Kathryn Schulz Quotes

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.

The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.

Thirty-three percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.

If you Google 'regret and tattoo,' you will get 11.5 million hits.

We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.

The inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.

Of all the things we are wrong about, error might well top the list ... We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honourable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.

Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly, it reminds us that we know that we could do better.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Wow. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct

wrongness always seems to come at us from left field - that is, from outside ourselves. But the reality could hardly be more different. Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing; and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

If it is sweet to be right, then - let's not deny it - it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.

both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold

Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people's errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human.