Wrongology - 1: Beliefs

In her awesome book, Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz writes:

“When we make mistakes, we shrug and say we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.”

Sure, you knew that already, and yet:

“There is no experience of being wrong. There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course… Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.”

Take our beliefs. Not just religious or political beliefs, but nearly every kind of belief we hold:

“Our beliefs often seem to us not so much constructed as reflected, as if our minds were simply mirror in which the truth of the world passively appeared.”

And that is exactly what leads to, well, errors:

“Believing something on the basis of messy, sparse, limited information really is how we err.”

Once we have a belief, we then only notice the data that supports it:

“Looking for counterevidence often requires time, energy, learning, liberty and sufficient social capital.”

And then we can’t even imagine that we might be wrong:

“We cannot imagine, or do not care, that our own certainty, when seen from the outside, must look just as unbecoming and ill-grounded as the certainty that we abhor in others.”

Even more problematically:

“The vast majority of our beliefs are really beliefs once removed. Our faith that we are right is faith that someone else is right.”

Ironically, the social norm of not expressing one’s strongest views and beliefs is a sure-shot way to “stay close-minded, a way not to get busted”, says the magician Penn Jillette. Here’s why, he explained in an interview:

“If you have some crazy thought and keep it in your head, there is much less chance that someone will say, “what are you, fucking nuts?”… One of the quickest ways to find out if you are wrong is to state what you believe.”

Schulz quotes Thomas Kuhn on scientific theories:

“A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.”

Beliefs, like nature, apparently abhor a vacuum. And once we replace one belief with another, here’s how we think, writes Schulz:

“We are absolutely right about something up until the very instant that, lo and behold, we are absolutely right about something else.”