“Being Wrong” by Kathryn Schulz

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  • I error therefore I am
  • We “know” erroring is human but strive avoid admitting it
  • “You can either be ‘right’ or be in a relationship”
  • How often are we actually wrong?
  • We never feel wrong, we feel when we recognize we are wrong
  • Specific mistakes are difficult for us to see and thus appear as an “act of God”
  • To eliminate errors, we must know when we are wholly wrong and not just temporarily wrong
  • Are errors tangents to the journey to truth or parts of the journey?
  • “Err” meant “to move” and eventually gave us “error” and “erratic”
  • “Wondering jew” was a curse from Christ to a Jew who teased Christ while carrying the cross
  • Memories are poorly understood
    • Memories are recreated every time we remember them
    • (This makes them volatile, especially if they are interrupted when we are trying to resave them)
  • We have a story maker and a fact checker in our brains
  • Confabulation is when we make up a story while our fact checker is not available
  • “There is no accounting for taste” but we tend to make accounts up
  • “Belief” is an overt conviction
  • We downplay things we want to dismiss as “self-serving” but drum up things we want to promote by stating it is truth
  • Everyone that does not agree with us is because they are ignorant
  • “Lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack”
  • Wrong bets are not bad bets
  • Inductive reasoning saves us a lot of thinking effort
    • Be careful with tortured reasoning
  • Most of our beliefs are “beliefs second-hand”
  • We tend to “see” (alter our perception of the world) to adapt to how those around us see the world
  • Our society has a “disagreement deficit”
    • (That is, we lack the ability to politely disagree and remain friends)
    • Cure, quarantine, or expel
    • The original “Zealots” killed each other rather than risk capture
  • Too many ideas and not enough convictions
  • Doubt is a mental luxury
  • Belief is the default; we must think to dismiss something
  • We manufacture confidence to avoid having to reconsider if we could be wrong
  • We revise our memories to better align with our current beliefs
  • Theories are replaced but never dismissed unless a new theory is available
  • Error detection tends to start with the smallest possible error rather than bigger issues
  • Civilizations operate on the principal of shared expertise
  • Denial is a response to feelings not facts
  • We assume because we see people from the outside that we can know them from the outside
  • We can never know what people are like on the inside
  • (“We judge ourselves by our intentions; We just others by their actions”)
  • “You don’t know me, but I know you”
  • In love, we feel
    • Recognition
    • Timelessness
    • Reunification
    • Necessity
  • “Everyone complains about their memory. No one complains about their judgement.”
  • Loving is more like sharing a story than sharing a soul
  • Our desire to be right is really our desire for our beliefs to adhere outside ourselves
  • “Stories and theories may be all that we have that God does not”

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