Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

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Kathryn Schulz. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York: Ecco/ HarperCollins 2010.  405 pp  47 pp. of thoughtful notes and references  $26.99

This is a truly amazing book! This book deserves to be required reading in every school, business, hospital and government office. It has the potential to transform our world.

Kathryn Schulz is a sushi master with words and concepts. I take this image from the art of slicing seafood in various ways so that the original morsel looks and tastes different in each variation that is served up on the sushi platter and in different dishes.

Prior to reading this book, I had the mistaken idea that I understood how wrong I could be. Schulz showed me that I was incredibly wrong in that assumption. After reading this treatise on wrongology, it is clear that I will never feel confident in anything I am aware of again – other than that I am likely in one way or another to be wrong about it.

Being wrong is far more complex than it might appear on the surface.

There are slips and lapses and mistakes, errors of planning and errors of execution, errors of commission and errors of omission, design errors and operator errors, endogenous errors and exogenous errors. (p. 12)

Schulz meticulously analyzes varieties of errors that everyone regularly makes, due to four types of problems.

1. Misperceptions

Although we are highly adept at making models of the world, we are distinctly less adept at realizing that we have made them. (p. 99)

2. Misinterpretations of information

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. (p. 82)

We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look at our beliefs and see reality. This is the essence of the ‘Cuz It’s True Constraint': every one of us confuses our models of the world with the world itself – not occasionally or accidentally but necessarily. (p. 107)

3. Erroneous basic beliefs that shape our understandings of the world (or lack thereof)

No matter the domain of life, one generation’s verities so often become the next generation’s falsehoods that we might as well have a Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything. (p. 9)

We feel that we are right because we feel that we are right: we take our own certainty as an indicator of accuracy. (p. 74)

4. A pervasive human frailty of being reluctant to admit we are wrong

I believe this is the most insidious and undermining problem.

You can imagine how we feel about being wrong. For one thing, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre – an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. For another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed…in our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy… Our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings. (p. 5)

This aspect of being wrong is highlighted and explained in my Editorial Musings in this issue of IJHC, in the context of another book review – of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. In brief, McGilquist reviews extensive research literature on Left and Right Brain Hemisphere (LH and RH) functions and preferences. LH functions with linear reasoning; analyzes perceptions, thoughts and relationships; and creates personal models of the world. LH believes strongly in its models and resists changing them, even in the face of evidence that contradicts them. Western society today is very strongly entrenched in LH modes of thinking and of relating to the world around us. This is a deeper explanation for why it is difficult for many people in our society to consider – much less to accept – that we may be wrong.

Schulz suggests that how we deal with being wrong can be both an art and a healing.

In 1987, after facing a couple of high-profile, high-cost malpractice suits, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, became the first hospital in the nation to implement an apologize-and-disclose policy for medical error. In the thirty-plus years since then, the hospital has gone to court only three times. Over that same period, its legal fees have dropped dramatically, and its average per-patient settlement has been surprising when you consider a few others – for instance, that 40 percent of medical-error victims say that a full explanation and apology would have prevented them from seeking legal action. (301)

In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs. That’s part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with ourselves. Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one – a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. (p. 21)

In a broader frame of reference, it is vital and essential to improving ourselves and our world to identify when we are wrong I order to be able to correct the errors of our thinking and of our ways.

This book will be a major contribution to anyone who has paused to consider why it is so difficult to bring about changes in this fraught world of ours. This will also make an excellent talking book, as Schulz's cogent and clever observations and engaging turns of phrases are delightful.

Review by Daniel Benor, MD
Editor-in-Chief, IJHC

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