Being Wrong
Adventures in the Margin of Error
Editorial Review
In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world. Given this centrality to our intellectual and emotional development, error shouldn’t be an embarrassment, and cannot be an aberration. On the contrary, Benjamin Franklin observed in a quote about truth and errors that wrongness is a window into normal human natureinto our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls.
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Wisdom to Share
Like many fears, the fear of being wrong stems partly from a lack of understanding. The pessimistic model of error tells us that wrongness is unpleasant, but it doesn’t tell us why, and it has nothing at all to say about errors that don’t turn out to be disagreeable.
Like many fears, the fear of being wrong stems partly from a lack of understanding. The pessimistic model of error tells us that wrongness is unpleasant, but it doesn’t tell us why, and it has nothing at all to say about errors that don’t turn out to be disagreeable.
Unfortunately, as proponents of the pessimistic model of wrongness will be quick to point out, the reassuring notion that error yields insight does not always comport with experience.
Sometimes, being wrong feels like the death of insight—the moment when a great idea or a grounding belief collapses out from under us.
And sometimes, too, our mistakes take too great a toll to be redeemed by easy assurances of lessons learned.
Of the very long list of reasons we can get things wrong, the most elementary of them all is that our senses fail us.
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 that others have already tested and verified.
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