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Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error Kathryn Schulz 9780061176050 Books

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Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error Kathryn Schulz 9780061176050 Books

Shulz’s book is a thoughtful, powerful work that should be required reading for everyone in high school or college – and beyond. Part philosophy, part sociology and part reporting, “Being Wrong” feels a lot like Kahneman’s “Thinking: Fast and Slow” and, in my view, is every bit as helpful and important for understanding what drives us (as well as what steers us off a cliff or unhelpfully slams on the brakes). The chapter on Heartbreak is the most valuable piece of writing I’ve read on that issue despite the fact this isn’t a “self-help” book. The complexity of the issues here and the deftness and doggedness with which she pursues them puts her on par with Steven Johnson and maybe even Michael Lewis. Not a fast or simple read but very highly recommended.


Tags : Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error [Kathryn Schulz] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything,Kathryn Schulz,Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,Ecco,0061176052,Applied Psychology,Decision making - Psychological aspects,Errors,Fallibility,Philosophical anthropology,DECISION-MAKING (PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS),GENERAL,General Adult,HISTORY Social History,Movements - Humanism,Non-Fiction,PSYCHOLOGY Applied Psychology,PSYCHOLOGY General,PSYCHOLOGY History,PSYCHOLOGY Social Psychology,Philosophy : Movements - Humanism,PhilosophyMovements - Humanism,Psychology,United States,Western philosophy: Medieval & Renaissance, c 500 to c 1600

Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error Kathryn Schulz 9780061176050 Books Reviews

This is a sensitive, thoughtful, erudite yet down-to-earth account of our universal propensity to err AND be in total denial about it. Schulz takes us on a deeply educational ride from Genesis and Plato to the latest in neuropsychology. She writes like a dream, shows her heart, shares her rich life-experience and gently instructs us in the inevitability of error and the right and wrong ways of learning from it. If you are incapable of growing when you are faced with contradictions to your world-view, this book is probably not for you, but boy, are you in need of it!
This is one of my favorite non-fiction titles. Less terrifying than The Psychopath Test, more optimistic than Among the Truthers, Being Wrong is a great way to learn that people are wrong frequently, and that, guess what, you're people.

Written in a friendly, accessible, intelligent, articulate voice, Ms. Schulz makes a case for accepting error as an opportunity to get better.

Highly, highly recommended.
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 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"
If you want to get a new perspective on how beliefs and perceptions influence decisions then read this book. It is important to note that Kathryn Schultz has a stunning vocabulary. It is not often that I have to look up a word but with this book I did on several occasions. I have recommended this book to all of my friends and family. I have read parts to my wife and we both said "hmmm." I now examine why I feel someone or something else is wrong. As much as I don't want to agree with people that have opposing political views, I try to see if they are right because of this damn book. Great read and very inciteful.
This book is a tour of belief, knowledge and doubt by way of psychology and a heavy dose of philosophy. If you have any interest in epistemology, then this book is a must read! Schulz takes a look at inductive reasoning and how it's so efficient and serves us so well, but when it fails, it can fail hard. She shines a light on the fallibility of our physical senses and memory and how what seems so obviously right is sometimes absolutely wrong. While this may be paradigm shifting (and disturbing) for some people who haven't ever considered what one self can actually know, you don't need to fear succumbing to hard solipsism after reading this book.

The author takes a look at why we fear being wrong so strongly, and how we often can't admit we are wrong until we have a new "right" theory to replace our wrong one. We discover that our error blindness keeps us from perceiving our own errors without hampering our ability to find the same or similar error in others. Practically all facets of our lives are affected by error - from politics to religion to love. Can we eliminate error? Even if it is possible, SHOULD WE? Error appears to be a uniquely human endeavor - as such we should embrace it (at least some of the time). The joy of being wrong is experienced daily through optical illusions, humor and art.

Favorite quotes from the book
(pg. 31) there is a slippery slope between advocating the elimination of putatively erroneous beliefs, and advocating the
elimination of the institutions, cultures, and—most alarmingly—people who hold them

(pg 32) 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

(pg. 70) 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.

(pg 82) It’s not exactly news that most people are reluctant to admit their ignorance. But the point here is not that we are
bad at saying “I don’t know.” The point is that we are bad at knowing we don’t know.

(pg 86) As that suggests, the idea of knowledge and the idea of error are fundamentally incompatible. When we claim to
know something, we are essentially saying that we can’t be wrong. If we want to contend with the possibility
that we could be wrong, then the idea of knowledge won’t serve us; we need to embrace the idea of belief
instead. This might feel like an unwelcome move, since all of us prefer to think that we know things rather than
“merely” believing them.

(pg 106) In other words, if we want to discredit a belief, we will argue that it is advantageous, whereas if we want to
champion it, we will argue that it is true. That’s why we downplay or dismiss the self-serving aspects of our own
convictions, even as we are quick to detect them in other people’s beliefs.

(pg 123) leaping to conclusions is what we always do in inductive reasoning, but we generally only call it that when the
process fails us—that is, when we leap to wrong conclusions. In those instances, our habit of relying on meager
evidence, normally so clever, suddenly looks foolish

(pg 141) The vast majority of our beliefs are really beliefs once removed. Our faith that we are right is faith that someone
else is right. This reliance on other people’s knowledge—those around us as well as those who came before us—
is, on balance, a very good thing. Life is short, and most of us don’t want to spend any more of it than absolutely
necessary trying to independently verify the facts

(pg 157) Just as disturbing, and more important, we also can’t be sure that some of the beliefs we hold today won’t appear
grievously unjust in the future. This is error-blindness as a moral problem we can’t always know, today, which
of our current beliefs will someday come to seem ethically indefensible

(pg 161) What zealots have in common, then, is the absolute conviction that they are right. In fact, of all the symbolic
ones and zeros that extremists use to write their ideological binary codes—us/them, same/different, good/evil—
the fundamental one is right/wrong. Zealotry demands a complete rejection of the possibility of error.

(pg 167) Doubt, it seems, is a skill—and one that, as we saw earlier, needs to be learned and honed. Credulity, by
contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct

(pg 179) Whether you believe in flying saucers or the free market or just about anything else, you are (if you are human)
prone to using certainty to avoid facing up to the fact that you could be wrong. That’s why, when we feel
ourselves losing ground in a fight, we often grow more rather than less adamant about our claims—not because
we are so sure that we are right, but because we fear that we are not.

(pg 187) 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 medium size 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.

(pg 199) All of us know people like this—people whose rigidity serves to protect a certain inner fragility, who cannot
bend precisely because they are at risk of breaking. For that matter, all of us are people like this sometimes

(pg 209) our beliefs come in bundles. That makes it hard to remove or replace one without affecting the others—and it
gets harder as the belief in question gets more central

(pg. 217) we are exceptionally bad at saying “I was wrong”—or at least, we are bad at leaving it at that. For most of us, it’s tough not to tack that “but” onto every admission of error.

(pg 293) This is one of the most powerful ways being wrong can transform us it can help us become more compassionate
people. Being right might be fun but, as we’ve seen, it has a tendency to bring out the worst in us. By contrast,
being wrong is often the farthest thing in the world from fun—and yet, in the end, it has the potential to bring
out the best in us.
Shulz’s book is a thoughtful, powerful work that should be required reading for everyone in high school or college – and beyond. Part philosophy, part sociology and part reporting, “Being Wrong” feels a lot like Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” and, in my view, is every bit as helpful and important for understanding what drives us (as well as what steers us off a cliff or unhelpfully slams on the brakes). The chapter on Heartbreak is the most valuable piece of writing I’ve read on that issue despite the fact this isn’t a “self-help” book. The complexity of the issues here and the deftness and doggedness with which she pursues them puts her on par with Steven Johnson and maybe even Michael Lewis. Not a fast or simple read but very highly recommended.