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: Adventuresin 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.
Me: "Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up, well, you can, but you'll look strange in public." Being wrong is part of being human I think. I've certainly blurted out wrong things at the wrong time. Perception plays into it as well as I assume it's different from person to person. A lot of personal prejudges play into it as well, along with ego.
"To err is Human" may have a more comprehensive meaning than we usually give it. It may be our defining characteristic. The thought alone is apparently unpleasant though: this blog post has the lowest readership count of anything I've posted in the past year. I'm guessing it's the title.
Me: "Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up, well, you can, but you'll look strange in public." Being wrong is part of being human I think. I've certainly blurted out wrong things at the wrong time. Perception plays into it as well as I assume it's different from person to person. A lot of personal prejudges play into it as well, along with ego.
ReplyDelete"To err is Human" may have a more comprehensive meaning than we usually give it. It may be our defining characteristic. The thought alone is apparently unpleasant though: this blog post has the lowest readership count of anything I've posted in the past year. I'm guessing it's the title.
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