Gotham Diary:
Wrongology
What’s the word for it? The word for this “new science” that’s everywhere on the Internet: can we do better than “new”?
In the old days, I’d rack my brains, trying to think of a handy term that just might catch on. But I haven’t got the gift for it. I don’t have much faith in the things that I make up — it’s as if I knew better. I believe in the connections that I make between things, in the web of references and corroborations that has assembled itself, galaxy-like, in my brain. But I don’t put much stock in my own inventions, not, at least, where words are concerned.
In a recurring nightmare from which I invariably awaken in a state of sharp discomfort, I am reading a book. As I am reading the book, it occurs to me that I am also writing the book, and as this impression deepens the words become paler and paler on the page, fading eventually into invisibility. I try to read them but cannot. I try to read, but since I am writing, or supposed to be writing, there is nothing there to be read.
It took me years to grasp one of the things that this dream was telling me: that I would never write fiction.
Anyway: the “new science.” It’s all about “cognition,” which is the new word for “epistemology.” They’re not perfect synonyms, of course. Cognition is the material, almost mechanical, study of how sensation becomes perception. Epistemology, in contrast, has a metaphysical ring to it, suggesting theories of how we know things in spite of our sensations. For example: how do we know about God? The new science is agnostic at best on that subject.
It turns out that almost everything that we thought that we knew about our minds is rubbish. Out with it! It’s not even interesting rubbish — it’s not fertile with new possibilities, as all good rubbish is. It’s just, frankly, the sort of tripe that you get when you decide to think about big issues while seated in a comfortable chair with a snifter of cognac. “Just so.” “Armchair.” Take the foundational piece of crap: “Man is a rational animal.” What a desperate bluff that is! No matter, though: it’s not in the least bit worth arguing with. Into the tip with it.
A fine place to begin studying the irrationality of man is Kathryn Schulz’s zesty and cogent treatise, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. We will be much better off when everyone has read this book. I wouldn’t mind affixing one of those warranty panes at the entry to my sites, asking potential visitors to “agree” to or “decline” an understanding of Ms Schulz’s findings. First, though, I’d have to distill some a declaration or manifesto from Being Wrong’s lively collection of anecdotes. Take Chapter 11, for example, “Denial and Acceptance.” Much of this chapter is taken up with the aftermath of the rape of a Wisconsin woman, Penny Beerntsen. Beerntsen was gently but firmly railroaded into identifying the wrong man, Steven Avery, as her assailant; years later, she would ask for his forgiveness. She would also have to come to grips with the seductive fallibility of a bad human habit called “confirmation bias.”
At the trial, sixteen separate witnesses had testified that Avery had been at work on the day of the rape, but Penny dismissed their stories as too similar to each other to be believable — an outstanding example of interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory instead.
And that’s just one nugget. The red meat of the chapter is the stuff about bull-headed prosecutors who invest too much self-worth in their decisions to admit that they’ve been mistaken. But what’s the word for that? While you’re at it, work up a catchy label for “interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory.”
It’s not that the misguided behavior parading through Being Wrong is anything new. (The late, great character actor J T Walsh built a career out of impersonating deluded men who knew they were right.) What’s new is Kathryn Schulz’s conviction that being wrong is such a common state of affairs that we might as well learn a few things about it, instead of pushing it away, as Thomas Aquinas did, as abhorrently abnormal. Ms Schulz proposes that we stop treating error as defect, and begin to understand it as the inevitable byproduct of otherwise healthy and necessary psychological functions. It’s admirably humble to be able to admit that we’ve been wrong about something; Being Wrong shows us how much more pleasant and relaxed life would be if we desensitized ourselves to the bitterness of having failed to get something right.
Being wrong about something isn’t great. Kathryn Schulz isn’t proposing that aeronautic engineers adopt a more relaxed attitude toward the exactness of their calculations. Her target is “the experience of being wrong.” For too many people, this experience is unacceptably painful, to be avoided at all costs no matter how wrong they’ve been. The attempt to avoid the experience of being wrong has a fearful tendency to compound the original, underlying error with even bigger mistakes. It is one thing to identify the wrong man in a lineup. It is a much worse thing to stick with that misidentification, in the teeth of mounting evidence to the contrary, simply to protect (as we all unconsciously do) the roots of our vanity from the acid of error — at the cost of sending the wrong man to prison.
Is there a term for that?
The term that I’m really looking for would cover the stacks of findings, studies, and fMRI analyses that have piled up in the past half century or so, ranging from the Milgrim experiments to the prisoners’ dilemma to the strange phenomenon of anosognosia. When I was young, the field was pretty much covered by “behavioral science,” but there’s a lot more to it now than behavior. Consider Paul Bloom’s essentialist theory of pleasure: we like what we like because we know that we like it. The irrationality of our pleasures has little to do with the inputs, considered debased by the philosophers, of the senses; it is all in our once-supposedly rational minds.
There is an ethical urgency to this work. In an autocratic age, it’s enough to understand the pathologies of individual despots. In democracies, however, we need working theories of everyday human understanding — theories that aren’t grounded in the idea that we’re fallen, defective creatures. We need to learn how to make mistakes without feeling existentially diminished by them. We need to study what Kathryn Schulz calls “wrongology” as a tool for being right a lot more often than we are now.