Being Wrong
Book

Being Wrong

Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz
Ecco, 2010

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Background
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Malcolm Gladwell opened the book market to accessible, highbrow social analysis, and Kathryn Schulz has skillfully adopted that model. However, unlike Gladwell, Schulz does not analyze trends. She’s fascinated by the perpetual, universal propensity for human error in all its forms and contexts. In this companionable, readable, kind-hearted, rambling (and sometimes random) essay collection, she discusses philosophy, astronomy, politics, psychiatry, love and heartbreak, as well as the science of the brain and the workings of memory. She demonstrates a credible grasp of her topics and bends each to her theme without losing sight of the larger picture. This is not a self-help book, but still it offers opportunities for insight, laughter and the rueful recognition that when humans err, they seldom err alone. getAbstract recommends this worthy book to anyone who’s ever made a mistake, and especially to those who are convinced they never have.

Summary

Wrong About Being Wrong

Everyone loves to be right. Even more, people love to think that they’re right and they tend to connect being wrong with “shame...stupidity...ignorance, indolence, psychopathology and moral degeneracy.” But if that’s what you think, you are, it turns out, wrong about being wrong. Actually, being wrong ennobles you and fuels “empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction and courage.” Being wrong lets you rethink the world, yourself and your processes. Of course, no one likes to admit being wrong. To mistake the “false to be true,” people must believe truth exists. If you think you know a truth or fact, but you don’t, you probably are not aware that you are wrong. Your errors are opaque to you. You never know what you don’t know until you hit the wall of your own ignorance. In fact, when a mistake expands your understanding of your own limits, it remakes your world, and that feels like a cataclysm.

Truth and the Unconscious

Sigmund Freud wrote that errors help “reveal rather than obscure the truth.” When the conscious mind cannot cope with a truth, it hides that truth in the unconscious. Mistakes allow a glimpse of those concealed truths...

About the Author

Kathryn Schulz has written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone and The Nation.

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