What Does It Even Mean to Be Wrong?
This book will show you just that, and how and why to embrace being wrong
“We are wrong about what it means to be wrong.”
As I picked up Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz this morning, I said to myself, “I gotta share the epiphanies I’m having as I read every other page of this book with the world!”
Having just finished Chapter 1, I already know the book will change how I think (or at least think about how I think) as radically as that other book I always bring up, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.
Being Wrong is so incredibly illuminating because it reminds us that the most mysterious object in the whole universe is located right between our ears, encased in the 3D puzzle of bones we call the human skull.
Yes, the brain. How can it produce so many states of mind? Love, inspiration, delusion, creation, alternate realities, empathy, smugness, wrath… ad infinitum.
So, you ask, the mind and brain being so infinitely mysterious, what, specifically, does Being Wrong focus on? Well, in the author’s words:
“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.”
Here, then, dear explorer of the human mind, are the ideas from Chapter 1, titled Wrongology, that rattled my thinking in some way.
I told you so!
“On the whole, our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right is matched by an almost equally indiscriminate feeling that we are right.”
I told you so! Even if we’re nice enough not to throw the comment to a person’s face when we’re right and they’re wrong, we take deep pleasure in being proven right — and the other person wrong, especially if that other person is someone smug who always thinks they’re right.
As to the first part of the quote, “our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right”, I can’t help but think of how my dear husband always has to say he knew Barack Obama would be POTUS when he first heard him speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It’s like he has to relive that “being right” pleasure time and again. By contrast, he never belabors the fact that he was wrong to invest in that coffee shop that failed.
You were wrong, obviously.
“We positively excel at acknowledging other people’s errors.”
Haha! Totally reminds me of this Mark Twain quote: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
Isn’t it uncanny how we recognize other people’s mistakes and feel competed to analyze them in detail? She was wrong to marry him because…. It should’ve been obvious to her years ago that she should leave him since… I can’t believe she didn’t see it coming how he would…
How could I have been so blind?
“Although we understand in the abstract that errors happen, our specific mistakes are just as unforeseeable to us as specific tornadoes or specific lighting strikes.”
How convenient, no? Other people seem to make obvious mistakes with predictable outcomes. Not us though.
For instance, in my teens, I didn’t see it coming that my views on abortion would change. And change they did, pretty radically.
Also, can it be possible I was convinced for so long that having autism and an intellectual disability would limit my son’s potential to have a full, purposeful life? Man, was I ever wrong!
Makes you wonder which of your current strongly held beliefs you’ll consider wrong in the future.
And note what being wrong actually means:
“The experience of rejecting as false a belief we ourselves once thought was true — regardless of that belief’s actual relationship to reality, or whether such a relationship can ever be determined.”
You can’t always prove that you or anyone else was wrong. Being wrong is a personal experience. Thus, I was wrong because I rejected my previous belief, though I cannot really prove that those views are either right or wrong in the way that a scientist can prove the earth is round.
We’re all kind of delusional, and that’s a good thing
“Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality.”
And,
“It [erring] is also the essence of imagination, invention, and hope.”
This, my friends, is the greatest revelation so far. The fact that we can be so wrong while convinced we’re right is proof that our brains are capable of awesome feats of imagination and creativity. The human experience of being wrong is what makes it possible for us to solve problems. Isn’t that something!
Want to learn more about the human mind? Come along on my journey exploring the 15 chapters in this book. Next up, Chapter 2: Two Models of Wrongness