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Kathryn Schulz QUOTES

Kathryn Schulz QUOTES

1 " 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

4 " 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. "

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

5 " Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong "

― Kathryn Schulz

6 " 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. "

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

7 " 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. "

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

8 " 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. "

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

9 " The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own. "

― Kathryn Schulz

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

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

11 " 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. "

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

12 " 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. "

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

13 " [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. "

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

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

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

15 " The late novelist and critic John Updike once noted that the trouble with writing book reviews is that it is “almost impossible to…avoid the tone of being wonderfully right. "

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

16 " Still, one could argue—and many did—that Greenspan, at least, had no business being quite so shocked. Over the years, countless people had challenged his deregulatory dogma, including (to name just a few) Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, both Nobel Prize–winning economists, and Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999. Born eventually became something of a Cassandra figure for the crisis, since she repeatedly called for regulating the market for derivatives, those ultracomplex financial products that eventually helped bring down the economy. Those calls were silenced when Greenspan, along with then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Arthur Levitt, took the extraordinary step of convincing Congress to pass legislation forbidding Born’s agency from taking any action for the duration of her term. "

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

17 " Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. “The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them,” the writer Louis Menand observed. “…The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes. "

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

18 " As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes."


Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds.


To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it. "

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

19 " both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold "

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

20 " the Catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible. "

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