highlights by me and others from Being Wrong by Kathryn Schultz
When other people reject our beliefs, we think they lack good information. When we reject their beliefs, we think we possess good judgment.
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“Everyone complains about their memory; no one complains about their judgment.”
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“Everyone complains about their memory; no one complains about their judgment.”
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In sum: we love to know things, but ultimately we can’t know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing when we don’t know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up.
Note: if i ever need a GOD to hold on to, that`s why
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Highlights made by me and others
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.
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This book is about the opposite of all that. It is about being wrong: about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals cope when our convictions collapse out from under us.Read more at location 97
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Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.
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that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.
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Twelve hundred years before René Descartes penned his famous “I think, therefore I am,” the philosopher and theologian (and eventual saint) Augustine wrote “fallor ergo sum”: I err, therefore I am.
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So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right.
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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.
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Another is that (as we’ll see in more detail later) realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time: something else instantly becomes the new right. In light of this new belief, the discarded one can quickly come to seem remote, indistinct, and irrelevant, as if we never took it all that seriously in the first place.Read more at location 374
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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.
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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.
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To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in that spirit that this book is written.
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If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of the phrase “smoke and mirrors,” Brewster provides a detailed description of how to use pieces of concave silver to throw human images against a background of smoke, thereby making gods (or rulers, or enemies) seem to dance and writhe in the center of a fire.Read more at location 1002
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confirmation bias is the tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than to evidence that challenges them.
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Unless we took these things on trust, we should accomplish absolutely nothing in this life.Read more at location 2245
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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.Read more at location 2631
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For this and other bedrock beliefs, he argued, we literally can’t provide any convincing grounds, because the belief itself is “as certain as anything that I could produce in evidence for it.” If someone were to ask him how many hands he had, Wittgenstein pointed out, “I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don’t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn’t I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands?”Read more at location 2671
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Hirstein has a point; you will be hard-pressed to find a skeptical mollusk. And what goes for our collective evolutionary past also goes for our individual developmental trajectory—which is why you will also be hard-pressed to find a skeptical one-year-old. “The child learns by believing the adult,” Wittgenstein observed. “Doubt comes after belief.”Read more at location 2682
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When it comes to observing imperceptibly slow natural processes—flowers blooming, weather systems forming, stars moving across the sky—we rely on time-lapse photography. If we wanted to isolate the wrongness implicit in our own gradual changes, we would need a kind of internal equivalent to that—which, as it happens, we have. Unfortunately, it is called memory, and as we have seen, it is notoriously unreliable. Moreover, it is most unreliable precisely with respect to accurately recalling past beliefs. This effect is widely documented. For instance, in 1973, the psychologist Greg Markus asked over 3,000 people to rate their stances (along one of those seven-point “strongly disagree / strongly agree” scales) on a range of social issues, including affirmative action, the legalization of marijuana, and equal rights for women. A decade later, he asked these same people to assess their positions again—and also to recall how they had felt about the issues a decade earlier. Across the board, these “what I used to think” ratings far more closely reflected the subjects’ current beliefs than those they had actually held in 1973. Here, it wasn’t just the wrongness that disappeared from the process of belief change. It was the change itself.Read more at location 2935
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One person who has seen this happen is Philip Tetlock. Tetlock is a psychology professor and political scientist who has conducted longitudinal studies of the accuracy of political forecasts by so-called experts—academics, pundits, policy wonks, and the like. As a matter of course, Tetlock would get back in touch with his subjects after the events they had predicted did or did not come to pass. In doing so, he discovered that these experts systematically misremembered their forecasts, believing them to have been far more accurate than his records showed. This, Tetlock said, created “a methodological nuisance: it is hard to ask someone why they got it wrong when they think they got it right.”Read more at location 2951
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“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.Read more at location 2967
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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.Read more at location 2971
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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.Read more at location 2980
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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.Read more at location 2982
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Recently, for example, while spending some time in Oregon, my home away from home, I took a break from work to go for a bike ride. My destination was a certain alpine lake, and, along the way, I chatted briefly with a somewhat crotchety older man who had been fly-fishing in a nearby river. He asked where I was headed, and when I answered, he told me that I was on the wrong road. I thanked him pleasantly and continued on my way. I figured he thought I should be on the main thoroughfare, which would have gotten me to my destination faster, while I was opting for a more scenic and roundabout route. I also suspected him of trying to steer me, a young female cyclist, toward an easier option, since the road I had chosen was steep and challenging. Eight miles later, when I rounded a corner and dead-ended into barbed wire and private property, I realized the guy had simply told me the facts. I had taken a wrong turn, and the road I was on wasn’t going to get me anywhere near a lake. I could have saved myself sixteen miles of fairly arduous alpine cycling if I had bothered to have a longer conversation with him, or to take him a bit more seriously. And quite possibly I would have done so—if, say, he had been a little friendlier, or a fellow cyclist, or someone I recognized from town, or a woman. Whatever might have made me pay more attention to this man, in other words, had nothing at all to do with how right he was. This is, unfortunately, a universal truth.Read more at location 3077
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La Rochefoucauld observed, “Everyone complains about their memory; no one complains about their judgment.”Read more at location 4267
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Singular, aberrational, transgressive, evil: we’ve seen this constellation of ideas before. This is the pessimistic model of wrongness, in which error is an unwelcome anomaly, a mark of our exile from the sacred realm of truth.Read more at location 4694
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(One psychologist quotes a child as saying that lungs “are for your hair. Without them you couldn’t have hair.”) Likewise, most kids under eight think that boys can become girls and girls can become boys simply by changing their hairstyle and clothing.Read more at location 4708
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Sometimes they haven’t stumbled across the necessary information yet, and sometimes they haven’t reached a developmental stage where they can grasp it. And sometimes, too, information is deliberately withheld from them—which explains why children are often particularly wrong about things like the mechanics of sex and reproduction, the identity of their biological parents, and how (or even that) a family member has died.*Read more at location 4714
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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. Given what we saw earlier about the influence of community on beliefs, you can imagine (or simply recall) how readily bad information spreads around lunchrooms and playgrounds. A friend captures this funny state of childhood belief systems nicely when he recollects that, “At some point in elementary school someone told me—and I believed—that chocolate milk was made from milk that had blood in it, but I didn’t believe that in order to have children, my parents took off their clothes and had sex.”Read more at location 4718
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Moreover, recent work in developmental psychology suggests that error might play the same role in the lives of children as it does in the lives of scientists—inspiring them to sit up and take notice, generate new theories, and try to understand what is going on around them. Being wrong, in other words, appears to be a key means by which kids learn, and one associated as much as anything with absorption, excitement, novelty, and fun.†Read more at location 4736
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In traveling (as in other kinds of adventures that we’ll encounter in the last chapter), we embrace the possibility of being wrong not out of necessity, but because it changes our lives for the better.Read more at location 4754
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We need not necessarily venture abroad to have these kinds of willing experiences of error. Sometimes, the unknown places we visit are the unknown places inside of us. Psychotherapy, for instance, is explicitly premised on the notion that we can change by exploring the parts of ourselves that have been hidden from conscious awareness—in particular, by coming to understand our own habitual delusions and mistakes.Read more at location 4756
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