Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

We think so often about being right....Shulz caused me to think about wrongness in a different light. She included several important stories about people who were wrong and eventually recognized it, and the powerful change that occurred as a result. This is a book I will read again soon.

explores the limits of our ability to understand the world around ourselves and our inability to get out what seems to me to be the central aspect of human existance ;that O hell,just buy it & judge. W/regrets for my spelling yours truly.

Even though I was already familiar with most of the psychology discussed in this book, I find it to be a great read.

The illustrative examples are very well chosen indeed. Some are unbelievable as well as fascinating.

It is hard to believe that confirmation bias (sticking to your first impression no matter what) could be as strong as the examples here show.

Tediously thorough yet illuminating. Took me a while to get into it but glad I finished it. I did find use of the "F" word unnecessary, unhelpful in making points, and ultimately distracting. To each his own on that one.

I am half-way through Being Wrong and LOVING it - it is not a book I want to rush through. I am savoring every word, every insight. It is changing my life, by the way. Seriously, it is that good, and that important a book to read.
I will post again when I have come to the conclusion - a book full of information, unique viewpoints, fun, comfort, and a book that will help you see yourself (& your mistakes) in a whole new way.

Illusions are universally loved. The Bell Curve is really a distribution of errors. I was astounded to read that Freud was diagnosing hysteria rather than abdominal cancer and “forgetting” about it. Widely believed truths today may be debunked in the future – that was a good one! The idea that Greenspan’s flawed belief caused half the world's wealth to disappear was a huge oversimplification of what happened with the stock market crash. We are constantly amassing information about our environment and using it to add to or rearrange our model of the world – cool thought! We care about what is probable based on our prior experience - inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Does our being wrong about things beyond our expertise matter if there are others who have the knowhow? Affirming and later rejecting a belief jeopardizes the whole paradigm of truth – deep! I like the quote “doubt postdates belief.” Our attraction to certainty is really an aversion to uncertainty – true! I like the musical references to Phil Collins, Beyoncé, etc. We don't want to live with our partner's reality, we want them to second our own. Buyer's remorse applies more broadly - crave, acquire and then regret. Our understanding of ourselves can turn out to be in error – but not in my case ;) We are dubious if real change is even possible.

I really like this quote: “I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right to be found otherwise.” Ben Franklin

A tough read, but full of really good information and ideas. Schultz has tackled a subject---wrongness--which most of us haven't thought about. What is it, what does it do, how doies it teach us? Fascinating stuff.

The Adventures in the Margin of Error is an interesting concept, and also gave me much respite to know it was okay to be wrong, even good to be wrong sometimes, because you need a margin of error to survive life. In that sense I liked it because I knew I could identify with it. At over 50, my therapist has finally given me a diagnosis of having ADD, and this has been a great eye-opener to why I made so many mistakes in my life: it was because I lose interest in things faster than most people, and can't stay attentive to things for long, so being wrong about things as the author contends, can be a good thing. Yoopeee!

Very monotonous book that was a pain to get through. The premise of the book is strong enough for you to keep on chugging but it seems a tad opinionated and has a slight tone of arrogance. Would I suggest the book? Yes, that it is still a perspective one should pick up and develop

There's little substance here. What little there is could have filled a 30-page pamphlet and no more. It's your typical academic attempt to take a simple, shallow premise and turn it into a full book. It rarely works and didn't work here.

Having a tough time getting this one started. There seems to be a whole lot of "filler" material, at least in the first couple of chapters. Lots of why it was written, wanderings through the history of what people have thought about wrongfulness, and several points regarding what the book isn't about. If you like a book that is in no great hurry to get to the meat and potatoes, you'll do well. Working hard at not skimming!
If I turn out to be wrong about the book after a few more chapters, expect an update...

Text begin very slowly. Hard to get going. Interesting concepts; however, development of thematic areas takes a great deal of time and words to express what could be simple ideas. Interesting concepts -- overly worked.

I had soaring hopes when I read the reviews; sadly my hopes crashed.

Booksellers and authors (especially on post-publication high-priced speaking gigs) have done quite well with books that promise a map through the whirlpools and shoals of life. Being Wrong is another of that genre. It is both good and bad, mostly bad. It is good because it gives us occasional glimpses of verity--why folks succumb to error. It is bad because in my view the map's trails are long, serpentine, and arduous to traverse.

Kathryn Schultz takes bits and pieces of what other people have said--spanning a millennium or so--and cobles together a too-long book that tells us mostly what we already know: we believe because we want to believe, and use the tools of rationalization and denial to validate our beliefs when faced with contrary evidence. And as Eric Hoffer's superb The True Believer (which, oddly, Schultz does not mention) points out, we tend to go along with the crowd.

Being Wrong essentially gives us a pastiche of quotes (both from fiction and non-fiction); it is as if Schultz had to find pages for all her note cards (or the computer-age equivalent). The book shows a lack of writing and thought discipline and seems like a first draft that needed to be mercilessly cut down. True, meandering stream-of-consciousness might be great fun with a sprightly dinner companion, where alternating observations (both insightful and banal) would add spice and sugar, books should have greater focus than a mere vortex of anecdotes that rarely coalesce into coherence.

Schultz's apparent overt sexism also peeks through her writing, where, for example, she admits to having ignored accurate travel directions from a man because he was not a woman! And her lengthy and repetitive diversion as to why the Swiss were so late in adopting women's suffrage adds little to her supposed thesis, although the writing of it must have felt good.

Being Wrong even tries to expand Schultz's thesis to art and humor. This is more than several bridges too far. For those interested in the ties between art and humor and discovery, Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation is the best book on the subject I've read. Sadly, Schultz, as with her apparent unfamiliarity with Hoffer's paradigm The True Believer, doesn't even mention The Act of Creation.

Finally, many of the footnotes should have been woven into the text; I suspect that they were not because they came to Schultz after the draft had been put in publishable form-- l'esprit de l'escalier ("thoughts on the stairs") (German has a similar word: Treppenwitz--stairs joke). And the book has extensive endnotes--stuff she could not cram into the main text.

In sum, Being Wrong has a few kernels of insight; they are mostly lost, however, in the mass of straw. Of course, I could be wrong.

I bought this book thinking that there would be a reasonable exposition on the subject of regret. A deep and moving analysis that would serve to bring that open wound that so many of us suffer from - out into the light. Instead what I found was punchy little vignette's from the lives of presumably average Americans show-casing their various regrets and 'sound-bytey' phrases such as 'don't regret, regret'. Schulz has attempted to scale a monumental peak of human emotion and has settled for the equivalent of setting up a lemonade stall at base camp. This is a pretty thin soup, perfect for the twitterati looking for re-assuring but less cliche'd ways to reassure themselves and their friends. But it did nothing to help me make sense of my own regret. There are a few chapters in Sorrow's Profiles: Death, Grief and Crisis in the Family by Richard J. Alapack that did way more for me than anything I got out of Schulz book. I've realised now that catchy titles with great the store reviews designed to exploit niches in the self-help market are often end up being fairly lousy.

This book caught my eye immediately. Who hasn't been embarrassed to admit being wrong? How often have you witnessed (or been part of) senseless arguments because neither side, once they've become entrenched in their position, are willing to back down or find a middle ground to resolve things?

I originally got this book as I was hoping for answers on how to deal with what I admit to be sometimes irrational behaviour to avoid admitting wrongness. I thought perhaps I'd get some advice on how to approach this sensitive topic with others (particularly in a business setting.) If you're looking for advice on dos and don'ts, some sort of behavioural checklist to overcome this sensation, then that's not what this book is about. (and the author says as much in her introduction.)

In a way though, even without a list of to-dos, the book has helped me feel more at ease about being wrong. Through stories shared of human error, through the exploration of just how our senses work and how our belief systems can fail us, through an examination of how we make decisions and evaluation evidence (and why it makes sense to do it that way), and examples where it actually feels good to be wrong (optical illusions, magic tricks), I started to come to terms on just how being wrong is perfectly "normal" and a part of who we are, and started to move away from the belief that being wrong meant I was sloppy, or stupid, or ignorant. It makes sense that our brains would want to take shortcuts for efficiency sake, and it makes sense that sometimes those shortcuts will be off. Plus looking at how often decisions are being made at the subconscious level underscores how much being fallible is hardwired into our system.

I thought the book was a great read, if nothing else, for the journey it took me through.

Most people go through life thinking they are almost always right about pretty much everything virtually all the time. The reality is we are often wrong about things from the trivial to the universal. Being Wrong explores why we are wrong so often and how it is helpful to us.

Katheryn Shulz breaks down various sources of error, from sensory perception and cognitive interpretation to group prejudices and cultural biases. She also looks at the mental, psychological and social consequences of both being wrong and knowing you are wrong. She had so many categories of how we get things wrong as well as compound combinations of error, I began to wonder how we ever get anything right. I also marveled at humanity’s ability to remain in existence considering how massive some of our mistakes are.

In the end, Being Wrong suggests error is a fundamental part of thinking. Developing the ability to use the brain also develops the ability to misuse it. Shulz took time to focus on the positive aspects of being wrong, including innovation, learning and adaptive behavior. She didn’t spend anytime discussing situations where subjective opinion is the basis of being “right” or when the “right answer” can’t be known or situations where people continued to maintain the “wrong” stance when it was in their best long term interests. Still, Being Wrong is an insightful look an ignored part of our mental processes. If you decide not to read it you will, once again, be wrong.

Kathryn Schulz's "Being Wrong" is a historical, literary, scientific and philosophical exploration on an all-too-common predicament. She explores the topic with wit, warmth and precision.

Covers concepts such as
- The two general models of wrongness
- The Bias Blind Spot
- The "Cuz It's True" constraint
- The Ignorance Assumption
- Inattentional (perceptual) blindness
- Methodological Asymmetry
- Pessimistic Meta-Induction
- The Evil Assumption
- The "No True Scotsman" fallacy
- And the Lake Wobegon Effect

The book even includes a handy Taxonomy of Error

The author asks the reader to ponder questions such as
- Why is it that when we're wrong, we're so obliviousness of it?
- Why are altered states so compelling?
- Why are humans so afraid of wrongness?
- Why is it so difficult to remember instances when you were wrong?
- Why is righteousness often so hypocritical?
- Why are politicians expected to never change their mind?

Stuff to sprinkle onto your cocktail party conversations to impress people:
Various bit of trivia on False Fires, Fata Morganas, Offendcula, Palinodes, etc.

p.170 includes a fascinating discussion on the evolution of the perception of the character of Hamlet

Being Wrong is well-written and presents scores of sophisticated arguments. It's writing style is more New Yorker than Reader's Digest, with which some readers may be comfortable and some not. If you liked book such as The Black Swan,Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience or Invisible Gorilla, you'll like this book. Schultz aptly demonstrates that for all its faults, wrongness is an intrinsic human quality, one, however distasteful, essential to our evolution as individuals and as a species.

BEING WRONG is a book that turns the camera inward to our own personal experience of error. Kathryn Schulz writes that we relish being right: "Our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. [...But of] all the things we are wrong about, [...] error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. [...] it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are."

In a gentle narrative filled with curiosity and even humor, Schulz explores philosophy, psychology, history, and the personal experiences of people being wrong (lovers, explorers, crime victims and economists, among others). Over four sections, she 1) defines error; 2) investigates how we get there (e.g. our senses, memories, beliefs, the data at hand); 3) examines how we feel about being wrong; and 4) encourages us to embrace error. Extensive endnotes and an index complete the book.

She's adamant that error isn't an intellectual inferiority or moral flaw but rather something beneficial, a way of learning and becoming -- where, quoting the philosopher Foucault, "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." Schulz writes, "When you were a little kid, you were fabulously wrong about things all the time"; she suggests that when we seek new experiences it is a way of plunging ourselves back into the childhood experience of not-knowing, where error leads to rapid learning.

She also suggests that there is no actual state of "being" wrong -- we know we're right and then we know we were wrong and we transition to a new state of being right. And it's those "hinge moments" of awareness that provoke the revelatory shifts that change us; it's also our reluctance to acknowledge error and complete those transitions that keeps us stuck in painful life situations.

It's an intelligent and deeply researched book, highly readable and highly recommended.

"Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" is a feat of erudition presented to the lot of us with joy and respect. From Plato to Descartes to Dylan and Jon Stewart, a smart and smiling Kathryn Schulz has scoured the world and examined the works of its thinkers and commentators to present a cogent, often entertaining, always informative book about the qualities and, ultimately, the value of human error.

She begins with an assertion: "Wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change." Thanks to error, she writes, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world. To error is human, the saying goes. It is wrongness, not rightness, that teaches us who we are.

For the most part, error is neither welcomed nor understood with any sort of compassion. Error is associated with negligence, stupidity and recklessness. We are punished for our mistakes with demotions, derision and sometimes, lifelong regret. Some of Schulz's stories about human error show us how gravely we can be wrong and how lasting are the effects of our mistakes. Human error routinely leads to death or lasting suffering.

Parsing error, determining its nature and type, is beside the point. What interests me, says Schulz, is how we think about being wrong and how we feel about it. She presents many examples of people in the throes of their mistakes and relates the process to how the brain works, the influence of the values we hold, the role of denial, the allure of certainty. She brings many to the table for her discussions and we learn a lot.

Some people hold erroneous beliefs simply because they rely on their senses. You see a mountain range directly in front of you, therefore you turn your ship around and set sail for home. The Scottish explorer John Ross, when looking for the Northwest Passage, did this. In fact, what he'd seen was something called a superior mirage. The mountains were in fact 200 miles west, lifted into his sights above the horizon and apparently blocking his way. The cause of this mirage was an unusual bending of light rays from beyond the horizon. It happens with a temperature inversion that sometimes occurs on the polar seas. The next explorer to sail that route also encountered the mountain range but he sailed right through it. Other sensory deceptions include people with unusual brain disorders. They may be blind and not know it or paralyzed and not know it. Anosognosia is the denial of disease and those who suffer this disorder may, in every other way, be perfectly hitched to reality.

Readers may find themselves reading for the anecdotes. The theory and interpretation comes after, which is what Schulz intends. Some errors are highly intellectual and hinge entirely on a belief system. Claiborne Paul Ellis, a leader in the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan in the early `70s, agreed, extremely reluctantly, to co-chair a committee on desegregation. The other chair on this committee was a black woman, who, like Ellis, had come from a large poor family and struggled fiercely to survive. His greatest professional accomplishment, he said, came after that. He helped 40 low-income black women get Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday.

Other errors are belief based but they happen in the moment, often with lasting effects. In the most riveting of the anecdotes in this book, Penny Beerntsen is raped in a state park. She is a stunning example of presence of mind. She tries to make a mark on her attacker's face. She fights fiercely and works to see and memorize his face. He knocks her out but when she comes to, beaten and badly hurt, she crawls without using her hands in order to preserve the blood on her hands in case it's his.

Shown pictures and offered a lineup, she experiences a visceral reaction to the man she easily identifies. And though he denies his guilt for the quarter of a century he is imprisoned, Beerntsen retains her sense of certainty. Eventually DNA evidence shows him to be innocent. The actual rapist raped other women after Beerntsen and was eventually arrested and incarcerated. Beerntsen, who'd devoted her life to working with criminals and victims, met the man she'd falsely accused and he forgave her. Just a couple of years later he killed a woman, once again throwing Beerntsen a major curveball. I was "flabbergasted," she said.

Eyewitness accounts are classically unreliable. The best eyewitnesses get more than 25 percent of their facts wrong. From study to study the findings hold firm. The worst witnesses err 80 percent of the time. People make mistakes. More remarkable is the fact that at least 20 percent of people who are told they are near death forget the news within a few days.

By accepting our tendency to err, whether through reliance on our senses or gut instinct or long-held belief systems, we admit our nature to be human. In a way, that's like practicing acceptance, not just for ourselves but for the world of humanity with which we co-exist. Error is the gateway to the possibility of something better. In Schulz's thinking, we should rethink our ideas about error. To err is to change. In change there is hope for something better.

Rae Francoeur can be reached at [email protected]. Read her blog at [...] or her book, "Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair," available online or in bookstores.

This book is more interested in asking questions than supplying answers. The author makes it clear that this is not a self help book. If you want to read something thought provoking, this is great. If you want to deal with some some of life's bigger issues, say how we interpret the world, good book to read. If, however, you are interested in direct steps to improve yourself, you would have to read her positions and come up with your own actions. More than likely you would be even more confused at the end than the beginning. If you're looking for answers, you don't want to read this book, because by the end you will end up with more questions than you started.

One of the things I wish the book had more of was statics. The author frequently makes use of such ideas as often and frequently. But she fails to explain the extent of that does often mean 20%, does frequently mean 80%? It could be more academically rigorous.

Overall I recommend the book. You will find your mind wandering to it and seeing her points/situations in your life.

Read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for a much deeper and a much broader discussion of all of the information in this book and much more besides -- don't waste your money on this very weak and overly long book -- it could easily have been edited down to a fairly interesting short essay or article.

Robert C. Ross
September 2018

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I never knew there was so much to say about the topic. I will add it to the list of things I'm wrong about. The writing style is fluid, the ideas wide ranging, and the sense of humor delightful, sometimes wickedly so. For example, on p. 210 in a footnote she discusses "fractal wrongness," which is being wrong about absolutely everything - about one's overarching beliefs, about the people who corroborate those beliefs, about the beliefs that stem from those beliefs, and so on. This, the author says, is impossible. "As a condition," the author tells us, "fractal wrongness is, thankfully, unattainalbe. As an insult, however, it is incomparable." The book contains very interesting discussions about the many ways in which people are wrong (like the condition anosognosia, which is where a blind person doesn't believe she's blind; if the senses can deceive us so badly, then what about loftier and more complicated topics?), how they avoid admitting they're wrong, what philosophers and psychologists have had to say about wrongness, how our culture looks at it, etc. All in all, this was a very thought-provoking book. I think most people who are at least moderately honest with themselves will recognize themselves in the author's descriptions of people who are wrong but think it's everyone else who's wrong. I feel sorry for the reviewer who donated his copy to a charity after having read only the first chapter. He missed out on a very interesting, and in some ways humbling, read.

In her very first book, Kathryn Schulz, takes a very obscure concept and converts it into something that is not only fascinating to read about, but enriching nonetheless. The author takes the concept of "Being Wrong"(being wrong about anything in general) and drills down to its core, thereby exposing it and giving us more insight into why we are so wrong so many times. Her theory - which is painstakingly knit by borrowing generously from the works of great scientists, psychologists, philosophers, our very own neighbors, and the author's own experiences - hints at so many occasions where we thought we were right, but turned to be wrong, and worse yet when confronted about it, we either just shrugged our shoulders not acknowledging it or simply denied it.

With each chapter in her book dedicated to explaining our mistakes: why we make mistakes, what are our emotions when we see them unfolding before out eyes, and finally how we embrace them, the author makes a compelling case that there is more to be learned from our mistakes than to just feel miserable about them. She deftly weaves theories (from opinions of philosophers, the rationality of psychologists, the thoughts of social scientists, and plain - but often - ignored irrational behavior of our fellow humans) to arrive at a coherent solution to show why our errors help us in many ways - including transforming us into a different person - than we think. She argues that most of our errors can be attributed to our beliefs which are again not entirely grounded in reality. While empathizing with us in the wake of the disastrous errors we commit, Ms Schulz silently reminds us of the fact of how unaware we are of own fallibility. Making mistakes is inevitable, she confesses, yet few of us have the courage to come out in the open and embrace them. Through out her book she ridicules us about our quirky nature -for either being too egoistic or sloppy when it comes to decision making, or just acting plain dumb when it to comes to accepting our blunders - yet remains cheerfully and stubbornly hopeful that we will not repeat our mistakes.

From the outset the topic chosen by the author seems very simple and elusive, but only as you read through is when you understand the inherent difficulty with these "simple and elusive topics". It is just like trying finding a pot of gold at the very end of a rainbow, only this time though Ms Schulz finds it. A former reporter, an editor for an environment protection magazine, and now a freelance journalist, Kathryn Schulz never appears to be struggling for words nor for content as we read her work. Lacing different events together as though they all belong at one place, she makes her work highly engaging if not simply brilliant. She takes a neutral stance on most of the issues thereby avoiding the pitfall of polarizing her readers. More than a just self help book, "Being Wrong" actually helps us be better human beings by encouraging us to make mistakes, while learning from them at the same time.

This started out to be the greatest book on error I ever read, until part 3. It's as if the book established all the thinking about wrong and then proceeds to prove it by offering biased, misrepresented examples fueled by personal prejudices of the author. As an example, never once does the author posit even the remote possibility that non-religious people are in any way biased and ALL religious people "are not inclined to read Darwin in their spare time." Isn't that the type of thinking that the author is trying to encourage us not to have? There is a similar preoccupation with women's suffrage. Relentlessly harping on two Swiss villages as the prime example of everything that contributes to wrong thinking simply because of their defence against women's suffrage, yet contradictorily pointing out that these villages were very progressive in their general sense of democracy! The problem in the book is not the issues themselves, but the author's inability to see that the very arguments she is making and the solutions she is encouraging are being neglected by the author herself. My recommendation, read part one and two and then throw the book away.

I recently caught a TEDx talk by Kathryn Schulz on the reasons why we need to get over our fear of being wrong. That's an interesting mindset, and usually not one that people readily accept. To investigate her ideas more thoroughly, I picked up her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. It's a deep and heavy read, but her humor and irreverent attitude keep it from being a sleeping aid. Having finished it, I think I can now look at my many errors and mistakes in a much healthier light.

Contents:
Part 1 - The Idea of Error: Wrongology; Two Models of Wrongness
Part 2 - The Origins of Error; Our Senses; Our Mind, Part One - Knowing, not knowing, and Making It Up; Our Minds, Part Two - Belief; Our Minds, Part Three - Evidence; Our Society; The Allure of Certainty
Part 3 - The Experience of Error: Being Wrong; How Wrong?; Denial and Acceptance; Heartbreak; Transformation
Part 4 - Embracing Error: The Paradox of Error; The Optimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything
Acknowledgments; Notes; Index

Schulz takes on a heavy topic that most of us don't understand. The vast majority of people either feel they have to be right at all costs, or that being wrong is a personal failure. In reality, being wrong is what helps us grow and understand our world better. One prime example was the insistence that the Sun and all the planets revolved around Earth. But in the 1600s, Galileo went head-to-head with the Church and many other educated men, and declared his support for the Copernicus model of the universe based on his observations and theories. The possibility of being incorrect was not well-received, and Galileo died with the stimga of being a heretic. It took a number of years for people and institutions to come around to the fact that the previously held view was wrong, and that these new observations and facts dictated a change to the way we think about the universe. If we were less insistent on having to be right or less fearful of being wrong, we as a society could grow so much faster.

I was also struck by how error is often comedy. If something goes wrong on a trip or you make a mistake, it's common to hear "we'll laugh about this one day." Rather than wait, just accept that being human means making mistakes, and enjoy the moment. Laugh and/or learn from it, adjust your views or actions, and move on.

It was impossible not to think about politics while reading this, either. Each political party has a hard and fast set of beliefs that define them, and anyone not subscribing to those beliefs is wrong and needs to be corrected. Unfortunately, even when presented with evidence to the contrary relating to one of their closely-held views, it is nearly impossible for the person to adjust their thinking and admit they were wrong. There's no discussion and consideration of views to come up with a compromise or to learn from others. It's often a duel to the death to be right while proving the other person wrong. In the end, nobody gains from that.

Being Wrong has a great message that, if heeded, would make our lives so much more productive and enjoyable. It's well worth the time and effort it takes to go through the material. But I have little hope that the average man on the street who is affected by the need to always be right will ever take the time to read and understand this message.

Disclosure:
Obtained From: Library
Payment: Borrowed

A little liberty from a Rod Stewart song but seems appropriate for Kathryn Schulz's fine book on being wrong. In this cognitive psychology genre, this is indeed a very fine addition. Some have reviewed it as a little wordy, which reminds me of the great book `Dune'. Upon the initial reading, the first two chapters were difficult and almost lost me, but once past the background, the book opened to a wonderful and fulfilling experience. `Being Wrong' is very similar in this case as the first two chapters are a little tough plowing as many references and quotes are brought to the readers attention. Once past this, this book will also open to a wonderful and fulfilling experience.

Unlike Descartes where he claims that we weigh the likelihood of new information, Baruch Spinoza claimed that we automatically accept new information as true and only determine any falsehood in a second and more delayed process. This is becoming the more likelihood as research is closing in on its conclusion that we are only partially rational beings. Taken as mostly true, then this reading will either reconfirm it for you, or a least make you think a little harder about your own errors and others. Error not in the sense to ridicule or be embarrassed, but to rejoice at finding the true, truth.

All in, this is a worthy contribution to cognitive psychology genre and an enjoyable read. That is if you are inclined to such things. If you are, then a few of may other favorites on the subject include:

The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (McGraw-Hill Series in Social Psychology) by Scott Plous
How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich
Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin
The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy by James Montier
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
Mean Markets and Lizard Brains: How to Profit from the New Science of Irrationality by Terry Burnham

Schulz is a talented magazine-style journalist, and she has successfully morphed Williams James-ish pragmatism into a compelling read on the virtues of being wrong. I was really riveted by at least the third to half of this book -- her basic theme is simple to explain (pretty much laid out by the well-chosen epigraphs), but she elaborates it nicely.

However, at the end of the day, and although I felt she could probably have written 2000 pages, she doesn't really have *that* much conceptual material to present. So, especially in the second half of the book, I really started skimming liberally. Despite her claims otherwise, Part 3 of the book really digresses into self-help applications of her thesis (on love, transformation, self-fulfillment) and I had to skip quite a bit.

Related to this, the book suffers from a holographic quality, where everything reflects on everything. Like a good magazine journalist, she has a plethora of resonant anecdotes, and she has a rich array of interesting psych studies to draw on. But you could throw them all up like a deck of cards and reassemble them in any order and they would work just as well together. E.g. why is the study on word fragments in the "Heartbreak" chapter? No idea really, it could equally well have landed in a half-dozen other chapters.

These are just caveats though: her theme is well worth exploring, and her prose is eminently readable. Definitely worth a read!

The book is an interesting treatment of a subject that doesn't get enough attention. Schulz's research skills and erudition are formidable -- a quotable nugget appears on almost every page. But the book drags in places, and the final few chapters (particularly the one about art) were tough going. Schulz is best when she's telling stories, such as the incredible tale of the Millerite doomsday cult in 19th century America.

Another problem with the book is that it's too abstract and philosophical to be of much practical use. (To be fair, Schulz admits up front that she did not set out to write a self-help book on how to avoid error). Overall, I would recommend two other books over "Being Wrong". Check out, "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us--and How to Know When not to Trust Them", by David Friedman; and "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Either of these (or both!) would be a better choice over Schulz's book.

This book is a smooth read, quite humbling, yet with a strong and sensible through-line of optimism. It confronts us with the idea that making errors is a central and intrinsic condition of being human. Which is not a bad thing. Every error in a person's life is a necessary structure in their continual transformation. Errors get such a bad reputation because of our self-indulgence in our own comfort. It is time to stop being so afraid of discomfort.
This book clearly shows how human mistakes in thinking are structurally united with human success at thinking. The way that people make errors is a direct result of our ability to think at all. We all suffer from a kind of blindness without the ability to fully account for it or reconcile it. The clear message of the book is that because we are all inclined to make mistakes, to wander and get lost on the search for truth that it is in everyone's best interests to be humble and forgiving. Instead of being afraid or dismissive of our error it is better to dance with them. Once we accept that the possibility of error is a necessary condition of all life, then we can move forward with a clearer vision of who we are. One of biggest mistakes about making a mistakes is to decide that making a mistakes excludes us from being valuable or loveable. Making a mistake doesn't mean that someone is broken, flawed, idiotic or evil, it just means they are human. If we can choose to own our errors and endure the discomfort of claiming them, then we can discover real wisdom.
In the end, we must accept that mishaps and mistakes are not intrusions; they are a natural and normal aspect of all life. All of this is explained through wonderful vignettes, longer stories and beautiful explanations. This is a humbling, enlightening and hopeful book.

Disclaimer: I am reviewing an advance copy I received for free through the Vine program.

What a wonderful book! I am really enjoying it. Maybe I'm just predisposed to be interested in the kinds of questions and issues it raises and explores, but I find it fascinating.

From this wonderful book, you'll get some deep discussion, background, history, foundational philosophical ideas, behind concepts like "knowledge", "belief", "certainty","truth"....

And it explores the various stages of the phenomenon of error: first, believing (i.e. thinking/knowing that you are RIGHT in what you think is true about something) .... then, trying to zero in on the moment when you "realize that you're not right, but actually wrong" (if there even is such a moment, since some such conversions happen only gradually over time..... etc.

You'll have a wonderful time (at least I did!!), reading along with this book, thinking about all sorts of things, like the whole class of "I was blind but now I see" type phenomena (her initial prototypical examples include some nautical sailor explorers, searching for a passageway to land, who thought they saw mountains on land nearby, only to find years later that they were actually illusions caused by a kind of mirage phenomenon, images of some mountains that were actually extremely far away).

And it is so timely now, with the U.S. enthralled in a national nutty hysterical obsession over things like the abandoned Burlington Coat Factory building, in lower Manhattan New York, which a Sufi Muslim foundation wants to turn into the Islamic equivalent of a "YMCA" (a building full of various functions useful to the public community, including exercise, swimming pools, meeting rooms, and also a mosque).... which is being demonized, in a very inaccurate fashion, by demagogery as the "Ground Zero Mosque"....

I'm not saying you have to agree with me politically to like this book (and I'm not saying this book is only relevant to this particular moment in history, particularly not just in America), I'm just saying that this latest form of mass hysteria/mass delusion in the USA provides a perfect example, of phenomena examined in the book.... a lot of these people are going to (hopefully) wake up in a while and say Oops, was that really me, did I really get so hysterical, was I so completely mis-informed?

But don't just take my word for it, read it yourself and gain the firsthand direct experience!

Added thought: it discusses a very interesting idea, that "paranoid conspiracy theorists" are, in some sense (psychologically and philosophically), the "opposite" of "obsessive compulsives" -- in the sense that the paranoid conspiracy theorist has an unreasonable CERTAINTY unshakeable by contrary evidence, while the obsessive compulsive sufferer has an unreasonable DOUBT, also unshakeable by contrary evidence.