Being Wrong audiobook

I have a very strong memory of the day my youngest was born. I can still summon the piercing scent of puddled broken water in a middle room of the second floor of our house. Problem is that my daughter was born before we moved into that house. Yet I, and hopefully everyone else who comes up short in a quest for recollection perfection, can take solace from this outstanding book. Kathryn Schulz - image from TED Schulz coins the term “wrongology” as a tag for her view that being wrong can, in the scheme of things, be a pretty good thing, that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, that mistakes involve motion while perfect success implies stasis. In terms of the sheer volume of concepts raised in Being Wrong, this is a hefty work. It could have become a bit too heavy, but Schulz presents her case and her research with such puckish good humor that it all goes down very smoothly indeed.First of all, Schulz is a journalist, not a scientist, historian, philosopher or a linguist. Yet, all these viewpoints, and others, are well represented in this impressive work. This is not a fast read. Don’t bring it to the beach looking for a quick diversion. I tend to take notes in books of this sort, marking passages that hold particular appeal. I was kept quite busy while reading Being Wrong, noting, then typing out many, many passages that called my name. One measure for me of how rich a non-fiction read is can be found in how much time I spend typing out marked items. My hunt-and-peck time was considerable here. So many worthwhile observations, so much interesting material to be absorbed. Mother’s milk. You will learn a lot from reading this book, and will be entertained while doing so. I have a few quibbles. I suppose I was hoping for some familiar examples of error. Perhaps adding the Titanic to her trove of error evaluation chestnuts would be asking too much. And the most obvious and germane big-picture example of error, DNA mutation that results in evolution, receives only a passing mention near the end. Yet, not taking Schultz up on this challenge to look into her analysis of error would be…well, a mistake. To err is human but to read Being Wrong is divine.Review first posted - 2010Published - June 8, 2010 =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pagesAnd here is her wonderful TED talkA list of Schulz’s articles in New York Magazine

Absolutely loved this book, which really does uncover the extent to which we deny our mistakes and how much we would gain by admitting them, at least to ourselves. There is also an art to understanding that doubt is good so long as it does not paralyze us. The author found that when she told people that she was writing about mistakes, they all said: 'Oh I have made tons of mistakes in my life'. She would reply: 'Oh it would really help my research if you could tell me about a few of them.' And people couldn't remember a single example in most cases. :) Given this challenge, and being whom I am, of course, I could not resist then listing 70 major mistakes I had made in my life and sending them in an email to my wife for the record, as she is very kind! The mistakes covered relationships, friendships, financial, subjects I studied, career, housing. My goodness, that was pretty heavy, but I learned a lot. Try it sometime. It is oh so liberating if you can do it honestly, and then ask; 'OK so what might I do differently going forward'. Above all keep saying the Taoist phrase: 'no blame', just learn from the mistakes and don't beat up on yourself.

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 Kindle 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"

I wrote this 2014, and just came across it. It's one of favorite books. In my review there is a "things I learned" part that I think is very apt for today. So, sharing here on GR.42. Being Wrong : Adventures in the Margin of Error (Audio) by Kathryn Schulz, read by Mia Barron (2010, 14 hours, 17 minutes, 420 pages in paper format, Read July 10-25)I thought about my job the entire time I listened to this. Not sure that comes across as a compliment. It’s just that I’m wrong a lot. And this book has me thinking about that, about how often I am surprised when I discover, for sure, I was wrong, and about how valuable that is, how much I learn from it and get better at what I do because of it.It’s long book, that covers a lot of topics and then goes on and on about them. So, it’s good thing I found so many topics interesting.Things I learned:That being wrong is a human problem. Animals and computers are never in state of awareness that they were wrong (probably arguable with animals). But humans are never in a state of knowing they are wrong, only that they were wrong. We always assume we are right about everything. Once we are aware we are wrong, we instantly know we are right that we were wrong, so maintain our permanent sense of rightness.Our power of inductive reasoning. How we make vast conclusions on the tiniest amount of information. Typically we make our conclusion from the first bits of data, and then take the remaining data only with a sense of confirmation bias, looking for proof our initial conclusion was right. We need to do this to get through day-to-day life and it’s actually a very impressive thing. Computers can’t do inductive reasoning. But it’s also, naturally, error prone.About the emotional disaster of transition - which is kind of like being in a state of wrongness. For example, if you have a strong belief and it is suddenly shown to be wrong, and you don't have another belief to replace it, you are left in difficult state. Belief is critical to our confidence that the world is as we think it is, even at the most basic lever. The transition state results in a loss of confidence.About the mechanisms we use to avoid being proven wrong. How the less secure we feel about a belief, the more ardently we fight for it. And how some of us are so stubborn as to refuse to see the wrongness, including going through exaggerated states of denial of confabulation.About confabulation - or making things up. How we all do it even when we think we are simply explaining what we are doing. How stubborn people tend to confabulate more.On the separation in our minds between the parts that confabulate and the parts that fact check. We make stuff up first; it’s a critical part of our imagination. Then we fact check it second. Except that when we dream, we aren’t able to fact check. It’s the only time our imagination can run loose.And so on.Not a book for everyone, as it’s a bit long and very long winded. But it’s a great collection of interesting stuff. There is a lot here that might change how you view humanity.

This is, to my way of thinking, an extraordinary book about a great topic. Although, if you're not an intellectually ambitious person the book may seem to have, as several Good Reads reviewers opined, too damn many words. But I like Kathryn Schulz's prose. She knows her western canon and cites it deftly. In the course of elaborating her ideas about the experience of wrongness she'll even uncover a novel point here and there about the literature and philosophy she so clearly loves.I also like that she's a reporter. She wants to tell stories about our world now, and finds people whose lives have forced on them deep meditations on wrongness and she gets them to open up to her: A divorce lawyer to the stars, a woman who was raped who's testimony put the wrong man in prison, a young fundamentalist woman who fell in love with an atheist. She draws on their experience and brings their words into her argument with considerable delicacy.The topic itself is fascinating. She explains that "we don't experience, remember, track, or retain mistakes as a feature of our inner landscape." As soon as we realize we have a bad theory about something it's like our brain grabs another one so that we can always experience ourselves as in the right. This argument is set out with great fun and skill, and if you buy into it you start to buy into a humanizing fascination with our relations to wrongness. She argues it's inextricably bound with our next best selves, and she makes this argument in a friendly, secular, wide-ranging way that I found myself taking to heart.

Reviewed for THC ReviewsIf not for it being our latest book club read, I’m not sure I would have picked up Being Wrong on my own, not because it didn’t sound interesting (it did and was one of my top picks among the choices we voted for this month), but because I may not have found it without someone else bringing it to my attention. It’s simply not the type of book that probably would have come up in my day-to-day browsing of reading recommendations. But I can’t deny that it ended up being a very interesting read. As a psychology geek, who’s fascinated with the inner workings of the human mind, I was intrigued by all the many different ways in which we can be wrong, and more importantly, how we can delude ourselves into thinking that we’re right even when we aren’t. This was an extremely well-researched and well-written book that engaged my intellect, while also bringing me to the realization that perhaps I need to more closely examine my beliefs and sense of rightness in various areas.One of the main things this book does is delving into the various reasons why we can be so wrong about certain things. Some of it is rooted in a seeming quirk of human nature that drives us to have a need for beliefs. We being theorizing about the world around us as infants and by childhood we’re beginning to develop our beliefs. We all must believe in things, whether it’s as benign as what color of paint looks best in a certain room to something as momentous as the existence of God. And throughout life our beliefs may change, but usually we have trouble letting go of one belief until we have another one to replace it. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in an existential crisis. Whether we realize it or not, we also have a need for certainty in our lives. That’s why when someone seems so certain about something, it can be very appealing and lead us toward a belief in that thing whether it’s true or not. As humans, we additionally tend to have a tribal mentality, the sense that if the majority of the people in our social circle are going along with something, then it must be the right path when sometimes it isn’t. I was also intrigued by the ways in which our memories can be so fickle and faulty. I know that the next time someone insists that something happened a certain way, I’ll be taking it with a grain of salt, even if that someone is me.:-) One of the major strengths of the book for me was all the true stories of people who’ve been wrong in various ways. I think I’m the type of person who learns and understands better when I have concrete examples, so these stories really helped the message of the book come alive for me in a way it might not have without them. The author includes so many stories of ways in which people have been wrong, even phenomenally wrong, throughout the ages, even though they thought they were right. One that stood out was the Millerites in the 18th century, who claimed to have calculated down to the day when Christ was going to return. Many of them didn’t plant crops that year and/or sold off all their worldly possessions, believing they were going to be swept up to heaven on that day. But of course it didn’t happen. Some then left the faith altogether, while others readjusted their beliefs and what they thought they knew into something else, and still others doubled down on their beliefs. This movement later grew into the denomination known as Seventh Day Adventists. Another stand-out story was that of two contrasting rape cases. In both cases, the men convicted of the rapes were misidentified and later exonerated through DNA evidence. In one case, the woman who was raped was very accepting of the results and tried to reconcile with the man she misidentified. In the other case, the prosecutor, apparently unable to come to terms with the fact that he’d tried the wrong man, tied himself up in knots trying to explain away the scientific evidence while insisting the man was still guilty. There were so many of these great stories throughout the book that helped make it a fascinating read.I had a really hard time rating Being Wrong. It truly is very well done. The author is clearly an extremely intelligent, erudite, and articulate writer, who did her research well and organized this book in a way that made sense. I was constantly amazed at how she was able to tie everything together cohesively, and sometimes temporarily drop a thread, only to deftly weave it back in later. The absorbing, tantalizing, and sometime humorous anecdotes made the book more accessible, and there was much that I learned from its pages with regards to the human mind and how we can be wrong, but at the same time, I felt like there were things that I was missing. I freely admit that this may have been a failing of my own brain to grasp what was being said, but I can’t help feeling that if I had trouble with parts of it, others might as well. My book club is a pretty smart group and yet most of them agreed that this was definitely not an easy read. I think this is my main reason for dropping the star, but feel free to take that with a grain of salt. Just know that it will require a sharp mind and good concentration to grasp the contents.I will also leave with this last thought. Despite the author saying that she didn’t set out to write a self-help book, I felt that it did in many ways help me to better understand wrongness. I might have wished for a step-by-step guide for combating the reasons for wrongness, but I was still able to glean some strategies for this from within its pages. At the end of the day, that’s a win for me. If it makes me (and others who read it) look more carefully at my (their) assertions, then IMHO, the book will have done its job. So for that I definitely recommend it. In our current age, when so many people are entrenched in political or other divisive belief systems, I think delving into our wrongness is a great place to start the difficult work of change.

This just might be the scariest book you'll ever read. If you really read it, and let go of your own rightness just long enough to risk a little. . .it'll be like looking deep into the Grand Canyon.Seriously one of the best books I've read on this topic. I keep thinking about it, and mulling.Mulling and mulling.Still mulling. And will buy a hardcopy. This was a listen for me, and I'm finding myself reaching for highlighters. Time for a hardcopy.

My Nerdy Brain Loved Pondering discussions in this Read.....

Think about the last time you were wrong. Can you remember it? I could, after taking some time to think about it. I thought my car had been stolen, and had reported it stolen, before I realized that I'd left it in the parking lot of a nearby Safeway and walked home with my groceries by mistake. I wonder if the police dispatchers still laugh at that one, or if the incident's been replaced in their memories by others like it that happen a dozen times a day.That's one story of my being wrong. I have others. But like most people, I feel as if I'm right about everything I currently think, even though a reasonable percentage of it is probably wrong. But I like feeling as if I'm right. I'm comfortable with it. And I admit that I've not always behaved well when someone's pointed out my mistakes.What's great about Kathryn Schulz's book is that it's made me rethink my fear of being shown I'm wrong.Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error is an exceptional work that recommends taking an optimistic view of our capacity for wrongness without ignoring the costs of our errors. Being wrong, Schulz says, feels a lot like being right. But realizing we're wrong is often the first step toward a greater empathy with our flawed neighbors and sometimes a transformed sense of ourselves; while our refusal to admit mistakes usually encourages us to be cruel, judgmental, and angry. Our ability to err, Schulz argues, is essential to our ability to change and grow intellectually and morally. It's what allows the world to surprise us and sometimes even teaches us to think more carefully. Those looking for a companion piece to The Believing Brain would do well to buy, beg, borrow, or steal a copy.

I found Being Wrong slow going, not because I wasn't enjoying it--although I do think that the first couple of chapters are the most dense--but because I needed to stop and digest and think about how what Schulz says resonates with my own experiences. One of the things I enjoyed most about the book, was Schulz' examination and concise rendering of questions I've often pondered. She looks at why we're wrong so often, why we have trouble admitting that and go to great lengths to stay on the "right" side of things, and why the connection between "wrong" and "bad" is so hard to sever. She relates personal anecdotes, historical events and medical case histories in an intelligent, yet amusing tone that made it feel like a conversation with a very well-informed friend. One interesting thing--not having looked before I started, I was surprised to realize after a couple of chapters that the author is a woman. So I also spent a fair amount of time thinking about why I was wrong about that and what the cues were that gave me that impression.I think I'll be referring back to this one often. Unless I'm wrong.

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.”

What a book! One of those "easy reads" with regards to how it's written, the way the language flows easily, the sense of humor has me chucking more than once every chapter, and then at the same time, this is not an easy read, not at all. If you truly read it, take in what Kathryn points at, this is definitely a game-changing book (that is, it has the potential to be, if you let it. But it requires one thing from you: a willingness to be wrong, and admit to it, at that!)! My full review here:https://helenaroth.com/being-wrong-ad...

Imprescindible. El mejor libro q he leído este año.

I've read a lot of books on cognitive biases, so many that I'm sort of fed up with the topic. I imagined that it would be a long time for me to read another one, if ever. Yet, a good friend of mine recommended it to me and I trusted his judgement. In some ways, the book explains many ways that we err, having some overlap with many books I've read previously - what I feared. Yet, this wasn't the main point of the book. While it's helpful to describe and explain how are wrong, the approach she takes is more holistic. She is not only concerned about how we make errors but the idea of error itself, which I highly appreciated and it contained many fresh and interesting ideas. A couple of them stood out to me. The first is that Schulz spends a considerable amount of time in the phenomenology of being wrong. Not just analyzing errors from a detached "objective" perspective, but a deeply personal one, which is of course the one we experience. Although depending on how you look at it, actually being wrong at the moment is not something you experience. Because while it is happening, you don't know that you're "in the wrong". Afterwards, you recognize your mistake, but you're no longer "inside" of it so to speak. Another interesting aspect is how we feel about wrongness. We always see it as... well, wrong. As something fundamentally bad, and this pops out in how we view the world and ourselves in unexpected ways. Error is generally thought of as a gap. She gives the example that Plato thought existence was filled with error because we took a physical form (instead of being pure soul being, John Locke thought that error arose from the gap between how we describe the world through language and how the world actually is, and Heidegger from the fact that are embodied and cognitively bound creatures trapped in time and space, always limited to a single perspective without seeing the whole. All of them have a "gap", and that gap is from a difference between our mind and the rest of the world. I don't remember if she gave this example in the book, but perhaps the best illustration is the word sin which simply meant missing the target. Meaning the gap between what you should do and what you actually do. The other powerful idea is that being wrong is deeply tied to being right. We almost exclusively think of error as a bad thing to be eliminated at all costs, but she goes through great depth at why that's not the best way to view it. And this isn't simply a cliche self-help yin-yang type idea, it is at the core of how we arrive at the truth. One way she describes this, although certainly not the only one, is how historically error has been associated with truth. For example, dreams have long been considered gateways to truths otherwise not accessible. So has a variety of psychedelic plants, and even madness itself. What they all in common is that they change reality. In some sense, we get outside reality. That's almost the definition of error, and yet humanity has long considered them sacred as a way to fight error and guides towards rightness. The book also has sections that are surprisingly detailed and guide you through a particular example. Sometimes I felt this was overkill, but it certainly had a benefit. Some of these were quite personal and the objective was to have a more rich understanding of event, especially from a subjective perspective. For example, someone who stopped believing in God and how that turned her life upside down, or identifying the wrong person in a case of rape and decades later finding out it was the wrong person, causing an innocent man to be behind bars for years. I have read a lot of books, but given this book's length, I think it's the one I saved content the most. It totals over 40 pages... an absurd impractical amount which I wanted to shorten but too much of it was too interesting to delete. The only thing I disliked was that the book seemed to be deceptively long, and at the times it felt I was making little progress and it was a never-ending journey, one at that time I was impatient to complete. Not sure what made happen, perhaps the book's narrator (I listened on Audible), but nevertheless I consider it as a small inconvenience for the overall fantastic value it provides. If you care about truth, you should care about error. And this book is by far the most comprehensible work on the topic, analyzing error not just as a psychological phenomenon but also much more that will certainly deepen your understanding of what error is, why it happens, and its importance.

“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.” ― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of ErrorAn excellent book on being wrong and our inborn love of feeling right. In this book, not only does Schulz explain myriad ways in which we are wrong but also why we are wrong, the evolutionary reasons why being wrong could be helpful, and also why we are blind to our wrongness and why it is essential that we accept how frequently we are wrong. If Schulz had her way, we would have a much more positive view of our wrongness and be much more willing to say, “I am wrong.”The human mind and ego is reflexively hostile to the very notion that it could be wrong. And when we are proven wrong, it is a wound to our self-concept. The collapse of convictions can threaten our identity. I think this book was particularly helpful now, when we live in an era of social media in which everyone is convinced in their rightness and not only tweets their unshaken convictions but attacks the very humanity of those who disagree with them. This book was originally published in 2010, before social media’s eclipse of traditional media, and Schulz’s book resonates even more now.Most importantly, Schulz demonstrates that, “[i]t is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.” I highly recommend.

I let go of my grasp of rightness so much while reading this book. And it didn't hurt.The writing is beautiful and every chapter feels like it's own book - there are so many revelations and each chapter takes on a new facet of wrongness. It's almost like 15 dissertations in one book. Plus it's funny and super relatable while still cutting to the core. Impressive is the word that comes to mind."And yet the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and, perhaps most oddly, entirely undiscriminating....we can relish being right about almost anything.'"Our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. To be fair this serene faith in our own rightness is often warranted. Most of us navigate day to day life fairly well after all which suggest that we are routinely right about a great many things. And sometimes we are not just routinely right but spectacularly right.""If it is sweet to be right then..it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.""Knowing that this behavior is ridiculous seldom stops us from engaging in it.""When we accuse someone of being wrong we don't mean that she is in the throes of rejecting her own beliefs. We mean that her beliefs are at odds with the real state of the world.""Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality. That's a dismaying discovery because it's precisely this quality of convincing-ness, of verisimilitude, that we rely on as our guide to what is right and real.""Certain mistakes can actually kill us, but many many more of them just make us want to die.""Indeed one of our recurrent responses to error is to wish ourselves out of existence....as if our identity was rubbed out by the experience of being wrong.""We hear this strangely intimate relationship between error and truth in the double meaning of the word vision which conveys both delusion and revelation.""His resources may have been better but his senses were equally, spectacularly deceived.""Most of us find them more disturbing since they suggest just how baseless the feeling of knowing can be. And accordingly, how radically our memories can be manipulated, deliberately or otherwise.""...a memory is not so much stored intact in one part of the brain as reassembled by all these different structures each time we call it to mind....We also have to dispense with the idea that vividness is a good indicator of accuracy. If instead of pulling our memories out of storage when we need them we rebuild them afresh every time then vividness could just be a feature that we build into some but not others." (or vividness could be from how often we recall or how acceptable it seems to forget them)"The erroneous and the impossible simply have no meaning in the dreamscape.""My friends and I were the most outrageously unqualified group of string theorists ever assembled. In fact we could far more aptly have been called shoestring theorists: virtuosos of developing elaborate hypotheses based on vanishingly small amounts of information.""In the moment of error our implicit beliefs are simultaneously contravened and revealed.""While many of our beliefs fall somewhere in the middle of the implicit-explicit spectrum, it is those that lie at the extreme ends that collapse most spectacularly in the even of error.""There is virtually no subject, no matter what domain of life it concerns, how pressing or trivial it may be, and how much or little we know about it, that is not suitable fodder for our theory-happy minds.""Although we are highly adept at making models of the world, we are distinctly less adept at realizing that we have made them.... Our beliefs often seem to us not so much constructed as reflected. As if our minds were simply mirrors in which the truth of the world passively appeared." (naive realism)"So we look into our hearts and see objectivity. We look into our minds and see rationality. We look at our beliefs and see reality...every one of us confuses our models of the world with the world itself, not occasionally or accidentally but necessarily.""Ignorance isn't necessarily a vacuum waiting to be filled. Just as often it is a wall actively maintained.""This is the lesson we learned from optical illusions and it is the fundamental lesson of inductive reasoning as well. Our mistakes are part and parcel of our brilliance, not the regrettable consequences of a separate and deplorable process. Our options in life are not careful logical reasoning through which we get things right vs shoddy inductive reasoning through which we get things wrong.""We don't gather the maximum possible evidence in order to reach a conclusion. We reach the maximum possible conclusion based on the barest minimum of evidence.""Instead of trusting a piece of information because we have vetted its source we trust its source and therefore accept its information.""Internal dissent, unlike outside opposition, can be deeply destabilizing.""When we come to see one of our own past beliefs as false we also glimpse, for a moment, the persistent structural possibility of error....As important and life altering and even gratifying as this revelation can be it runs contrary to what I've described here as one of the chief functions of a community: to buttress our sense that we are right and protect us from constantly contending with the possibility that we are wrong.""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 we 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. This is one of the most defining and dangerous characteristics of certainty. It is toxic to a shift in a perspective. If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people's stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people's stories (which is to say other people) cease to matter to us.""No wonder we gravitate towards certainty instead. It's not that we are oblivious to its intellectual and moral dangers. It's that those dangers seem pretty abstract when compared with the immediate practical, emotional, and existential perils of doubt.""As with our own certainty, so too with theirs. We mistake it for a sign that they are right.""Accusing someone of flip-flopping (changing positions on an issue), is not the same as accusing him of waffling (being indecisive) or of being wishy-washy (seeming weak). Still these terms are often deployed together in service of a larger accusation: that their target has too many thoughts and too few convictions.""But it doesn't follow that all of us admire certainty and abhor doubt or that any of us have a straight-forward relationship to either of them. On the contrary...some people are rendered as acutely uncomfortable by ardent conviction as others are by indecision.""The same goes for our high-speed errors. We vault over the wrongness so quickly that the only evidence that we erred is that something inside us has changed.""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.""We are quasi rational actors in whom reason is forever sharing the stage with ego and hope and stubbornness and loathing and loyalty.""Fundamentally, am I, in the biggest of big pictures, safe? smart? worthy? righteous? right? To have a belief that answers all these questions is to be sunk into it at a psychological cost considerably beyond calculation.""having no theory at all and having no theories both suggest that you are in the middle of a crisis of knowledge.""In a sense though, creative is exactly the wrong word for this kind of behavior. Since in the end such tactics are largely destructive.""Denial is not... a response to the facts. It is a response to the feelings those facts evoke. And sometimes those feelings are simply too much to bear.""How we are able to perpetrate deception against ourselves is a long standing mystery of psychology and philosophy.""What happens when the refusal to acknowledge error is so extreme and the consequences of that refusal so grave that compassion starts to seem like an inadequate, ingenuous, or even dangerous response?""Our need to be gotten by other people, so critical in early childhood, doesn't fade as we age.""It's as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological ice bergs with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible.""Heartbreaks socks us not only with the temporary loneliness of lost love, but also with the enduring loneliness of being alive.""So we should be able to be wrong from time to time and be at peace with other people's wrongness and still love and be loved. That's so basic as to be banal and yet it runs counter to our prevailing model of romantic love.""The problem in buyer's remorse then isn't that we don't ask ourselves the right questions about what we'll want in the future. The problem is that we don't know ourselves well enough or remain static long enough to consistently come up with the right answer.""The subjunctive has largely disappeared from English, lingering only in grammatical niceties like 'if that were true, I would be the first to admit it.""From philosophical treatments of error we learn that our thoughts exist but that they might not make much resemblance to the real state of the world.""In this alternative attitude, wrongness reminds us that the human mind is far more valuable and versatile than it would be if it just passively reflected the precise contours of reality. For those who share this view, the fact that our beliefs inhere in our minds is a given and a gift. One whose gifts - humor, imagination, intelligence, individuality - are so manifestly worthwhile that we willingly pay fro them with our mistakes.""That is why error, even though it sometimes feels like despair, is actually much closer in spirit to hope. We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds. And we face up to that wrongness in the faith that having learned something we will get it right the next time."