Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

"In the aftermath of our errors, our first task is always to establish their scope and nature."

"[There] is . . . a problem that bedevils all of us as members of communities of believers. I call this problem our disagreement deficit, and it comes in four parts. . . . First, our communities expose us to disproportionate support for our own ideas. Second, they shield us from the disagreement of outsiders. Third, they cause us to disregard whatever outside disagreement we do encounter. Finally, they quash the development of disagreement from within."

"the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all—if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own—we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good."

"Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds. We can create open and transparent environments instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak up when they see the potential for error. These measures might be a prescription for identifying and eliminating mistakes, but they sound like something else: a prescription for democracy. That's not an accident. Although we don't normally think of it in these terms, democratic governance represents another method—this time a political rather than an industrial or personal one—for accepting the existence of error and trying to curtail its more dangerous incarnations."

"conversion stories are one of the classic Western narratives about the self."

"To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling and sometimes even dangerous but in the end it is a journey and a story. Who really wants to stay at home and be right when you can don your armor spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world True you might get lost along get stranded in a swamp have a scare at the edge of a cliff thieves might steal your gold brigands might imprison you in a cave sorcerers might turn you into a toad but what of what To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in the spirit that this book is written."

"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."

"Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. . . . This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can't embrace error—the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder."

"Reliance on other people's knowledge. . . . buys us all a lot of time. It also buys us, in essence, many billions of prosthetic brains."

"The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk of the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest of the brain."

"The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest if the brain."

"knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials"