“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” By Kathryn Schulz. Ecco, New York, 2010. 405 pages. $26.99.
“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” is a feat of erudition presented to the lot of us with joy and respect. From Plato to Descartes to Dylan and Jon Stewart, a smart and smiling Kathryn Schulz has scoured the world and examined the works of its thinkers and commentators to present a cogent, often entertaining, always informative book about the qualities and, ultimately, the value of human error.
She begins with an assertion: “Wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change.” Thanks to error, she writes, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world. To error is human, the saying goes. It is wrongness, not rightness, that teaches us who we are.
For the most part, error is neither welcomed nor understood with any sort of compassion. Error is associated with negligence, stupidity and recklessness. We are punished for our mistakes with demotions, derision and sometimes, lifelong regret. Some of Schulz’s stories about human error show us how gravely we can be wrong and how lasting are the effects of our mistakes. Human error routinely leads to death or lasting suffering.
Parsing error, determining its nature and type, is beside the point. What interests me, says Schulz, is how we think about being wrong and how we feel about it. She presents many examples of people in the throes of their mistakes and relates the process to how the brain works, the influence of the values we hold, the role of denial, the allure of certainty. She brings many to the table for her discussions and we learn a lot.
Some people hold erroneous beliefs simply because they rely on their senses. You see a mountain range directly in front of you, therefore you turn your ship around and set sail for home. The Scottish explorer John Ross, when looking for the Northwest Passage, did this. In fact, what he’d seen was something called a superior mirage. The mountains were in fact 200 miles west, lifted into his sights above the horizon and apparently blocking his way. The cause of this mirage was an unusual bending of light rays from beyond the horizon. It happens with a temperature inversion that sometimes occurs on the polar seas. The next explorer to sail that route also encountered the mountain range but he sailed right through it. Other sensory deceptions include people with unusual brain disorders. They may be blind and not know it or paralyzed and not know it. Anosognosia is the denial of disease and those who suffer this disorder may, in every other way, be perfectly hitched to reality.
Readers may find themselves reading for the anecdotes. The theory and interpretation comes after, which is what Schulz intends. Some errors are highly intellectual and hinge entirely on a belief system. Claiborne Paul Ellis, a leader in the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan in the early ‘70s, agreed, extremely reluctantly, to co-chair a committee on desegregation. The other chair on this committee was a black woman, who, like Ellis, had come from a large poor family and struggled fiercely to survive. His greatest professional accomplishment, he said, came after that. He helped 40 low-income black women get Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday.
Other errors are belief based but they happen in the moment, often with lasting effects. In the most riveting of the anecdotes in this book, Penny Beerntsen is raped in a state park. She is a stunning example of presence of mind. She tries to make a mark on her attacker’s face. She fights fiercely and works to see and memorize his face. He knocks her out but when she comes to, beaten and badly hurt, she crawls without using her hands in order to preserve the blood on her hands in case it’s his.
Shown pictures and offered a lineup, she experiences a visceral reaction to the man she easily identifies. And though he denies his guilt for the quarter of a century he is imprisoned, Beerntsen retains her sense of certainty. Eventually DNA evidence shows him to be innocent. The actual rapist raped other women after Beerntsen and was eventually arrested and incarcerated. Beerntsen, who’d devoted her life to working with criminals and victims, met the man she’d falsely accused and he forgave her. Just a couple of years later he killed a woman, once again throwing Beerntsen a major curveball. I was “flabbergasted,” she said.
Eyewitness accounts are classically unreliable. The best eyewitnesses get more than 25 percent of their facts wrong. From study to study the findings hold firm. The worst witnesses err 80 percent of the time. People make mistakes. More remarkable is the fact that at least 20 percent of people who are told they are near death forget the news within a few days.
By accepting our tendency to err, whether through reliance on our senses or gut instinct or long-held belief systems, we admit our nature to be human. In a way, that’s like practicing acceptance, not just for ourselves but for the world of humanity with which we co-exist. Error is the gateway to the possibility of something better. In Schulz’s thinking, we should rethink our ideas about error. To err is to change. In change there is hope for something better.
Rae Francoeur can be reached at rae.francoeur@verizon.net. Read her blog at http://www.freefallrae.blogspot.com/ or her book, “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair,” available online or in bookstores.
