This concerns the moral implications of wrongness itself. What responsibility do we bear for the consequences of our mistakes? How should we behave toward people when we think that they are wrong? The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch once observed that no system of ethics can be complete without a mechanism for bringing about moral change.
In other words, erring is not only although it is sometimes a moral problem. It is also a moral solution: an opportunity, as I said earlier, to rethink our relationship to ourselves, other people, and the world. This sketch of the relationship between moral wrongness and error brings us almost to the end of our definitional quagmire. But I confess I have saved the swampiest step for last. The conundrum of whether truth exists, how we can arrive at it, and who gets to adjudicate it has preoccupied some of the best thinkers of every culture and era since time immemorial.
This obsession has yielded tremendous intellectual and artistic returns, but very little that could truly be called progress, let alone resolution. Socrates was right: no theory of error can exist entirely outside a theory of truth. In other words, this definition of wrongness assumes the existence of absolute rightness—a fixed and knowable reality against which our mistakes can be measured. Sometimes, that assumption serves us well. There are, after all, plenty of broadly accepted standards of truth; even a committed relativist will likely concede that we can be just plain wrong about, say, the outcome of an election or the paternity of a child.
The trouble with this definition is that the opposite is true, too. 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.
Take the issue of aesthetics. We all know that matters of taste are different from matters of fact—that standards of right and wrong apply to facts but not to preferences. Indeed, we are somehow able to sort this out very early in life.
Yet it is comically easy to find examples of full-grown adults acting like their own taste is the gospel truth. Mac fanatics are famous for treating PC users like the victims of a mass delusion. People who swoon over hardwood floors regard wall-to-wall carpeting in Victorian homes as objectively appalling. Granted, most of us are a bit wry about our tendency to treat our own predilections as the transcendent truth.
Still, knowing that this behavior is ridiculous seldom stops us from engaging in it. And you, my rhubarb pie loving reader, are marveling at how wrong I am. It follows, then, that anyone sufficiently perceptive and intelligent would respond to these things—to everything—the same way I do. If this is how we act when we know that right and wrong are irrelevant, you can imagine what happens when there really is a fact of the matter, whether or not we ourselves can ever arrive at it.
Forget, for a moment, the obvious but treacherous terrain of religion or politics. You can provoke a deep-seated sense of rightness just as swiftly by, say, asking a bunch of scholars of Elizabethan literature who really wrote Hamlet.
Yet it is often precisely these irresolvable issues that arouse our most impassioned certainty that we are right and our adversaries are wrong. To find such a definition, we might return to the experience of error. This is a tempting fix, for two reasons.
First, with a slight tweak to an established definition of error, it puts paid to any irksome questions about truth. Second, it shines the spotlight on an important and often overlooked corner of human experience, one that is central to this book: the hinge moment when we swing from believing one thing to believing its antithesis.
Still, as an overall definition, this one seems unsatisfactory as well, since it fails to capture our everyday notion of error. We mean that her beliefs are at odds with the real state of the world. In the end, then, neither of these definitions of being wrong—as a deviation from external reality, or an internal upheaval in what we believe—will completely suffice for our purposes.
Although I will draw on both ideas, the full human experience of error is too multiform and chameleon to stay put inside either one. For better and worse, error is already our lifelong companion. Most of the rest of this book—into which I promise to release you very soon—is built around stories of people screwing up.
These stories involve, among other things, illusions, magicians, comedians, drug trips, love affairs, misadventures on the high seas, bizarre neurological phenomena, medical catastrophes, legal fiascos, some possible consequences of marrying a prostitute, the lamentable failure of the world to end, and Alan Greenspan.
But before we can plunge into the experience of being wrong, we must pause to make an important if somewhat perverse point: there is no experience of being wrong. There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course.
In fact, there is a stunning diversity of such experiences. When you are simply going about your business in a state you will later decide was delusional, you have no idea of it whatsoever. You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has gone off the cliff but before he has looked down. So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right.
This is the problem of error-blindness. Whatever falsehoods each of us currently believes are necessarily invisible to us. Error-blindness goes some way toward explaining our persistent difficulty with imagining that we could be wrong. But error-blindness suggests that another, more structural issue might be at work as well. If it is literally impossible to feel wrong—if our current mistakes remain imperceptible to us even when we scrutinize our innermost being for signs of them—then it makes sense for us to conclude that we are right.
Similarly, error-blindness helps explain why we accept fallibility as a universal phenomenon yet are constantly startled by our own mistakes. And, as a result, we seldom feel that we should be held accountable for them. By law, after all, no one is answerable for an Act of God.
If our current mistakes are necessarily invisible to us, our past errors have an oddly slippery status as well. Generally speaking, they are either impossible to remember or impossible to forget. I can never come across the name of the German writer Goethe without remembering the kindly but amused correction delivered to me by a college professor the first time I said it out loud, as Go-eth. As in pride goeth before a fall.
For readers in my erstwhile boat, it comes closer to rhyming with the name Bertha, minus the H. And the R. This was a trivial and understandable mistake, yet I seem destined to go to my grave remembering it. Compare that to an experience recounted by Sigmund Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life itself a book about erring. He tried for a long time to bring the patient to mind, but for the life of him was unable to do so.
Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer. On the whole, though, our ability to forget our mistakes seems keener than our ability to remember them. As someone who tried to review the literature on wrongness, I can tell you that, first, it is vast; and, second, almost none of it is filed under classifications having anything to do with error. Instead, it is distributed across an extremely diverse set of disciplines: philosophy, psychology, behavioral economics, law, medicine, technology, neuroscience, political science, and the history of science, to name just a few.
So too with the errors in our own lives. In light of this new belief, the discarded one can quickly come to seem remote, indistinct, and irrelevant, as if we never took it all that seriously in the first place. This convenient erasure of past errors happens on a societal level as well. This is practical and efficient pedagogy, but it shores up our tacit assumption that current belief is identical with true belief, and it reinforces our generalized sense of rightness.
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. Error, in that moment, 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 aftermath of error: What was I thinking?
How could I have done that? These private questions about the origins of error echo a broader public inquiry that has been under way since time immemorial. If wrongness both haunts and eludes us, we can take comfort from the fact that it has done the same for countless generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and scientists. Many of the religious thinkers who tried to understand why we err found their answer at the gates of the Garden of Eden.
Thus Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century scholastic, held that we make mistakes because, when we were banished from paradise, we were cut off forever from direct access to divine truth. This same basic idea has received countless secular treatments as well. Plato thought that our primordial soul was at one with the universe, and that we only began to err when we took on our current physical form and forgot those cosmic truths.
The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke thought that error seeped into our lives from the gap between the artificiality of words and the reality of the things they name—from the distance between an indescribable essence and the nearest sayable thing. As different as these explanations seem, all these thinkers and many more conceived of error as arising from a gap: sometimes between the particular and the general, sometimes between words and things, sometimes between the present and the primeval, sometimes between the mortal and the divine—but in every case, and fundamentally, between our own mind and the rest of the world.
For the most part, we spend our lives blithely ignoring this gap. And with good reason. Who wants to be reminded of the fall from grace, the separation from truth, the particular and limited nature of our existence?
When we get things wrong, however, this rift between internal and external realities suddenly reveals itself. Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality. Yet if we find this mental trickery troubling, we should also find it comforting. The miracle of the human mind, after all, is that it can show us the world not only as it is, but also as it is not: as we remember it from the past, as we hope or fear it will be in the future, as we imagine it might be in some other place or for some other person.
As that suggests, our errors sometimes bear far sweeter fruits than the failure and shame we associate with them. True, they represent a moment of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. For error to help us see things differently, however, we have to see it differently first. That is the goal of this book: to foster an intimacy with our own fallibility, to expand our vocabulary for and interest in talking about our mistakes, and to linger for a while inside the normally elusive and ephemeral experience of being wrong.
They can cost us time and money, sabotage our self-confidence, and erode the trust and esteem extended to us by others. In short, to the degree that we can prevent them, we probably should. And to do that, we need to understand why we err in the first place.
On the contrary, it is far more a defense of wrongness than a defense against it. In Part One, I trace the history of how we think about wrongness and the emergence of two opposing models of error—models that also reflect our ideas about what kind of creatures we are and what kind of universe we live in. In Part Two, I explore the many factors that can cause us to screw up, from our senses to our higher cognitive processes to our social conventions.
In Part Three, I move from why we get things wrong to how we feel when we do so. This part of the book traces the emotional arc of erring, from the experience of realizing we went astray to how that experience can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and—most profoundly—ourselves. The last part of this book turns from the origins and experience of error to its avoidable hazards and unexpected pleasures.
Here, I look at how embracing our fallibility not only lessens our likelihood of erring, but also helps us think more creatively, treat each other more thoughtfully, and construct freer and fairer societies.
In the final chapter, I encourage us to see error as a gift in itself—a rich and irreplaceable source of humor, art, illumination, individuality, and change. Two Models of Wrongness Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.
In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. Back in , when he was working for the Village Voice, he covered a press conference about The Limits to Growth, a study of the impact of economic development and population pressures on natural resources. The Limits to Growth made headlines all over the world when it was published, and is still the best-selling environmental book of all time.
The Voice printed the article on the front page. Certain mistakes can actually kill us, but many, many more of them just make us want to die. I mean, mortified mortified. I was not a rookie. The world has, in varying degrees, ignored, learned from, and defied the predictions in The Limits to Growth.
Donella Meadows died in Even journalism as we know it is on its way out. But if so, it is an extreme reaction to which we all sometimes succumb. Indeed, one of our recurrent responses to error is to wish ourselves out of existence.
In addition to this death-wish response to error, we have another reaction that is less drastic. But more gastric: sometimes, instead of wanting to die, we just want to vomit. Or so one might assume from the strangely culinary vocabulary we use to talk about being wrong. In the aftermath of our mistakes, we eat crow, eat humble pie, eat our hat, or, at the other end of the sartorial menu, eat our shoe.
And, of course, we eat our words. These sayings differ in their origins, but the overall implication is clear: error is both extremely unappetizing and very tough to digest.
If being right is succulent, being wrong runs a narrow, unhappy gamut from nauseating to worse than death. This is the received wisdom about error: that it is dangerous, humiliating, distasteful, and, all told, un-fun in the extreme.
As I acknowledged earlier and as everyone knows , our mistakes really can be irritating or humiliating or harmful, to ourselves as well as to others. To dismiss that fact would be disingenuous, but as an overall outlook on wrongness, the pessimistic one is radically incomplete.
To begin with, it obscures the fact that whatever damage can arise from erring pales in comparison to the damage that arises from our fear, dislike, and denial of erring. This fear acts as a kind of omnipurpose coagulant, hardening heart and mind, chilling our relationships with other people, and cooling our curiosity about the world. Like many fears, the fear of being wrong stems partly from a lack of understanding. To account for the breadth of our real-life experiences with wrongness, we need to pair the pessimistic outlook with another one.
Actually, in this model, the experience of being wrong is hardly limited at all. Surprise, bafflement, fascination, excitement, hilarity, delight: all these and more are a part of the optimistic understanding of error. This model is harder to recognize around us, since it is forever being crowded out by the noisier notion that error is dangerous, demoralizing, and shameful. But it exists nonetheless, and it exerts a subtle yet important pull both on our ideas about error and on our ideas about ourselves.
These two models of error, optimistic and pessimistic, are in perpetual tension with each other. We could try to study them in isolation—the discomforts and dangers of being wrong over here, its delights and dividends over there—and we could try to adjudicate between them. But it is when we take these two models together, not when we take them apart, that we begin to understand the forces that shape how we think and feel about being wrong.
For a representative of the pessimistic model, we might return to Thomas Aquinas, the medieval monk who tipped his hand in the last chapter by associating error with original sin. For Aquinas, error was not merely abhorrent but also abnormal, a perversion of the prescribed order of things.
Given that all of us get things wrong again and again, how abnormal, he might have asked, can error possibly be? This debate over whether error is normal or abnormal is central to the history of how we think about wrongness. Take Aquinas and James: they fundamentally disagreed, but their disagreement was only secondarily about error.
These competing ideas of error crop up in efforts to define the term, as we saw when we tried to do so ourselves. As error goes from being a hallmark of the lawless mind to our native condition, people cease to be fundamentally perfectible and become fundamentally imperfect. Meanwhile, truth goes from being a prize that can be achieved through spiritual or intellectual discipline to a fugitive that forever eludes the human mind. The history of error is not an account of the shift from one of these frameworks to the other.
Instead, it is an ongoing, millennia-long argument between the two. Over that time, this argument has come to be defined by several other questions, in addition and closely related to whether screwing up is basically aberrant or basically normal. One of these questions is whether error is with us to stay or if it can somehow be eradicated. James Sully, a British psychologist whose Illusions constitutes perhaps the most thoroughgoing early investigation of human error, thought that most forms of it would eventually be overcome.
A story, it might be observed, traditionally has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Jastrow clearly thought we were approaching the final chapter in the history of wrongness. We will welcome the new, test it thoroughly, and accept it joyously, in truly scientific fashion. But the idea that we can eradicate error—through evolutionary advancement, technological innovation, establishing an ideal society, or spreading the word of God—has a timeless hold on the human imagination.
Implicit in this idea is the belief that we should want to eradicate error. But eradicating the entirety of error is another matter.
Practicality aside, such an objective presents three problems. The first is that, to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth—a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves could be wrong. Thus the catch—22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible. The second problem with this goal is that virtually all efforts at eradication—even genuinely well-intentioned ones—succumb to the law of unintended consequences.
The final problem with seeking to eradicate error is that many such efforts are not well intentioned—or if they are, they tend in the direction for which good intentions are infamous. In either case it was the duty of Christians to destroy them. And, as they also show, there is a slippery slope between advocating the elimination of putatively erroneous beliefs, and advocating the elimination of the institutions, cultures, and—most alarmingly—people who hold them.
The idea that error can be eradicated, then, contains within it a frighteningly reactionary impulse. And yet, at heart, it is an idea about progress: a belief that there is an apex of human achievement, and that the way to reach it is through the steady reduction and eventual elimination of mistakes. But we have another, competing idea of progress as well—one that rests not on the elimination of error but, surprisingly, on its perpetuation. The gist of the scientific method is that observations lead to hypotheses which must be testable , which are then subjected to experiments whose results must be reproducible.
If all goes well, the outcome is a theory, a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon. As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs, to the extent that we bother investigating their validity at all.
But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. But the important part is that it can be—no matter how much evidence appears to confirm it, no matter how many experts endorse it, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. In fact, not only can any given theory be proven wrong; as we saw in the last chapter, sooner or later, it probably will be. And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure.
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. During and after the Scientific Revolution, the leading minds of Western Europe took this principle and generalized it. As they saw it, not only scientific theories but also political, social, and even aesthetic ideas were subject to this same pattern of collapse, replacement, and advancement.
In essence, these thinkers identified the problem of error-blindness on a generational and communal scale.
We can no more spot the collective errors of our culture than we can spot our own private ones, but we can be sure that they are lurking somewhere. The thinkers responsible for this insight came by it honestly. They lived at a time when fifteen centuries of foundational truths had lately been disproved or displaced by a staggering influx of new information: about previously unknown plants and animals, about geology and geography, about the structure of the universe, about the breadth and diversity of human culture.
I suppose that if tomorrow a UFO landed in Pittsburgh, I might experience a comparable combination of stunning error and thrilling possibility.
Certainly I would have to rebuild my understanding of the cosmos from the ground up. Faced with that task, many of these thinkers concluded that the best and safest tool for this sweeping intellectual reconstruction was doubt: deep, systematic, abiding, all-encompassing doubt.
Thus Michel de Montaigne, the great Renaissance philosopher and essayist, inscribed above the door of his study que sais-je?
They believed in truth, and they wanted to discover it. But they were chastened by the still-palpable possibility of drastic error, and they understood that, from a sufficiently distant vantage point, even their most cherished convictions might come to look like mistakes.
That idea is at least as old as Plato. It appears in the Bible as well—for instance, as the question of how to tell false prophets from true. Less romantically, false fires also referred to the ones lit by bandits to fool travelers into thinking they were approaching an inn or town. In either case, the metaphor says it all: error, disguised as the light of truth, leads directly into trouble.
But Enlightenment thinkers mined a previously unnoticed aspect of this image. Instead, it shed a light of its own. True, that light might be flickering or phantasmagoric, but it was still a source of illumination. In this model, error is not the opposite of truth so much as asymptotic to it—a kind of human approximation of truth, a truth-for-now.
This is another important dispute in the history of how we think about being wrong: whether error represents an obstacle in the path toward truth, or the path itself. The former idea is the conventional one. The latter, as we have seen, emerged during the Scientific Revolution and continued to evolve throughout the Enlightenment. Also known as the error curve or the normal distribution, the bell curve is a way of aggregating individually meaningless, idiosyncratic, or inaccurate data points in order to generate a meaningful and accurate big picture.
Laplace, for instance, used the bell curve to determine the precise orbit of the planets. By using the normal distribution to graph these individually imperfect data points, Laplace was able to generate a far more precise picture of the galaxy. 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 truths he cared about are the ones we stash away in our unconscious. By definition, those truths are inaccessible to the reasoning mind—but, Freud argued in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we can catch occasional glimpses of them, and one way we do so is through error.
Today, we know these truth-revealing errors as Freudian slips—as the old saw goes, saying one thing and meaning your mother. According to Freud, these seemingly trivial mistakes are neither trivial nor even, in any standard sense, mistakes.
Instead, they arise from—and therefore illuminate—a submerged but significant psychic truth. In addition to these slips, Freud also thought there were a few other avenues by which the secret truths of the unconscious could seep out. One of these, dreams, is relevant to us all. Another, relevant only to the unfortunate few, is insanity. At first, dreams and madness might not seem terribly germane to this book.
To better understand our mundane misperceptions, it pays to look closely at our extreme ones. So that is where I want to turn now—to dreams, drug trips, hallucinations, and madness; and, by way of those examples, to a closer look at the notion that, through error, we perceive the truth.
However far-fetched this connection between wrongness and whacked-outness might seem, you yourself invoke it routinely. I say this with some confidence, because our everyday ways of thinking and talking about error borrow heavily from the argot of altered states. For starters, we commonly if crudely compare being wrong to being high. Of all these analogies, the association between erring and dreaming is the most persistent and explicit. Once awake, you recognize them for what they are—baseless chimeras.
Although we treat errors and altered states as analogous in certain ways, there is one important respect in which we treat them very differently. But altered states—some of which really can sicken or kill us—frequently enthrall us.
We keep journals of our dreams and recount them to our friends and family to say nothing of our therapists. We feel that our lives are illuminated and enriched by them, and we regard those who seldom remember theirs as, in some small but important way, impoverished. We are highly motivated to seek out the reality-altering power of drugs, despite the danger of overdose, addiction, or arrest.
Yet I will say this: once, while running a very high fever in a tropical rainforest, I carried on a long conversation with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was sitting on the end of my bed, knitting. Altered states are so compelling that we often do what we can, wisely or otherwise, to produce, reproduce, and prolong them.
The attraction of an altered state is not, as one might initially imagine, just its pure weirdness—how far it diverges from everyday life. Instead, it is the combination of this weirdness and its proximity to everyday life. What is altered, in an altered state, are the elements of the world, the relations among them, and the rules that govern them. But the way we experience these states remains essentially unchanged. The tools we use to gauge and understand the sober world—our reason, our emotions, and above all our senses—are largely unimpaired and sometimes even enhanced in the trippy one.
As a result, these false worlds have all the intimacy, intensity, and physicality—in short, all the indicators of reality—of the true one.
And, conversely, what does it mean about the supposedly unreal if it is so easy to conjure and so intensely convincing?
One of the most consistent answers—and the crucial one, for my purposes—is that the false and the true are reversed: that the unreal is, so to speak, the real real. So did the writer Artemidorus Daldianus, who, almost two thousand years earlier, penned the Oneirocritica—a Greek Interpretation of Dreams.
Virtually every culture in every era has believed that dreams express otherwise inaccessible truths about the dreamer: about her forgotten or unknown past, her secret beliefs and desires, her destiny.
In the same vein, virtually every culture in every era with the halfway exception of the industrialized West has regarded visions and hallucinations as revealing the otherwise inaccessible truths of the universe. From Siberian shamans to Aztec priests to the Merry Pranksters to spiritually inclined potheads the world over ancient Christians, early Jews, Scythians, Sikhs, Sufis, and Rastafarians, to name just a few , we have regarded our drugs as entheogens—substances that can lay bare the truth of the cosmos and show us the face of God.
If dreams and drug states create acute but temporary alterations in our understanding of reality, the acute and ongoing version is insanity. You might think and hope that insanity would take us even further away from everyday error, but instead it brings us full circle.
Ultimately, only three factors seem to distinguish the false reality of madness from the false reality of wrongness. We can be wrong about all manner of things, even persistently and purely wrong about them, while still retaining our claim to sanity—just so long as enough other people are wrong about them, too. Madness is radical wrongness. Like all equations, this one is reversible. If madness is radical wrongness, being wrong is minor madness. Minor madness can also be an apt description of how being wrong actually feels.
We will meet more than one person in this book who characterizes his or her experience of error as scarily similar to insanity. We already saw that hallucinations and dreams are widely regarded as revealing greater truths. So too with madness. Societies throughout the ages have nurtured the belief that the insane among us illuminate things as they truly are, despite their own ostensibly deranged relationship to reality.
This narrative of wrongness as rightness might have achieved its apotheosis in King Lear, a play that features a real madman Lear, after he loses it , a sane man disguised as a madman Edgar , a blind man Gloucester , and a fool the Fool. And insanity is intellectual and moral clarity: it is only after Lear loses his daughters and his senses that he understands what he has done and can feel both loss and love.
This idea—that from error springs insight—is a hallmark of the optimistic model of wrongness. It holds even for mundane mistakes, which is why proponents of this model myself included see erring as vital to any process of invention and creation. The example of altered states simply throws this faith into relief: make the error extreme enough, depart not a little way but all the way from agreed-upon reality, and suddenly the humdrum of human fallibility gives way to an ecstasy of understanding.
In place of humiliation and falsehood, we find fulfillment and illumination. Unfortunately, as proponents of the pessimistic model of wrongness will be quick to point out, the reassuring notion that error yields insight does not always comport with experience. Sometimes, being wrong feels like the death of insight—the moment when a great idea or a grounding belief collapses out from under us. And sometimes, too, our mistakes take too great a toll to be redeemed by easy assurances of lessons learned.
Our errors expose the real nature of the universe—or they obscure it. They lead us toward the truth, or they lead us astray. They are the opposite of reality, or its almost indistinguishable approximation—certainly as close as we mere mortals can ever hope to get. They are abnormalities we should work to eliminate, or inevitabilities we should strive to accept.
Together, these two conflicting models form the backbone of our understanding of error. Before we turn to those experiences, I want to introduce two figures who vividly embody these different models of wrongness.
They are creatures of mythology, and they do not so much err as animate—and illuminate—the ways we think about error. That root gave rise to the Latin verb errare, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam. Implicitly, what we are seeking—and what we have strayed from—is the truth. One of these is the knight errant and the other is the juif errant—the wandering Jew. The latter figure, a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda, derives from a medieval Christian legend in which a Jew, encountering Jesus on the road to the crucifixion, taunts him for moving so slowly under the weight of the cross.
In response, Jesus condemns the man to roam the earth until the end of time. To err is to experience estrangement from God and alienation among men. The knight errant is also a staple of medieval legend, but otherwise he could scarcely be more different. Where the wandering Jew is defined by his sin, the knight errant is distinguished by his virtue; he is explicitly and unfailingly on the side of good. Some of the techniques listed in Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, psychology lovers. Great book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Author: Kathryn Schulz.
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