Getting It Wrong

t may come as a surprise to the reader that I’m occasionally wrong. I presume there is much about which I’m wrong all the time, though I could be wrong about that.
 
There are many ways to be wrong. There are moral wrongs, but these can be fuzzy since there are different moral systems. (The Nietzschean view is that those out of power devise moral definitions that make it only “fair” that they gain power, while those in power embrace moral definitions that make it only “fair” that they stay there.) People sometimes experience religious or political conversions and decide their former views were wrong. (These are often deeply unsettling in a way analogous to the five stages of grief, since former views are typically integral to sense of self.) In my experience, to the extent such conversions are philosophical rather than just emotional reactions to some event, they usually involve a reexamination of first principles about what it means to be human in the presence of other humans. (Goethe: "Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.”) First principles can differ. One simply can be mistaken about facts (e.g. believing an object is closer or farther away than is actually is), either from misperception or misinformation. (This implies that there is an objective reality – a truth about which to be wrong; this is a matter of more philosophical contention than one might think, but it is useful to posit it as true in ordinary circumstances.) We can misspeak and we can make false assumptions. My mom, who was spontaneous in social settings, was famous for both.
 
Three of my favorite mom “oops” moments also illustrate why we hate being wrong. Decades ago she was at a neighbor’s backyard tennis party where all the women (except her) wore bright white tennis outfits. She had intended to say, “It looks like everyone here has been using Clorox,” which she later admitted itself would have been a somewhat snippy remark. What she in fact said was, “It looks like everyone here has been using Clairol,” which was met by silence. Not long afterward at a meeting of local businesspeople (she was a real estate broker), she spoke to a local storeowner [I’ve changed his name]: “Hi Brad. Is this your mother?” It was his wife. At another business association dinner a waiter placed a bowl in front of her. She sampled the contents with a spoon and assumed it was some kind of gourmet cold spicy soup. After a few more spoonfuls, another person at the table spoke up, “Robina, are you really going to eat all of our salad dressing?” Each of these was a minor faux pas in the scheme of things but each was also mortifying in a way we’ve all experienced at some time or other but never want to experience again.
 
Much as we hate being wrong, we find pleasure in pointing out the wrongness of others. We don’t even seem to care if it is our own knowledge and skill that prevails. Who has not had one’s statements (say, on the price of a new Tesla) fact-checked in real time by someone Googling on a cell phone? If any discrepancy turns up, no matter how small, the satisfaction of the Googler is as real as if he personally had memorized the MSRPs of every model beforehand.

 
There are many books on error, but there is one in particular I enjoyed reading this past week. In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, author Kathryn Schulz examines all the various ways we get it wrong, how we acknowledge it, how we (all too often) deny it, how we (also all too often) blame the error on others, how we persist in error against solid evidence (e.g. confirmation bias and sunk cost bias), and how we (at best) grow from the experience. Schulz, journalist for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Nation, et al., has an informative but breezy style that doesn’t talk down even while she shows genuine erudition. She relies heavily on recent research but is just as likely to discuss a classical author. When she writes about Sully, or Plato, or Shakespeare, or Freud, or Proust, or whomever she always has something interesting to say without an assumption that the reader is unfamiliar with the works in question.
 
Many of our errors result in ultimately minor humiliations. Others can be truly destructive. Take the wrongness of memory. Many minor arguments are over conflicting memories. Schulz mentions an overheard argument at the train station between a husband and wife because the husband bought pound cake instead of crumb cake. “You said ‘pound cake,’” he said. “I said ‘crumb cake,’” she answered. “You said ‘pound cake,’” he repeated. “I said crumb cake.” The exchange went on. One of them was wrong – maybe both if she said “round cake.” I had a similar incident the other day. I recounted to a friend a story involving my dad and uncle during World War 2. Against policy after the Sullivan brothers died in the same sinking, they by pure chance had been assigned to the same ship. Taking place in the port of Naples, the story includes the Shore Patrol and a German air raid. “You told me this story before, but you said it was Marseille,” my friend said, happy to correct me. “I said it was Naples,” I answered. “I always say it is Naples. The story wouldn’t even make sense in Marseille.” “You said it was Marseille,” he insisted. One of us remembered wrong. I’m quite sure it was my friend who was wrong, but absolutely 100% sure? After all he is almost certainly right that I told him the story before (I’ve told it enough times over the years that I don’t remember who has heard it and who hasn’t), so one must admit the possibility (though I still regard it as unlikely) that I misspoke rather than that he misremembered.
 
That example is of little consequence, but there can be devastating consequences to the faulty memories of eyewitnesses. For more than a century (early experiments were conducted in 1900) it has been known how poor and malleable eyewitness testimony can be. Witnesses primed with mugshots, for example, commonly pick from live lineups someone from the mugshots rather than anyone who was actually at the scene of a crime, and the false memory hardens with time. Vividness of memory has little to do with its accuracy. The Innocence Project reexamines cases of people convicted of crimes based primarily on eyewitness (sometimes face-to-face eyewitness) testimony by testing DNA evidence when it still exists. So far 375 convictions have been overturned, often after the falsely accused person had spent years in prison. In the 1980s there was a spate of convictions based on “recovered memories.” Within a decade it became clear just how unreliable such memories were, leading to the most egregious cases being reopened.
 
Schulz in her final chapter has an optimistic message: “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.” I hope she is right about that.
 

Depeche Mode – Wrong