Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz

eBook - 2010

The bestselling history of and investigation into human error by beloved New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz"Both wise and clever, full of fun and surprise about a topic so central to our lives that we almost never even think about it." —Bill McKibben, author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New PlanetTo err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why is our grasp of the psychology of belief so flawed that we are bad at imagining our ideas could be mistaken, and why do we react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness, and shame?In the tradition of T...he Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational, Being Wrong explores the fascinating human cognition behind what it means to be in error, and why homo sapiens tend to tacitly assume (or loudly... more