Being Wrong
Being wrong is an inescapable part of being alive. And yet we go through life tacitly assuming (or loudly insisting) that we are right about nearly everything - from our political beliefs to our private memories, from our grasp of scientific fact to the merits of our favourite team. Being Wrong looks at why this conviction has such a powerful grip on us, what happens when this conviction is shaken, and how we interpret the moral, political and psychological significance of being wrong. Drawing on philosophies old and new and cutting-edge neuroscience, Schulz offers an exploration of the allure of certainty and the necessity of fallibility in four main areas: in religion (when the end of the world fails to be nigh); in politics (where were those WMD?); in memory (where are my keys?); and in love (when Mr or Ms Right becomes Mr or Ms Wrong).
Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
3people
2018–2021years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The book that immediately sprang to mind is one I hesitated to share here, and will only devote a paragraph to. It is "The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ". I believe it truly is a record of God's dealings with men, and have changed my life to live according to what it teaches.
Now, onto the sorts of books you were more likely looking for, although most of these have only changed my perspective, and not my day-to-day:
- "The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (1995). The most mind-blowing thought was that if you, say, accurately simulate an atom, and then build molecules out of it, then, while the atoms are fake, the molecules are real/true/useful.
- http://worrydream.com has presentations and essays by Bret Victor on using the computer to augment what humans can think and accomplish. Everything here is good; "Up and down the ladder of abstraction" talks about seeing a problem at different levels. "Stop drawing dead fish" discusses creating interactive simulations by drawing. "The humane representation of thought" discusses how knowledge work has been constrained to rectangles and we should move beyond it and engage our whole bodies.
- I highly recommend all the books by Dan and Chip Heath. "Decisive" is on making decisions. "Upstream" is on solving root problems, and not just symptoms. "Made to Stick" is about spreading ideas and having them be remembered.
- "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schulz—looks like she's also done some Ted talks—talks about how we can be deceived and why we are wrong in so many domains. Similarly, "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt was very interesting as it suggests why people understand the world so differently. By analogy, imagine that we all have five taste receptors on our tongues, but some people use different ones to inform what they like. Fascinating.
- "Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, Sexy, and Smart—Until You're 80" by Chris Crowley and Henry Lodge. I don't fit the categories the book is for, but saw it on my library shelves, and it applies to everyone. It maintains that your body is either growing or dying, and you need to put time in every day getting your heart rate up if you want to live a full and healthy life.
- "Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps" by Steve Grand. Written before GPU-powered machine learning, this book, by the programmer behind the "Creatures" series of games, gives interesting insight into artificial life.
I'm certain there are lots of good books I've read that I'm not recalling at the moment.
- The other way to look at this was pointed out to me in the book 'Being Wrong' by Kathryn Schulz (amazing book, btw).
What is your goal? Is your goal to be right, or is your goal to feel right? Because those are not the same things at all. When we get attached to our ideas and emotional, it's because we believed we were right, and we don't want to give up that feeling.
But if our goal is to actually be right, then it's super easy to recognize when you got it wrong and move forward.
It also helps to stop thinking of things as 'correct' or not, and look at them as a spectrum of 'less wrong' to 'more wrong'. If you're constantly working your way towards being less wrong, then it becomes really easy to abandon ideas that have outgrown their usefulness.
- "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schulz. I especially loved the bit where she explained that if people see things differently, we 1) think they are uninformed. If we know they are informed, we think 2) they are stupid. If we know they aren't stupid, we decide 3) they are evil.
I also read another great book that talked about differences between conservative, liberal, and libertarian viewpoints, with a notion of different taste buds that are active when observing the world that was really interesting, but unfortunately, the name escapes me.
- > "Being right feels the same as being wrong".
From the book "Being Wrong" by Kathryn Schulz. I highly recommend it!
- I enjoyed all these. All of them are worth a read.
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Science The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Hidden Figures Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe Sightlines An Ocean of Air: A Natural History of the Atmosphere Snowball Earth: The Story of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know it Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error: The Meaning of Error in an Age of Certainty Mycophilia Packing for Mars: The Curious Science Of Life In Space No Logo King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry The Ghosts Of Evolution Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, And Other Ecological Anachronisms Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA Growing Up Boeing: The Early Jet Age Through the Eyes of a Test Pilot's Daughter Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 bath Toys Lost at Sea Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science
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