Being Wrong

by Schulz, Kathryn

• ISBN13: 9780061176050
• ISBN10: 0061176052
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-01-04
• Publisher: HARPER COLLINS

Summary

To 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. In Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken. Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan, and Groucho Marx, she shows that error is both a given and a gift-one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and ourselves. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Kathryn Schulz is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, the Nation, the Boston Globe, and the "Freakonomics" blog of the New York Times. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Table of Contents

The Idea of Error
Wrongology	p. 3
Two Models of Wrongness	p. 25
The Origins of Error
Our Senses	p. 47
Our Minds, Part One: Knowing, Not Knowing, and Making It Up	p. 67
Our Minds, Part Two: Belief	p. 87
Our Minds, Part Three: Evidence	p. 111
Our Society	p. 133
The Allure of Certainty	p. 159
The Experience of Error
Being Wrong	p. 183
How Wrong?	p. 201
Denial and Acceptance	p. 220
Heartbreak	p. 247
Transformation	p. 273
Embracing Error
The Paradox of Error	p. 299
The Optimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything	p. 320
Acknowledgments	p. 341
Notes	p. 345
Index	p. 393
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.