Kathryn Schulz on the Feeling of Being Wrong

Epistemology Realism: this is the sense that there is a purely objective existence of the world. Perhaps Kathryn Schultz would take exception to this -- or at least with the idea that we can know the world in a purely objective manner. Schulz suggests that it is big mistake to go through life avoiding thinking about the possibility that we may be wrong.

She says we are trapped in the bubble of feeling that we are right all of the time. One of the problems we have is that the way we feel when we are wrong is exactly the same way we feel when we are right, until we actually realize that we are wrong.

Trusting too much on feeling of being on the right side of anything can be dangerous. The feeling of "rightness" is not a reliable guide for what is actually going on in the world.

The problem with feeling that you are right means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. This creates a problem because it means that we are forced to generate a narrative to explain all those people who do not agree with us. That narrative that we generate is usually embedded with an unfortunate set of assumptions:

1. That they are misinformed, and once we educate them they will see things the same way that we do.

2. That they are idiots -- they have all the information we have, but they are too stupid to put it all together so that they will see the world as we do.

3. That they are malicious -- they know the truth, but they are refusing to admit for their own malevolent purposes.

This feeling of rightness prevents us from avoiding preventable mistakes and causes us to treat each other terribly, says Schulz. It also misses the whole point of what it means to be human.

A key moment in this video clip is when she says, "The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is, it is that you can see the world as it isn't."

"We can remember the past and we can envision the future -- and we can imagine what it would be like to be some other person in some other place." This, says Schulz, is what makes the human mind miraculous. It does not just reproduce a dead-panned copy of an "objective reality".

We see the world through the lens of subjectivity and through emotion, which is something that is discussed in an online journal called "Raptitude".

The same attribute of our mind that enables us to be creative is the attribute that necessitates our getting things wrong. We should not try to deny, or futilely to suppress, it -- we should embrace and celebrate it. This is who we are; it is what it means to be human.

It is also what is at the heart of a good story and a good joke. A good joke and a good story is premised on thinking one thing and having reality turn out to be something else.

To error is human, says Schulz. In fact, Saint Augustine once wrote -- centuries before Descartes -- "I error, therefore I am."

Schulz says that the root of all of our productivity and creativity is that, "unlike God, we don't really know what is going out 'out there', and unlike all of the other animals we are obsessed with trying to figure it out."

"I thought this one thing was going to happen, and something else happened instead." -- we need this, says Ira Glass of This American Life radio show.

"If you really want to re-discover wonder," Schulz says, "you need to step out of that tiny, terrifying space of 'rightness' and look around at each other, and look out at the vastness and complexity of the universe, and be able to say, 'wow, I don't know -- maybe I'm wrong.'"

This video is found on my YouTube playlist "Being Wrong and Other Insights"