so on.

Not a book for everyone, as it’s a bit long and very long winded. But it’s a great collection of interesting stuff. There is a lot here that might change how you view humanity.

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Jane

Author 28 books89 followers

December 20, 2011

This is really a must-read. Do you realize how little we can trust ourselves to perceive the truth? This is a great analysis of how we get things wrong, why it matters, and why errors can be a good thing in the journey of life. Plus, its analysis of Hamlet is spot on. I mean, if the only evidence of murder you have is a ghost's message, don't you think you'd better try to vet the facts a bit before taking justice in your own hands?-g

psychology

Wick Welker

Author 7 books536 followers

August 29, 2024

I don't have much to say here. This is a good book and I've read many like it. Schulz does a god job entertaining the reader about the uncomfortable land of being wrong where few like to dwell but through which all pass. I loved how she talked about that the feeling about being wrong is the exact feeling of being right because when you're wrong, you think you're being right. The human mind and ego has a tremendous aversion to being wrong and we rewrite and create all sorts of revisions in our mind to make us less wrong when looking back at mistakes. There's some great discussions about theory of mind and how seeking error is actually desirable and is what makes science and humor possible. It's a fun read.

epistemology nonfiction nonfiction-favorites

Kate

922 reviews22 followers

July 23, 2010

Interesting how polarizing this book is. I think an open mind and a willingness to be wrong are helpful as you read; there's a lot to be gotten from the psychological delving. An excellent examination of the psychological and physiological aspects of "being wrong." The first 1/2-2/3 of the book are dedicated to explaning WHY we are wrong, and why we usually think we are right! The rest of the book talks about acknowledging when we are wrong and why being wrong can is a good thing, and indeed an essential element in art and literature. I found the chapters on people accepting areas in their life that they got wrong to be especially moving. A chapter on understanding why our spouse/partner is NOT exactly the person we think (because we of course are right!) they should be is worse the price of the book. When you come to see the 'truths' you take to be self evident are really your beliefs, and could possibly be wrong, or could change, you can be more open and forgiving of others.
I thought this was an excellent read and not at all stuffy or too technical or too hard to read.

engaging-nonfiction

Sarah

361 reviews37 followers

June 6, 2010

Being Wrong. Kathryn Schulz. 2010. Ecco. 400 pages. ISBN 9780061176043.

Being Wrong is an exploration of how and why making errors is a crucial, natural and necessary component of being human, and how we must embrace being wrong to grow as people.

Falling into the psychology versus scientific realm, Being Wrong provides an interesting history of wrongness using numerous examples of pop-culture incidents; if you can consider an intricate look at being wrong an interesting subject, that is.

Schulz's voice is very eccentric, and the book will flood you with a barage of examples on how being wrong has transformed people and generated numerous events and mis-adventures since the beginning of time. Schulz also uses the experiences of past leaders and world-renowned figures as examples in terms of how being wrong has been significant in history.

Being Wrong reads very much like a narrative, and we can really hear Schulz's opinions on the matter. Because the book has this particular tone, it tends to be quite long, drawn-out, and somewhat boring in most places.

If the book had been written more to cater to the common audience using layman's terms, it would have been infinitely more interesting and appealing. I also noticed there are no definitions to some terms, phrases and words that the majority of readers will fail to understand. It's great when I can learn new words throughout the course of a book, but needing a dictionary several times in one paragraph tends to become more work then enjoyment. You can open Being Wrong to any random page in the book and immediately be able to pinpoint a sentence that requires assistance in some way, shape, or form to understand. To provide an example, I can open the book to a random page in Chapter 4 and find the following sentence,

"For us, as for those shoppers, something in the alchemy of the interaction often causes our half-baked hypotheses to congeal on the spot."

What does that MEAN??!! What exactly is a "half-baked hypothesis"?

As it stands, I don't think Being Wrong will be a great experience for someone who isn't a psychologist or even mildly interested in the subject of being wrong. I give kudos to those readers who can interpret and enjoy Being Wrong.

For more book reviews by DreamSE22 visit http://dreamworldbooks.com.

first-reads

Moonkiszt

2,585 reviews296 followers

May 13, 2022

This just might be the scariest book you'll ever read. If you really read it, and let go of your own rightness just long enough to risk a little. . .it'll be like looking deep into the Grand Canyon.

Seriously one of the best books I've read on this topic. I keep thinking about it, and mulling.

Mulling and mulling.

Still mulling. And will buy a hardcopy. This was a listen for me, and I'm finding myself reaching for highlighters. Time for a hardcopy.

adults-authors-explaining-stuff bookclubbable change-a-call-for-change

Red

66 reviews65 followers

July 29, 2014

I really thought I was going to like this. I guess I was...

Jack Hart

13 reviews5 followers

February 2, 2013

This is, to my way of thinking, an extraordinary book about a great topic. Although, if you're not an intellectually ambitious person the book may seem to have, as several Good Reads reviewers opined, too damn many words.

But I like Kathryn Schulz's prose. She knows her western canon and cites it deftly. In the course of elaborating her ideas about the experience of wrongness she'll even uncover a novel point here and there about the literature and philosophy she so clearly loves.

I also like that she's a reporter. She wants to tell stories about our world now, and finds people whose lives have forced on them deep meditations on wrongness and she gets them to open up to her: A divorce lawyer to the stars, a woman who was raped who's testimony put the wrong man in prison, a young fundamentalist woman who fell in love with an atheist. She draws on their experience and brings their words into her argument with considerable delicacy.

The topic itself is fascinating. She explains that "we don't experience, remember, track, or retain mistakes as a feature of our inner landscape." As soon as we realize we have a bad theory about something it's like our brain grabs another one so that we can always experience ourselves as in the right. This argument is set out with great fun and skill, and if you buy into it you start to buy into a humanizing fascination with our relations to wrongness. She argues it's inextricably bound with our next best selves, and she makes this argument in a friendly, secular, wide-ranging way that I found myself taking to heart.

decision-theory

Ryan Holiday

Author 67 books16.2k followers

June 22, 2012

I should have liked this more than I did. Having sat on it a bit, I kept going back to thinking how much I like the author. The book's a bit long at times and redundant, and I don't think it's organized well, but it's the right kind of book. There's actually a saying in the The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Interviews with Pierre Hadot -- that real philosophical dialog sets out to form rather than inform. That's what this book does. Most of these psychology books try to teach you a bunch of stuff. They talk about this study and these fallacies and how you must listen to them convince you that your way of thinking about the world is wrong. Schulz, I think, would just be happy if you left with a flicker of doubt. She adds a couple new pikes that might catch and snag you before you barrel down the road of wrongness. It's a rare approach for an author, one worth rewarding

Julianna

Author 5 books1,337 followers

September 6, 2018

Reviewed for THC Reviews
If not for it being our latest book club read, I’m not sure I would have picked up Being Wrong on my own, not because it didn’t sound interesting (it did and was one of my top picks among the choices we voted for this month), but because I may not have found it without someone else bringing it to my attention. It’s simply not the type of book that probably would have come up in my day-to-day browsing of reading recommendations. But I can’t deny that it ended up being a very interesting read. As a psychology geek, who’s fascinated with the inner workings of the human mind, I was intrigued by all the many different ways in which we can be wrong, and more importantly, how we can delude ourselves into thinking that we’re right even when we aren’t. This was an extremely well-researched and well-written book that engaged my intellect, while also bringing me to the realization that perhaps I need to more closely examine my beliefs and sense of rightness in various areas.

One of the main things this book does is delving into the various reasons why we can be so wrong about certain things. Some of it is rooted in a seeming quirk of human nature that drives us to have a need for beliefs. We being theorizing about the world around us as infants and by childhood we’re beginning to develop our beliefs. We all must believe in things, whether it’s as benign as what color of paint looks best in a certain room to something as momentous as the existence of God. And throughout life our beliefs may change, but usually we have trouble letting go of one belief until we have another one to replace it. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in an existential crisis. Whether we realize it or not, we also have a need for certainty in our lives. That’s why when someone seems so certain about something, it can be very appealing and lead us toward a belief in that thing whether it’s true or not. As humans, we additionally tend to have a tribal mentality, the sense that if the majority of the people in our social circle are going along with something, then it must be the right path when sometimes it isn’t. I was also intrigued by the ways in which our memories can be so fickle and faulty. I know that the next time someone insists that something happened a certain way, I’ll be taking it with a grain of salt, even if that someone is me.:-)

One of the major strengths of the book for me was all the true stories of people who’ve been wrong in various ways. I think I’m the type of person who learns and understands better when I have concrete examples, so these stories really helped the message of the book come alive for me in a way it might not have without them. The author includes so many stories of ways in which people have been wrong, even phenomenally wrong, throughout the ages, even though they thought they were right. One that stood out was the Millerites in the 18th century, who claimed to have calculated down to the day when Christ was going to return. Many of them didn’t plant crops that year and/or sold off all their worldly possessions, believing they were going to be swept up to heaven on that day. But of course it didn’t happen. Some then left the faith altogether, while others readjusted their beliefs and what they thought they knew into something else, and still others doubled down on their beliefs. This movement later grew into the denomination known as Seventh Day Adventists. Another stand-out story was that of two contrasting rape cases. In both cases, the men convicted of the rapes were misidentified and later exonerated through DNA evidence. In one case, the woman who was raped was very accepting of the results and tried to reconcile with the man she misidentified. In the other case, the prosecutor, apparently unable to come to terms with the fact that he’d tried the wrong man, tied himself up in knots trying to explain away the scientific evidence while insisting the man was still guilty. There were so many of these great stories throughout the book that helped make it a fascinating read.

I had a really hard time rating Being Wrong. It truly is very well done. The author is clearly an extremely intelligent, erudite, and articulate writer, who did her research well and organized this book in a way that made sense. I was constantly amazed at how she was able to tie everything together cohesively, and sometimes temporarily drop a thread, only to deftly weave it back in later. The absorbing, tantalizing, and sometime humorous anecdotes made the book more accessible, and there was much that I learned from its pages with regards to the human mind and how we can be wrong, but at the same time, I felt like there were things that I was missing. I freely admit that this may have been a failing of my own brain to grasp what was being said, but I can’t help feeling that if I had trouble with parts of it, others might as well. My book club is a pretty smart group and yet most of them agreed that this was definitely not an easy read. I think this is my main reason for dropping the star, but feel free to take that with a grain of salt. Just know that it will require a sharp mind and good concentration to grasp the contents.

I will also leave with this last thought. Despite the author saying that she didn’t set out to write a self-help book, I felt that it did in many ways help me to better understand wrongness. I might have wished for a step-by-step guide for combating the reasons for wrongness, but I was still able to glean some strategies for this from within its pages. At the end of the day, that’s a win for me. If it makes me (and others who read it) look more carefully at my (their) assertions, then IMHO, the book will have done its job. So for that I definitely recommend it. In our current age, when so many people are entrenched in political or other divisive belief systems, I think delving into our wrongness is a great place to start the difficult work of change.

psychology-and-self-help read-2018

Robin Tobin (On the back porch reading)

974 reviews14 followers

October 2, 2019

My Nerdy Brain Loved Pondering discussions in this Read.....

nonfiction

Reese

163 reviews67 followers

June 10, 2010

My copy of BEING WRONG: ADVENTURES IN THE MARGIN OF ERROR was a gift -- a Goodreads giveaway. My being wrong -- occasionally, frequently, perhaps consistently -- is a "gift" from our Creator and/or my creators. The ways in which I experience being wrong are probably also "gifts" from my creators, teachers, friends, et al. As a parent, I have passed on the "gift" of intermittent or perpetual wrongness and promoted certain reactions to being wrong. When my son was a young child, he would respond to "What time is it?" with answers such as "It's approximately 3:27." If from this anecdote you have concluded that being right is very important in the family that I helped to create, you are -- I believe -- not wrong. Half-jokingly, my son would announce scores in the family's never-ending game of I'm-Right-You're-Wrong. While I used to think that our determination to avoid being wrong was extreme, Schulz's book has enabled me to see that our responses to wrongness are not unusual. For that reason alone, I can say that reading BEING WRONG was not a waste of my time.

Nevertheless, I believe that I am not the "right" audience for this book. Too much information for an old woman with a fairly narrow range of interests and an old woman already familiar with Schulz's most important points. Other readers, too, if they get as far as the book's midpoint, are likely to decide that the work was not intended for them. If it happens to land in a bookstore's self-help section, heaven help the customer service staff of any bookstore that doesn't give refunds. I can imagine certain chapters of BEING WRONG showing up in rhetoric/readers and anthologies of nonfiction prose. And I can see the title of this book on syllabi for interdisciplinary studies courses. Schulz discusses history, philosophy, psychology, logic, sociology, theology, literature, and various sciences. Even if readers ignore the forty-five pages of endnotes, the number and length of her footnotes may cause some to wonder: "Am I reading a marketable version of the author's dissertation?" In many ways, the work is a textbook -- a well-written text, a valuable text. Its greatest value is in its potential to influence students -- young voters -- who need to understand the dangers of absolutism and to recognize that, unlike a rose, "a truth is not a truth is not a truth." How different our world would be if most people did not confuse beliefs and interpretations with facts. How different our world would be if most people acknowledged their mistakes and consciously used them to develop a new attitude, a better system, a higher standard of conduct.

Suppose that all that I've written about Schulz's book is wrong -- and it may be -- so what? I've only presented beliefs -- I think. Can my beliefs be wrong? I don't know. Do you know? Do you believe that you know? Will you know tomorrow? If I'm wrong, will you laugh?

favorite-gr-finds first-reads

Jim

Author 4 books57 followers

February 10, 2014

Think about the last time you were wrong. Can you remember it? I could, after taking some time to think about it. I thought my car had been stolen, and had reported it stolen, before I realized that I'd left it in the parking lot of a nearby Safeway and walked home with my groceries by mistake. I wonder if the police dispatchers still laugh at that one, or if the incident's been replaced in their memories by others like it that happen a dozen times a day.

That's one story of my being wrong. I have others. But like most people, I feel as if I'm right about everything I currently think, even though a reasonable percentage of it is probably wrong. But I like feeling as if I'm right. I'm comfortable with it. And I admit that I've not always behaved well when someone's pointed out my mistakes.

What's great about Kathryn Schulz's book is that it's made me rethink my fear of being shown I'm wrong.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error is an exceptional work that recommends taking an optimistic view of our capacity for wrongness without ignoring the costs of our errors. Being wrong, Schulz says, feels a lot like being right. But realizing we're wrong is often the first step toward a greater empathy with our flawed neighbors and sometimes a transformed sense of ourselves; while our refusal to admit mistakes usually encourages us to be cruel, judgmental, and angry.

Our ability to err, Schulz argues, is essential to our ability to change and grow intellectually and morally. It's what allows the world to surprise us and sometimes even teaches us to think more carefully. Those looking for a companion piece to The Believing Brain would do well to buy, beg, borrow, or steal a copy.

George Musser

Author 8 books61 followers

December 10, 2010

A worthwhile read that gives me much to think about in my own life. Schulz's broad point is that the fear of committing an error is often worse than the error itself -- it fills us with a fear of exploration and prevents us from acknowledging, correcting, and learning from our mistakes. The risk of error is often a necessary tradeoff for creativity and growth. I think Schulz convincingly makes her case. I vow to ease up on screwups, whether mine or others'. To err is human; to forgive, humane.

But I think the book would have been more effective as a magazine-length essay that focused on the most novel case studies. It has a winding, repetitive argument, a college-paper style that gets monotonous after 15 chapters, and lots of potted history that seems to have been written from encyclopedia lookups. The book also overstates its case. It claims to advocate error per se, but what it really advocates is an acceptance that we err. It's one thing to take a risk, quite another to actively seek to do wrong -- outside the contexts of comedy, art, and pep talks, that is purely destructive. And although there's utility in seeing the mishaps of daily life on a spectrum with the great errors of history, the latter often do involve more than mere error, but outright malevolence and a pathological neglect of simple prudence. Sometimes, in other words, we *shouldn't* be tolerant of error and just laugh it off as the price of being human. Schulz offers few thoughts on how to cope with these different degrees of error.

Elizabeth Hunter

334 reviews24 followers

September 15, 2010

I found Being Wrong slow going, not because I wasn't enjoying it--although I do think that the first couple of chapters are the most dense--but because I needed to stop and digest and think about how what Schulz says resonates with my own experiences.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book, was Schulz' examination and concise rendering of questions I've often pondered. She looks at why we're wrong so often, why we have trouble admitting that and go to great lengths to stay on the "right" side of things, and why the connection between "wrong" and "bad" is so hard to sever. She relates personal anecdotes, historical events and medical case histories in an intelligent, yet amusing tone that made it feel like a conversation with a very well-informed friend.

One interesting thing--not having looked before I started, I was surprised to realize after a couple of chapters that the author is a woman. So I also spent a fair amount of time thinking about why I was wrong about that and what the cues were that gave me that impression.

I think I'll be referring back to this one often. Unless I'm wrong.

brain-mind non-fiction

Stewart

319 reviews16 followers

June 26, 2012

Over many years I have grappled with the related issues of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. When measured against what there is to know, what we humans do in fact know is in the order of zero-point-several zeroes. No matter how well-read, well-traveled, or well-informed we think we are, our ignorance is immense. We have to make decisions – most trivial, many of them life-changing, a few of them life-and-death – based on a trifling amount of information, the vast majority second- or third-hand. Because the amount of information we use to make everyday decisions ranges from minute to microscopic, we often make mistakes and miscalculations. We suffer misunderstandings. Unaware of so much in the universe, we get buffeted and in some cases crushed by its forces. To err is indeed human.
Thus when I found a book on error in a recent Daedalus book catalog, I quickly ordered it. And I wasn’t disappointed. "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Shulz is an amazingly insightful, humorous, and quotable book, drawing on philosophy, science, history, politics, literature, and pop culture.
That I hadn’t heard of this 2010 book or seen a review in the many newspapers and magazines I read shows the ignorance in which I am immersed, despite thinking I am a well-read individual. It seems this worthwhile book somehow got lost in the shuffle among the tens of thousands of books published every year in English.
Shulz, a newspaper and magazine journalist and author, looks at error in many of its forms – the personal, political, religious, philosophical – and our efforts to deny our mistakes and deflect blame. She examines the success in lessening error in the life-and-death areas of aviation and hospitals. She spends a lot of time on inductive reasoning, our way of making sense of the world, and its limitations. She looks at error in romantic love and the rare cases of radical shifts of belief that people have made.
There is so much that is wise and quotable in this book that I couldn’t begin to list all the passages.
Although Shulz spends many pages discussing the larger issues people can be wrong about – religion, philosophy, science, world politics – she also spends a lot of time talking about situations closer to home, including relationships. “Our default attitude toward wrongness, then – our distaste for error and our appetite for being right – tends to be rough on relationships. This applies equally to relationships among nations, communities, colleagues, friends, and (as will not be lost on most readers) relatives. Indeed, an old adage of therapists is that you can either be right or be in a relationship: you can remain attached to Team You winning every confrontation, or you can remain attached to friends and family, but good luck trying to do both.
“If insisting on our rightness tends to compromise our relationships, it also reflects poorly on our grasp of probability.” We have thousands, if not tens of thousands of beliefs, ranging from the trivial (Joe’s Pizza Place closes at 9 p.m. on Fridays) to the complex and interlocking system of religious, political, and philosophical beliefs through which we experience the world. That all of these myriad beliefs are correct and reflective of the real world is exceedingly unlikely.
Shulz opines that the world would be a better place if we admitted how commonplace error is, in general and in our specific cases.
“As a culture, we haven’t even mastered the basic skill of saying ‘I was wrong.’ This is a startling deficiency, given the simplicity of the phrase, the ubiquity of error, and the tremendous public service that acknowledging it can provide.”

Jacob

879 reviews64 followers

May 25, 2018

Wow! I've read quite a few books about being wrong (e.g. Don't Believe Everything you Think, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), How We Know What Isn't So, You Are Not So Smart), now that I look at it, but this one, focusing on the *experience* of being wrong and how it feels, is my favorite so far. Part of it is that I identify closely with the author's description of what being wrong is like, and part is the author's philosophical discussion about why being wrong is human, even essential to being human, and the source of some good (it's dry, but worth the read).

The book addresses different reasons people tend to be wrong about things, addressing various personal, social, and other factors that contribute to people not recognizing when they're wrong, or acknowledging it when they do. The first part takes a while to warm up to, but it eventually gets really engrossing, especially when Schulz starts using stories to illustrate her points.

The author makes the point in multiple ways that error is inextricably part of being human. Not only are we inherently fallible, and many of our human mechanisms for dealing with reality inherently include seeds of error, but our capacity for error actually provides us with motivation and mechanisms for doing better (like science). She argues it's also the source of our ability to imagine what isn't real, the foundation of art and humor, and our ability to empathize with others through imagining how they feel.

And she's right. It's why, among other things, when Philip K. Dick gives a speech entitled "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later", his point is that you *do* want to build a universe that falls apart two days later because that's what will make a story interesting (https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to...). It's conflict that makes a story worth reading, and conflict comes from error of one sort or another.

I was going to give this 4.5 stars and mention I'd give it a 5 if I ever reread it and still like it, but two thirds of the way through, the author makes a brave choice that pushed it right up into 5-star territory. She includes the story of a woman who was sure she identified the man who assaulted her, only to find out conclusively, years later, that she was wrong. After his exoneration, she made her peace with the man, but then the guy went on to actually commit a violent crime later. It makes the story messy and unclear, and Schulz was going to cut it and use a different story until she realized that's exactly what we do in dealing with error -- we try to ignore the messiness of life and things that don't fit with what we want to think. Her honesty and openness in including the story despite its unresolved issues earned that fifth star.

Bonus points for mentions of:
- Oregon as the author's "home away from home"
- Phil Tetlock (repeatedly) and his work on the failure of experts to predict things, or even recognize their predictions are wrong
- The fact that science can't prove anything, only disprove it, and that it's an approximation of reality, not reality itself

Not everything is fantastic. Most pages are a wall of text, which makes it a little tougher to get through. And while the writing is interesting and the author includes decent amounts of humor, it's not as easily engaging as some other similar writing. Schulz's style is more philosophical, so be prepared to think about what she says and take time to understand it.

There's a TED talk (very) short version of Schulz's ideas if you'd like to see it: https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_sch...

from_library nonfiction psychology

Carolyn

187 reviews58 followers

June 3, 2011

I consider myself the consummate fuckup. Even when I succeed in accomplishing something difficult, once the warmth of self-congratulatory celebration dissipates I can’t help thinking about every screw up and each way they’ll likely weigh me down during the course of my life the rest of my life and preclude me from divinity and the promises of pennies from heaven. I know a lot of people who think like this while we know that this manner of thinking is stupid and counterproductive, every time we try to mentally put our mistakes into perspective and balance them with our accomplishments, the inner asshole that we all have in our head won’t let us accept them, and gleefully drowns out rationality by reciting a grocery list of all our screw ups. How could we make all those mistakes?

Being Wrong provides an absorbing counterpoint to the notion that making a mistake somehow diminishes you as a person. “Twelve hundred years before Rene’ Descartes penned his famous ‘I think, therefore I am,’ the philosopher Augustine wrote ‘fallor ergo sum.’” – I err therefore I am. We shouldn’t fear error; rather, we should embrace it because it’s our capacity for making mistakes that makes us who we are. Schulz explores the nature of error: are big mistakes fundamentally different from small mistakes, or are they all essentially the same? How much does peer pressure, or crowd response, affect our capacity to blunder? Why do we remember relatively insignificant mistakes for the rest of our lives, long after they have ceased to be relevant to anything? And why do we take being wrong so personally. As Molière said, “It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.”

Shultz is a witty and dynamic writer, capable of quoting everyone from Aristotle, to Pliny the Elder, to Hamlet and Beyonce. She argues in “Being Wrong” that, of all the things we’re wrong about, our ideas about error are probably our “meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.” She continues, “Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.” She is full of stories and anecdotes but avoids turning the book into a “wrongology slide-show”. The stories include everything from Alan Greenspan’s firm faith in the economy proved wrong, a doomsday prophet whose apocalypse wasn’t now, a sexual assault victim whose mistaken testimony jailed an innocent man and a Klansman who became an unlikely advocate for civil rights. Shultz argues that when people are confronted with their wrongness, they can either must accept it, deny it or be transformed by it.

However, her book still doesn’t read like a book; more like a collection of essays on the theory of wrongness. The book is fascinating from chapter to chapter, but there isn’t a theory that encapsulates the whole book, except that we shouldn’t worry about making mistakes. At the beginning of the book, she calls the book a study of “wrongology” but never builds the systematic arguments that “¬-ology” requires. Instead we get a “wrongologue” — a series of observations and insights that leave us feeling that we’ve had all the good thoughts one could possibly have about wrongness, but that we still don’t know which ones are . . . well, right. There’s none of the necessary conclusions about being wrong, so the book is a fascinating and compelling read, but not life-changing or groundbreaking.

Nicole Lisa

332 reviews13 followers

August 11, 2017

This is an excellent read on how we go wrong, how we think about and react to going wrong, and about the place wrongness has in Western society.

The optical illusions are great. I had to print them out and cut them up myself to believe that my eyes were lying.

The brief mention of autism has not aged well and the author chose to include the racist slurs in quotes which I just felt was unnecessary since we all know what those slurs are in the context of the KKK.

I would have been interested to see what this book could have been like if all the conversion stories in it didn't reinforce Americans' and specifically progressive's idea of what is right (evangelical to atheist; racist to anti-racist; Muslim to Christian). That last one I thought was problematic in its representation out of context, because it was the story of a Muslim man in Afghanistan converting to Christianity that treated it as merely a change of belief without examining the colonizing effects of Christian missionaries or the political ramifications of changing religions when the law is based on that religion.

Still an excellent read and we could all do with thinking about what wrongness means to each of us.

2017 non-fiction

Helena

Author 2 books35 followers

August 7, 2020

What a book!

One of those "easy reads" with regards to how it's written, the way the language flows easily, the sense of humor has me chucking more than once every chapter, and then at the same time, this is not an easy read, not at all.

If you truly read it, take in what Kathryn points at, this is definitely a game-changing book (that is, it has the potential to be, if you let it. But it requires one thing from you: a willingness to be wrong, and admit to it, at that!)!

My full review here:
https://helenaroth.com/being-wrong-ad...

Gio Listmaker

288 reviews90 followers

Want to read

March 18, 2017

https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_sch...

I Now Want To Read This Book.

Jessica

104 reviews7 followers

July 18, 2017

Interesting but also dry. Hard for me to concentrate on the philosophical parts of the first 1/3rds of the book.

Mateo Toledo

496 reviews7 followers

October 22, 2020

Imprescindible. El mejor libro q he leído este año.

ciencia ensayo filosofía

Scott

8 reviews

December 18, 2020

Manages to be fascinating and dead boring at the same time.

Tiago F

358 reviews142 followers

December 1, 2021

I've read a lot of books on cognitive biases, so many that I'm sort of fed up with the topic. I imagined that it would be a long time for me to read another one, if ever. Yet, a good friend of mine recommended it to me and I trusted his judgement.

In some ways, the book explains many ways that we err, having some overlap with many books I've read previously - what I feared. Yet, this wasn't the main point of the book. While it's helpful to describe and explain how are wrong, the approach she takes is more holistic. She is not only concerned about how we make errors but the idea of error itself, which I highly appreciated and it contained many fresh and interesting ideas.

A couple of them stood out to me. The first is that Schulz spends a considerable amount of time in the phenomenology of being wrong. Not just analyzing errors from a detached "objective" perspective, but a deeply personal one, which is of course the one we experience. Although depending on how you look at it, actually being wrong at the moment is not something you experience. Because while it is happening, you don't know that you're "in the wrong". Afterwards, you recognize your mistake, but you're no longer "inside" of it so to speak.

Another interesting aspect is how we feel about wrongness. We always see it as... well, wrong. As something fundamentally bad, and this pops out in how we view the world and ourselves in unexpected ways. Error is generally thought of as a gap. She gives the example that Plato thought existence was filled with error because we took a physical form (instead of being pure soul being, John Locke thought that error arose from the gap between how we describe the world through language and how the world actually is, and Heidegger from the fact that are embodied and cognitively bound creatures trapped in time and space, always limited to a single perspective without seeing the whole.

All of them have a "gap", and that gap is from a difference between our mind and the rest of the world. I don't remember if she gave this example in the book, but perhaps the best illustration is the word sin which simply meant missing the target. Meaning the gap between what you should do and what you actually do.

The other powerful idea is that being wrong is deeply tied to being right. We almost exclusively think of error as a bad thing to be eliminated at all costs, but she goes through great depth at why that's not the best way to view it. And this isn't simply a cliche self-help yin-yang type idea, it is at the core of how we arrive at the truth.

One way she describes this, although certainly not the only one, is how historically error has been associated with truth. For example, dreams have long been considered gateways to truths otherwise not accessible. So has a variety of psychedelic plants, and even madness itself. What they all in common is that they change reality. In some sense, we get outside reality. That's almost the definition of error, and yet humanity has long considered them sacred as a way to fight error and guides towards rightness.

The book also has sections that are surprisingly detailed and guide you through a particular example. Sometimes I felt this was overkill, but it certainly had a benefit. Some of these were quite personal and the objective was to have a more rich understanding of event, especially from a subjective perspective. For example, someone who stopped believing in God and how that turned her life upside down, or identifying the wrong person in a case of rape and decades later finding out it was the wrong person, causing an innocent man to be behind bars for years.

I have read a lot of books, but given this book's length, I think it's the one I saved content the most. It totals over 40 pages... an absurd impractical amount which I wanted to shorten but too much of it was too interesting to delete.

The only thing I disliked was that the book seemed to be deceptively long, and at the times it felt I was making little progress and it was a never-ending journey, one at that time I was impatient to complete. Not sure what made happen, perhaps the book's narrator (I listened on Audible), but nevertheless I consider it as a small inconvenience for the overall fantastic value it provides.

If you care about truth, you should care about error. And this book is by far the most comprehensible work on the topic, analyzing error not just as a psychological phenomenon but also much more that will certainly deepen your understanding of what error is, why it happens, and its importance.

audiobooks psychology

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Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz

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