Kathryn Schulz Quotes & Sayings

Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs. That's part of why recognizing our errors is such a strange experience: accustomed to disagreeing with other people, we suddenly find ourselves at odds with *ourselves*. — Kathryn Schulz

Doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct — Kathryn Schulz

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better. — Kathryn Schulz

Relying on hard data, committing to open and democratic communication, acknowledging fallibility: these are the central tenets of any system that aims to protect us from error. They are also markedly different from how we normally think - from our often hasty and asymmetric treatment of evidence, from the cloistering effects of insular communities, and from our instinctive recourse to defensiveness and denial. — Kathryn Schulz

The inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. — Kathryn Schulz

This idea began to emerge during the Scientific Revolution, through that era's hallmark development, the scientific method. — Kathryn Schulz

Conversion stories are one of the classic Western narratives about the self. — Kathryn Schulz

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. — Kathryn Schulz

If you Google 'regret and tattoo,' you will get 11.5 million hits. — Kathryn Schulz

[We] are usually much more willing to entertain the possibility that we are wrong about insignificant matters than about weighty ones. This has a certain emotional logic, but it is deeply lacking in garden-variety logic. In high-stakes situations, we should want to do everything possible to ensure that we are right
which, as we will see, we can only do by imagining all the ways we could be wrong. That we are able to do this when it hardly matters, yet unable to do so when the stakes are huge, suggests that we might learn something important by comparing these otherwise very different experiences. — Kathryn Schulz

Wrongness always seems to come at us from left field - that is, from outside ourselves. But the reality could hardly be more different. Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs. — Kathryn Schulz

Your own regrets may not be as ugly as you think they are. — Kathryn Schulz

And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. — Kathryn Schulz

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. — Kathryn Schulz

In 1972, the psychologist Irving Janis defined groupthink as, "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." Groupthink most commonly affects homogenous, close-knit communities that are overly insulated from internal and external criticism, and that perceive themselves as different from or under attack by outsiders. Its symptoms include censorship of dissent, rejection or rationalization of criticisms, the conviction of moral superiority, and the demonization of those who hold opposing beliefs. It typically leads to the incomplete or inaccurate assessment of information, the failure to seriously consider other possible options, a tendency to make rash decisions, and the refusal to reevaluate or alter those decisions once they've been made. — Kathryn Schulz

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

By definition, there can't be any particular feeling associated with simply *being* wrong. ndeed, the whole reason it's possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it. (...) You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has gone off the cliff but before he has looked down. Literatlly in his case, and figuratively in yourse, you are already in trouble when you feel like you're still on solid ground. So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right. — Kathryn Schulz

Error in extremis - extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar - becomes insanity. madness is radical wrongness. — Kathryn Schulz

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

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway? — Kathryn Schulz

[Our errors] represent a moment of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. But what's wrong with that? "To alienate" means to make unfamiliar; and to see things - including ourselves - as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew. — Kathryn Schulz

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science. — Kathryn Schulz

The fact is, with the exception of our own minds, no power on earth has the consistent and absolute ability to convince us that we are wrong. However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone. — Kathryn Schulz

The certainty of those with whom we disagree - whether the disagreement concerns who should run the country or who should run the dishwasher - never looks justified to us, and frequently looks odious. As often as not, we regard it as a sign of excessive emotional attachment to an idea, or an indicator of a narrow, fearful, or stubborn frame of mind. By contrast, we experience our own certainty as simply a side-effect of our rightness, justifiable because our cause is just. And, remarkably, despite our generally supple, imaginative, extrapolation-happy minds, we cannot transpose this scene. 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 we abhor in others. — Kathryn Schulz

If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail. — Kathryn Schulz

If it is sweet to be right, then - let's not deny it - it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong. — Kathryn Schulz

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

It is often precisely these irresolvable issues that arouse our most impassioned certainty that we are right and our adversaries are wrong. To my mind, then, any definition of error we choose must be flexible enough to accommodate the way we talk about wrongness when there is no obvious benchmark for being right. — Kathryn Schulz

We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know. — Kathryn Schulz

This suggests a curious paradox. If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds - from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents - it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people's inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs. — Kathryn Schulz

Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing. — Kathryn Schulz

If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy. — Kathryn Schulz

[W]hen we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up. — Kathryn Schulz

The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. — Kathryn Schulz

The idea behind the meta-induction is that all of our theories are fundamentally provisional and quite possibly wrong, if we can add that idea to our cognitive toolkit, we will be better able to listen with curiosity and empathy to those whose theories contradict our own. We will be better able to pay attention to counterevidence - those anomalous bits of data that make our picture of the world a little weirder, more mysterious, less clean, less done. And we will be able to hold our own beliefs a bit more humbly, in the knowledge that better ideas are almost certainly on the way. — Kathryn Schulz

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't. — Kathryn Schulz

This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it. — Kathryn Schulz

Our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient. — Kathryn Schulz

Our brains are not actually duplex apartments occupied by feuding neighbors, and how we bring about the complicated act of deceiving ourselves remains a mystery. — Kathryn Schulz

Without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses — Kathryn Schulz

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

[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

it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are. — Kathryn Schulz

Of all the things we are wrong about, error might well top the list ... We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honourable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world. — Kathryn Schulz

Thirty-three percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education. — Kathryn Schulz

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that? — Kathryn Schulz

As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write. — Kathryn Schulz

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

Freud, as I've already noted, believed that the false worlds of our dreams reveal deep and hidden truths about ourselves. — Kathryn Schulz

Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks. — Kathryn Schulz

Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong — Kathryn Schulz

MAN: You said pound cake. WOMAN: I didn't say pound cake, I said crumb cake. MAN: You said pound cake. WOMAN: Don't tell me what I said. MAN: You said pound cake. WOMAN: I said crumb cake. MAN: I actually saw the crumb cake but I didn't get it because you said pound cake. WOMAN: I said crumb cake. MAN: Well, I heard pound cake. WOMAN: Then you obviously weren't listening. Crumb cake doesn't even sound like pound cake. MAN: Well, maybe you accidentally said pound cake. Woman: I said crumb cake. - overheard in Grand Central Station, November 13, 2008 — Kathryn Schulz

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

Surely, then, this was a situation that merited the high-minded if somewhat sneering riposte of John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? — Kathryn Schulz

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

Wow. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. — Kathryn Schulz

Both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold — Kathryn Schulz

Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality. — Kathryn Schulz

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

The Catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible. — Kathryn Schulz

Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better. — Kathryn Schulz

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

The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number. — Kathryn Schulz

Here is Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, describing the way scientists react when their pet theories are unraveling: "What scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies," Kuhn wrote, " ... . [is] renounce the paradigm that led them into crisis." Instead, he concluded, "A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place." That is, scientific theories very seldom collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. They topple only when a new and seemingly better belief turns up to replace it. — Kathryn Schulz

The patient in question was a young woman whose parents brought her in because she complained incessantly of stomach pains. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer. — Kathryn Schulz

We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality. — Kathryn Schulz

Confirmation bias is the tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than to evidence that challenges them. — Kathryn Schulz

The first, he says, is a feeling of recognition - the thing that makes you say to your newfound love (the quotes are his), "I know we've just met, but somehow I feel as though I already know you." The second is a feeling of timelessness: "Even though we've only been seeing each other for a short time, I can't remember when I didn't know you." The third is a feeling of reunification: "When I'm with you, I no longer feel alone; I feel whole, complete. — Kathryn Schulz

It's as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible. — Kathryn Schulz

Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people's errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human. — Kathryn Schulz

Often, our beliefs about what is factually right and our beliefs about what is morally right are entirely inextricable. — Kathryn Schulz

But nor is the willing embrace of error always beyond us. In fact, this might be the most important thing illusions can teach us: that it is possible, at least some of the time, to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found in being right. — Kathryn Schulz

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

Knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials — Kathryn Schulz