Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error Paperback – Illustrated, January 4, 2011

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.”

Broadly speaking Dr. Schultz's purpose here is to examine the matter of error not in specific detail but in outline. Examples are cited to illustrate the broad topics. Error in our perceptual relation to the world, error in our beliefs and theories about the world, errors in our views about who we are and how others perceive us. As it turns out we can be wrong about almost everything! Some error is trivial, some of grave consequence. A mistake can kill, or perhaps precipitate life changing decisions. Frequently it is not the error as such but its recognition that has consequences. Again sometimes trivial (humor, mild embarrassment) and sometimes profound; the apparent collapse of one's entire life's work or view of the self! Sometimes even such errors lead one to a new beginning, and sometimes to something much more tragic.This is not so much a philosophical investigation as a psychological one and as such I think she does a good job, but I would have been much happier with a more considered philosophical treatment for she misses much as well. Philosophically the problem of error is almost infinitely complicated because it isn't just that we can be wrong about almost everything, but also that we can be partly right and partly wrong about something and in fact this is often the case. She doesn't get into this much rather tending to treat any partial case as a case of error because it is not entirely right. This truth has implications for so much. It is afternoon on a sunny day here on the west coast of the U.S. but I might say "the sun did not rise this morning". What? Surely such a statement is wrong as concerns the meaning of the English word 'sunrise'? On the other hand, my observation is perfectly truthful as concerns the astronomical relation between Earth and Sun. Something can be correct on one level and at the same time wrong on another. Schultz notes this, but doesn't much deal with it.There are a few items about which we cannot be wrong. Dr. Schultz says that if we feel depressed, we are depressed, and if we feel in love then we are in love. Yes tomorrow we might change our mind about that being in love business. We say that "I was wrong, I was not in love" but in fact we were yesterday. What was wrong is reflected in an ever present, hidden, second clause: "I am in love with X, AND I will be forever!" These second clauses are usually invisible and only that part was wrong about the love I felt yesterday. She addresses Descartes and notes that he declared he could not be wrong about being a thinking being. Today that might be more appropriately rendered as "I cannot be wrong about having an experience NOW, even if I can be wrong about what I take to be the content of that experience". Schultz doesn't really get into this, but it is the foundation from which point we judge all of our beliefs (right or wrong) about the world.At the end of the book she addresses comedy and art. Her view is that both convey their value to us by being wrong. There is a digression to Plato in this, but Schultz never notes that it isn't always the wrongness per se that is funny in comedy or profound about art, but rather that the wrongness is used to highlight truth otherwise obscured by the flow of our lives or perceptions. Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" is not funny merely because of the errors, but because it shows us the truth that we too can be like this. The distortions of art, both classical and modern, are supposed to bring to our minds associations, truths, to which we are often blind.This is a long book, but not as long as it seems by the number of pages. The text proper ends at the 70% point (I am always reading these books on a Kindle) and there follows from that point many pages of notes taken from the various sources the author read in the process of writing the book. These notes alone are valuable, a short summary of dozens and dozens of philosophers, artists, novelists, psychologists, and scientists on the subject of error. A very valuable compendium. What she doesn't give us is a table, a "classification of errors". There is here in this book all the material she needs to produce it.