Kathryn Schulz: Being Wrong

The Poptech description of this presentation is:

Kathryn Schulz is an expert on being wrong. The journalist and author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error,” says we make mistakes all the time. The trouble is that often times being wrong feels like being right. What’s more, we’re usually wrong about what it even means to make mistakes—and how it can lead to better ideas.

This is a very good presentation, worth your attention.

I would add that one can get external negative evidence about a belief not only from people but from objective facts. Indeed, she gives the example of someone who was convinced for years that he had been listening to a baseball game when he heard the announcer break in with the news of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 -- until he realized that they did not broadcast baseball games in December, but only in the summer.

The scientific method depends fundamentally of generating hypotheses that can be disproved by objective measurements. Think of Einstein waiting for years for the measurement of the shift in the apparent position of stars close to the sun, predicted by his theory of relativity but not be Newton. We should similarly make predictions that can be demonstrated to be false in order to test the credibility of our beliefs. Ideally the test should not be hugely destructive. (Think about learning that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only after we had invaded the country and destroyed its government and economy.)

I agree with Schulz that the way we feel about something we believe that is wrong is usually the same way we feel about something we believe that is right. Indeed, that is a good reason to believe probabilistically. Say to yourself, I believe that is probably true. The next step is to quantify your degree of credence. It is more credible that the sun will rise tomorrow than to believe that the price of bread will be the same tomorrow, although we can hope for both.

Schulz refers to the recognition by Thomas Kuhn that history has shown again and again that a scientific paradigm that everyone believed to be correct, was not correct and should be replaced by a better one. Over time, experiments accumulate with results conflicting with the predictions of the existing paradigm. Since people make mistakes all the time in planning, conducting and interpreting experiments, the normal response to the first such experiments showing anomalous results is to check and double check the experiment. However, when a number of anomalies accrue, some people begin to question the paradigm.

In that moment, the questioners still believe the paradigm to be right, but suspect that it may be wrong. In our everyday lives, we too can have increasingly strong suspicions that something we once believed may be better replaced by an alternative belief. Sometimes that happens quickly, as when you thought you had turned off your cell phone and it rings in your pocket. Sometimes it happens slowly, as when you find over a period of years that a job you once thought fit you perfectly, you now suspect would not be as good a fit as something else.