Kathryn Schulz

Przyjemność mienia racji

• Prawda a błąd: "Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it"
• Benjamin Franklin: "In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities."
• Wrongology
• MOLIÈRE: "It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right."
• We can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything
• Like most pleasurable experiences, rightness is not ours to enjoy all the time.
• Mienie racji, niemylenie się: "the experience of being right is imperative for our survival, gratifying for our ego, and, overall, one of life’s cheapest and keenest satisfactions."
• Temat książki: "about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals cope when our convictions collapse out from under us. I"
• Mylenie się z psychologicznego punktu widzenia: "how we feel about being wrong. For one thing, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre—an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. For another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed."
• Geneza błędów: "Piattelli-Palmarini, who noted that we err because of (among other things) “inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance,…ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.”"
• Jedna z największych spółek ludzkości to błąd w kwestii błędu: "Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong."
• Błąd to podstawa ludzkich cnót i zdolności samorozwoju: "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 honorable 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."
• Uczymy się dzięki błędowi, a nie dzięki poprawności: "however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are."
• Kartezjusz i Augustyn: "René Descartes penned his famous “I think, therefore I am,” the philosopher and theologian (and eventual saint) Augustine wrote “fallor ergo sum”: I err, therefore I am."
• Brak społecznych instytucji które pozwoliłyby radzić sobie z popełnianiem błędów: "Our reluctance to admit that we are wrong is not just an individual failing. With the exception of those error-prevention initiatives employed in high-risk fields like aviation and medicine, our culture has developed remarkably few tools for addressing our propensity to err."
• Nie potrafimy powiedzieć pomyliłem się: "As a culture, we haven’t even mastered the basic skill of saying “I was wrong.”"
• Zamiast tego mówimy pomyliłem się ale lub pomyłki zostały popełnione: "Instead, what we have mastered are two alternatives to admitting our mistakes that serve to highlight exactly how bad we are at doing so. The first involves a small but strategic addendum: “I was wrong, but…”—a blank we then fill in with wonderfully imaginative explanations for why we weren’t so wrong after all. (More on this in Part Three.) The second (infamously deployed by, among others, Richard Nixon regarding Watergate and Ronald Reagan regarding the Iran-Contra affair) is even more telling: we say, “mistakes were made.” As that evergreen locution so concisely demonstrates, all we really know how to do with our errors is not acknowledge them as our own.*"
• Lubimy poprawiać innych: "By contrast, we positively excel at acknowledging other people’s errors. In fact, 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"
• Jak miło powiedzieć a nie mówiłem: "Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say “I told you so.”"
• "not only was I right, I was also right about being right"
• "we fight over the right to be right."
• Społeczne aspekty mylenia się: "Our default attitude toward wrongness, then—our distaste for error and our appetite for being right—tends to be rough on relationships. This applies equally to relationships among nations, communities, colleagues, friends, and (as will not be lost on most readers) relatives"
• "an old adage of therapists is that you can either be right or be in a relationship: you can remain attached to Team You winning every confrontation, or you can remain attached to your friends and family, but good luck trying to do both."

Definicja błędu

• Błąd u Platona: "You can’t define error, Socrates observes in Plato’s Theaetetus, without also defining knowledge; your theory of one hinges entirely on your theory of the other.)"
• Platona definicja błędu: "to be wrong is to believe something is true when it is false—or, conversely, to believe it is false when it is true."
• error studies
• Problem z definicją mylenia się zakłada prawda obiektywna: "In other words, this definition of wrongness assumes the existence of absolute rightness—a fixed and knowable reality against which our mistakes can be measured."
• Problem z pisaniem recenzji: "John Updike once noted that the trouble with writing book reviews is that it is “almost impossible to…avoid the tone of being wonderfully right.” The same goes for our informal reviews of almost everything"
• Warunki jakie musi spełniać definicja błędu: "Yet it is often precisely these irresolvable issues that arouse our most impassioned certainty that we are right and our adversaries are wrong. To my mind, then, any definition of error we choose must be flexible enough to accommodate the way we talk about wrongness when there is no obvious benchmark for being right."
• Problem z definicją błędu może jest podobny do problemu z definicją komizmu: "In writing about comedy, the French philosopher Henri Bergson argued against “imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition.”"

Doświadczenie mylenia się

• Nie istnieje doświadczenie mylenia się: "there is no experience of being wrong."
• "There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course"
• "Indeed, the whole reason it’s possible to be wrong is that, while it is happening, you are oblivious to it."
• "You are like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has gone off the cliff but before he has looked down"
• "So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right."
• "This is the problem of error-blindness"
• "Whatever falsehoods each of us currently believes are necessarily invisible to us."
• "Think about the telling fact that error literally doesn’t exist in the first person present tense: the sentence “I am wrong” describes a logical impossibility"
• "Thus we can only say “I was wrong.”"
• "Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time."
• "Marc Green has observed that an error, from the point of view of the person who makes it, is essentially “a Mental Act of God.”"
• Nie pamiętamy swoich błędów: "Most of us don’t have a mental category called “Mistakes I Have Made.”"
• Nasze błędy nazywamy eufemizmami: "We file them under a range of headings—“embarrassing moments,” “lessons I’ve learned,” “stuff I used to believe”—but very seldom does an event live inside us with the simple designation “wrong.”"
• "Error, in that moment, is less an intellectual problem than an existential one—a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are."

Błąd w filozofii

• Błąd wg Tomasza: "Thus Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century scholastic, held that we make mistakes because, when we were banished from paradise, we were cut off forever from direct access to divine truth"
• Błąd wg Platona: "Plato thought that our primordial soul was at one with the universe, and that we only began to err when we took on our current physical form and forgot those cosmic truths"
• Błąd wg Locka: "The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke thought that error seeped into our lives from the gap between the artificiality of words and the reality of the things they name—from the distance between an indescribable essence and the nearest sayable thing"
• Błąd wg Heideggera: "The German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought that error could be explained by the fact that we live in time and space; because we are bound to a particular set of coordinates, we can’t rise above them and see reality as a whole, from a bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view"
• Podsumowanie: "error as arising from a gap: sometimes between the particular and the general, sometimes between words and things, sometimes between the present and the primeval, sometimes between the mortal and the divine—but in every case, and fundamentally, between our own mind and the rest of the world."
• Błąd blisko wyobraźni i nadziei: "We already saw that “seeing the world as it is not” is pretty much the definition of erring—but it is also the essence of imagination, invention, and hope"

Psychiczne reakcje na własny błąd

• "Certain mistakes can actually kill us, but many, many more of them just make us want to die."
• Błąd skłania nas do zabicia sie: "Indeed, one of our recurrent responses to error is to wish ourselves out of existence"
• "sometimes, instead of wanting to die, we just want to vomit."
• "In the aftermath of our mistakes, we eat crow, eat humble pie, eat our hat, or, at the other end of the sartorial menu, eat our shoe."
• "And, of course, we eat our words."
• "error is both extremely unappetizing and very tough to digest."

Dwa modele błędu

• Pesymistyczny model błędu: "The pessimistic model of error tells us that wrongness is unpleasant, but it doesn’t tell us why"
• Optymistyczny model błędu: "optimistic model of error, the experience of being wrong isn’t limited to humiliation and defeat. Actually, in this model, the experience of being wrong is hardly limited at all. Surprise, bafflement, fascination, excitement, hilarity, delight: all these and more are a part of the optimistic understanding of error."
• "Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things."
• Optymista w kwestii błędu: "William James"
• Pesymistyczny model błędu: "Thomas Aquinas,"
• associating error with original sin
• Podstawy dylemat: "This debate over whether error is normal or abnormal is central to the history of how we think about wrongness"
• Definicja błędu z Larussa , wiek 17: "In the 1600s, France’s Larousse dictionary defined error, rather beautifully, as “a vagabondage of the imagination, of the mind that is not subject to any rule.”"
• Definicja błędu encyklopedii francuskiej: "Denis Diderot’s famed Encyclopédie defined it, instead, as endemic to every human mind, that “magic mirror” in which the real world is distorted into “shadows and monsters.”"
• Czytelnia wczesne studium błędu: "James Sully, a British psychologist whose 1881 Illusions constitutes perhaps the most thoroughgoing early investigation of human error,"
• Sulky uważał że da się wyeliminować błąd: "Sully concluded that “as it improves, the amount of error connected with its operation may reasonably be expected to become infinitesimal.”"
• Musielibyśmy być nieomylni aby wyeliminować błąd: "Thus the catch–22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible."
• Błąd jest nierozłączny inteligencji: "Even if you can’t be brought to believe that error itself is a good thing, I hope to convince you by the end of this book that it is inseparably linked to other good things, things we definitely do not want to eliminate—like, say, our intelligence."
• Ralph Linton
• Kultury pogańskie były uważane za opierające się na błędzie i dlatego trzeba je było wyeliminować: "all heathen cultures were [regarded as] at best examples of human error, while at worst they were devices of Satan, devised to keep damned souls securely in his net. In either case it was the duty of Christians to destroy them.”"
• scientists gravitate toward falsification
• Thus, the defining feature of a hypothesis is that it has the potential to be proven wrong (which is why it must be both testable and tested), and the defining feature of a theory is that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet
• Wedle modelu naukowego błędy nie oddalają nas od prawdy Ale nas do niej przybliżają: "In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it."
• Renesans, wątpienie jako ochrona przed błędem: "the best and safest tool for this sweeping intellectual reconstruction was doubt: deep, systematic, abiding, all-encompassing doubt. Thus Michel de Montaigne, the great Renaissance philosopher and essayist, inscribed above the door of his study que sais-je?—what do I know? And thus Descartes set himself the task of doubting everything, up to and including his own existence"
• Kolejny dylemat badań nad błędem: "whether error represents an obstacle in the path toward truth, or the path itself."
• The former idea is the conventional one. The latter, as we have seen, emerged during the Scientific Revolution and continued to evolve throughout the Enlightenment.
• Laplace, rozkład normalny błędu: "Pierre-Simon Laplace refined the theory of the distribution of errors, illustrated by the now-familiar bell curve. Also known as the error curve or the normal distribution,"
• Statystyka pozwala wnioskować prawdę z błędu: "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,"
• Louis Menand observed. “…The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.
• Wartość rozkładu normalnego: "the bell curve represented a kind of holy grail: wrongness contained, curtailed, and coaxed into revealing its opposite.*"
• Podobnie Freud, pomyłki odsłaniają nieświadomości: "Freud argued in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we can catch occasional glimpses of them, and one way we do so is through error."
• Freudian slips: saying one thing and meaning your mother.(another)

Błąd a szaleństwo i narkotyki

• Analogia między błędem a byciem pod wpływem narkotyków: "For starters, we commonly (if crudely) compare being wrong to being high."
• Błąd jest porównywany do szaleństwa: "Witness all the mudslinging about “liberal lunatics” and “right-wing wingnuts.”"
• I do snu: "as if they were trances and waking up from them as if they were dreams."
• Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali,
• that while asleep you assume your dreams to be indisputably real? Once awake, you recognize them for what they are—baseless chimeras.”
• Różnica między stanami zmienionymi oraz błędami: błędów się wstydzimy a sny kochamy i chcemy spożywać narkotyki: "mistakes, even minor ones, often make us feel like we’re going to be sick, or like we want to die. But altered states—some of which really can sicken or kill us—frequently enthrall us"
• Altered states are so compelling that we often do what we can, wisely or otherwise, to produce, reproduce, and prolong them.
• Czytelnia: "Artemidorus Daldianus, who, almost two thousand years earlier, penned the Oneirocritica—a Greek Interpretation of Dreams."
• Diderot'a definicja szaleństwa odpowiada definicji błędu: "Encyclopédie defined madness as the act of departing from reason “with confidence and in the firm conviction that one is following it.”"
• Podobnie z definicją Michaela Foucault: "Michel Foucault called insanity “the purest and most complete form of quid pro quo”—of taking one thing for another. To take something for something it is not: If that’s not error, what is?"
• François Boissier de Sauvages, described the insane as those “who persist in some notable error.”
• Erasmus, różnica między szaleństwem a błędem: "Erasmus in The Praise of Folly. “The reason a person who believes he sees a woman when in reality he is looking at a gourd is called crazy is because this is something beyond usual experience,” he wrote. “However, when a person thinks his wife, who is enjoyed by many, to be an ever-faithful Penelope, he is not called insane at all”—although he is called wrong—“because people know that this is a common thing in marriage."
• Szaleństwo to błąd radykalny: "error in extremis—extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar—becomes insanity. Madness is radical wrongness."
• Król Lear, w żadnym innym gdzie do literackim prawda nie jest tak bardzo odkrywana przez szaleńców: "King Lear, a play that features a real madman (Lear, after he loses it), a sane man disguised as a madman (Edgar), a blind man (Gloucester), and a fool (the Fool). I don’t know where else so many characters have been set in orbit around the idea of truth, or where else truth itself has been so set on its head."

Etymologiczne znaczenie errare

• Etymologia errare: "In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today’s global population, the word er meant “to move,” “to set in motion,” or simply “to go.” (Spanish speakers will recognize it as ir.) That root gave rise to the Latin verb errare, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam."
• Etymologicznie błąd to droga do prawdy: "From the beginning, then, the idea of error has contained a sense of motion: of wandering, seeking, going astray. Implicitly, what we are seeking—and what we have strayed from—is the truth.*"
• two archetypal wanderers of Western culture: knight errant (Galahad, Gawain, and Lancelot, Don Quixote), juif errant
• Żyd wieczny tułacz to symbol człowieka oddzielonego od prawdy: "David Bates has observed, the wandering Jew “literally embodied, for Christian Europeans, the individual separated from the truth.”"
• wandering Jew is defined by his sin, the knight errant is distinguished by his virtue;
• Rycerz wędrowny: "He is driven, like all travelers, by curiosity, by the desire to experience something more of the world."
• Błąd w historii filozofii, Protagoras: "Protagoras deserves recognition for being the first philosopher in Western history to explicitly address the problem of error, if only by denying its existence."

Iluzjonizm

• Twórca iluzji optycznych: "Edward Adelson, a professor of vision science at MIT.)"
• Naturalistyczne wyjaśnienie sztuczek magicznych: "David Brewster, a Scottish polymath and the author of the 1833 Letters on Natural Magic."
• Iluzjonista, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, pomógł w kolonizowaniu Algieru: "Napoleon sent Robert-Houdin to Algeria with instructions to out-holy the holy men, and so he did. Wielding the full panoply of contemporary illusions—plucking cannon balls from hats, catching bullets between his teeth, causing perfectly incarnate chieftains to vanish without a trace—the magician convinced his audience that the more powerful gods were on the side of the empire, and that the French, accordingly, were not to be trifled with.*"
• Iluzje są powszechnie kochane: "In other words, illusions are not just universally experienced. They are universally loved."

Anozognozja

• Anozognozja negacja własnej choroby, ślepoty lub paraliżu: "people with anosognosia are as wrong as it is possible to be."
• Anozognozja pokazuje że nie ma granic błędu: "What anosognosia shows us, then, is that wrongness knows no limits—that there is no form of knowledge, however central or unassailable it may seem, that cannot, under certain circumstances, fail us."
• Problem wiedzy kropek trudno nam się zorientować czego nie wiemy: "In sum: we love to know things, but ultimately we can’t know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing when we don’t know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up."
• Klasyczna definicja wiedzy według Platona: "Plato, who defined knowledge as “justified true belief.” To his mind, you could only claim to know something if A) it was true; and B) you could come up with a good explanation for why it was true."
• Teoria lampy błyskowej: lepiej pamiętamy wydarzenia dramatyczne: "flashbulb memory theory."
• Teoria lampy błyskowej została zanegowana: "Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting"
• Neisser
• Anton’s Syndrome: Niewidomy nie wie że jest niewidomy

Konfabulacja

• O konfabulacji: Hirstein put it in Brain Fiction
• Konfabulacja komercyjna: "1977, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson set up shop in a department store in Michigan, where they asked people to compare what they claimed were four different varieties of pantyhose."
• Konfabulacje są podawane z niezachwianą pewnością: "Hirstein, the author of Brain Fiction, echoed that sentiment. “Perhaps what is most troubling about witnessing such confabulations,” he wrote, “is the rock-jawed certainty with which they are offered up.”"
• Główny problem: "the point here is not that we are bad at saying “I don’t know.” The point is that we are bad at knowing we don’t know."
• Porównaj Adam Mickiewicz, golono strzyżono: "she is right and he is wrong"
• Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, It took ten years and $300 million to build, and costs $30 million per year to operate.
• Margaret Wertheim, First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation.

Psychologiczne uwarunkowania błędu

• ’Cuz It’s True Constraint: Odrzucamy myśl, że nasze sądy są uwarunkowane względami pozamerytorycznymi (przyzwyczajenie, interesy), jesteśmy przekonani, że wierzymy w coś tylko dlatego, że to prawda
• Sądzimy coś ponieważ jest to prawda: "I must believe that I believe it ’cuz it’s true. As the philosopher Ward Jones said, “It simply does not make sense to see myself as both believing that P is true”—where “P” stands for any proposition—“and being convinced that I do so for reasons having nothing to do with P’s being true.”"
• the bias blind spot: Uważamy że nasze przekonanie są ugruntowane w odróżnieniu od przekonań innych osób
• Lake Wobegon Effect: "endlessly entertaining statistical debacle whereby we all think that we are above average in every respect—including, amusingly, impartiality."
• Ignorance Assumption, nasi oponenci nie znają faktów: "Since we think our own beliefs are based on the facts, we conclude that people who disagree with us just haven’t been exposed to the right information, and that such exposure would inevitably bring them over to our team."
• Idiocy Assumption: nasi oponenci znają fakty, ale są idiotami
• Evil Assumption, nasi oponenci znają fakty i je rozumieją, ale działają w złej woli: "the idea that people who disagree with us are not ignorant of the truth, and not unable to comprehend it, but have willfully turned their backs on it."
• William Wordsworth acidly described the French Revolution as a cause that, ostensibly, “no one could stand up against, / who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud, / mean, miserable, willfully depraved, / hater perverse of equity and truth.” (Wordsworth was largely condemning his own doctrinaire past; the poem is subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind.)
• confirmation bias: "give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than to evidence that challenges them."
• Roger Bacon, offendicula: "the tendency to cover up one’s own ignorance with the pretense of knowledge. Another was the persuasive power of authority. A third was blind adherence to custom, and the last was the influence of popular opinion."
• Francis Bacon, four idols

Społeczne uwarunkowania błędu

• "fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.": amerykańska piosenka o modzie paryskiej, 1927
• Wiedzę o tym że nasi rodzice są naszymi rodzicami czerpiemy zawsze z drugiej ręki: "assume that our parents really are our parents (which, as Augustine went on to note, is the consummate example of a fact that most of us take for granted yet none of us know firsthand)."
• Nie tyle wierzymy w opinię co ufam ludziom którzy je wygłosili: "Avishai Margalit put this nicely. “It is not the case that I am caught in a web of beliefs,” he wrote. “…Rather, I am caught in a network of witnesses.”"
• We do not just hold a belief; we hold a membership in a community of believers.
• 1950s, Solomon Asch
• 1972, Irving Janis, groupthink
• Shahnawaz Farooqui, a Muslim journalist and commentator who supported the death penalty for Abdul Rahman, put the matter plainly. “He will have to be executed,” Farooqui said, because “if somebody at one point affirms the truth and then rejects it or denies it, it would jeopardize the whole paradigm of truth.”

Filozofia błędu

• Nasze pomyłki nie podważają naszej wiary w konkretny sąd ale w sam akt sądzenia: "our mistakes disturb us in part because they call into question not just our confidence in a single belief, but our confidence in the entire act of believing"
• "So certainty is lethal to two of our most redeeming and humane qualities, imagination and empathy."
• Pewność?: "It is ridiculed by philosophers as intellectually indefensible. (Voltaire called it “absurd,” and Bertrand Russell disparaged it as “an intellectual vice.”)"
• William Jamesa obrona pewności: "The better option would be for him to believe absolutely in his ability to leap over the crevasse.*"
• Wittgenstein o pewności: "In the face of those of his colleagues who believed that certainty was intrinsically absurd, Wittgenstein argued that, sometimes, it is uncertainty that doesn’t make any sense. If we want to get through life in a functional fashion, he noted, we have no choice but to treat some of our beliefs as absolutely certain. These beliefs serve as a kind of bedrock on which to build the rest of our worldview; instead of questioning them, we use them to ask and answer all our other questions. “At the foundation of well-founded belief,” Wittgenstein wrote, “lies belief that is not founded.” Not ill-founded, mind you: just not founded at all"
• As an example of such a belief, Wittgenstein takes his conviction that he has two hands: “I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don’t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn’t I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands?”
• William Hirstein (the author of Brain Fiction) calls, wątpliwość to luksus poznawczy, pojawia się tylko w rozwiniętych systemach nerwowych: "doubt “a cognitive luxury,” one that “occurs only in highly developed nervous systems.”"
• Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues, in a 1990
• Odruchowo traktujemy najpierw napotykaną informacje jako prawdziwą: "Spinoza claimed that when we encounter a new piece of information, we automatically accept it as true, and only reject it as false (if we do so at all) through a separate and subsequent process."
• Wiara w coś jest stanem domyślnym umysłu, wątpienie wtórnym: "belief is our default cognitive setting, while doubt or disbelief requires a second, super-added act."
• people should be more likely to believe untrue things if they are interrupted immediately after exposure to them.
• In a series of experiments, subjects who were distracted immediately after learning new information were more likely to believe that false statements were true, but not more likely to believe that true statements were false.
• Wolter – wątpienie jest kłopotliwe: "Even Voltaire, the one who dismissed certainty as absurd, acknowledged in the same breath that doubt is “uncomfortable.”"
• Dlaczego wątpienie sprawia dyskomfort: "Where certainty reassures us with answers, doubt confronts us with questions, not only about our future but also about our past: about the decisions we made, the beliefs we held, the people and groups to whom we offered our allegiance, the very way we lived our lives."
• In fact, just as our love of being right is best understood as a fear of being wrong, our attraction to certainty is best understood as an aversion to uncertainty.

Recepcja Hamleta, czyli kulturowa historia pewności

• Ewolucja w interpretacji postaci Hamleta, na początku heroizm od czasów romantyzmu zarzuca się mu wątpienie: "As the critic Harold Jenkins has observed, for at least the first 150 years of his literary life, Hamlet was generally viewed as “vigorous, bold and heroic”—a victim of his circumstances, not his psyche."
• But then, in the eighteenth century, the writer James Boswell remarked on “that irresolution which forms so marked a part of [Hamlet’s] character,” and the description stuck. Over the next hundred years, and with help from additional commentary by the likes of Goethe and Coleridge, the Hamlet we know today was born: a man so paralyzed by indecision that he is unable to take action.
• So why do we persist in feeling that doubt is Hamlet’s problem, and that a greater degree of certainty would be the solution?
• Brak pewności w polityce jest potępiany: "Barbara Tuchman observed, “to recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.”"
• Nie ma nic gorszego niż niezdecydowany wyborca: "On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart presented a pie chart that divided undecided voters into four equally unflattering categories: “attention seekers; racist Democrats; the chronically insecure; and the stupid.”"
• Leon Festinger documented this protective effect of certainty in the 1950s

Dlaczego nie lubimy własnych błędów. Pozytywne efekty błędów

• Nie można mówić o błędzie w czasie teraźniejszym: "in Chapter One, when I noted that we can’t talk about error in the first person present tense. The moment in which we can logically say “I am wrong” simply doesn’t exist; in becoming aware that a belief is false, we simultaneously cease to believe it."
• Ludzie zmieniają swoje poglądy zapominają o tym: "1973, the psychologist Greg Markus asked over 3,000 people to rate their stances (along one of those seven-point “strongly disagree / strongly agree” scales) on a range of social issues, including affirmative action, the legalization of marijuana, and equal rights for women. A decade later, he asked these same people to assess their positions again—and also to recall how they had felt about the issues a decade earlier. Across the board, these “what I used to think” ratings far more closely reflected the subjects’ current beliefs than those they had actually held in 1973."
• Here, it wasn’t just the wrongness that disappeared from the process of belief change. It was the change itself.
• Philip Tetlock, "longitudinal studies of the accuracy of political forecasts by so-called experts—academics, pundits, policy wonks, and the like."
• al-Ghazali, the Persian philosopher: "There can be no desire to return to servile conformism once it has been abandoned, since a prerequisite for being a servile conformist is that one does not know [oneself] to be such.” But when someone recognizes his former beliefs as false, al-Ghazali continued, “the glass of his servile conformism is shattered—an irreparable fragmentation and a mess which cannot be mended by patching and piecing together.” Instead, he concluded, “it can only be melted by fire and newly reshaped.”"
• Błędy nas odmładzają: "Drastic error makes us young again, in both the hardest and the best of ways."
• I’ve already touched on the hard ways: we grow small and scared, sacrifice some of our self-knowledge, lose our sense of where we belong in the world.
• Now, I really feel like me. It sounds like such a cliché, but I really did have to go to this terrifying place of losing myself in order to truly find myself.”
• Błąd pozwolą dokonać poznać siebie i dokonać zmiany: "This is the thing about fully experiencing wrongness. It strips us of all our theories, including our theories about ourselves. This isn’t fun while it’s happening—it leaves us feeling flayed, laid bare to the bone and the world—but it does make possible that rarest of occurrences: real change."
• Nie lubimy błędów, bo boimy się zmian: "This helps explain our dislike of error, since most of us are at least somewhat averse to change"
• For instance, the intolerance we routinely impute to adolescents and the wisdom we often ascribe to the elderly are, in part, reflections of different developmental stages in our relationship to wrongness. The hallmark of teenagers is that they think they know everything, and are therefore happy to point out other people’s errors—but woe betide the adult who tries to suggest that the kids could be wrong.
• By contrast, the wisdom we perceive in the elderly often stems from their hard-earned knowledge that no one knows everything.
• The other cliché about old age, that it makes people cantankerous and set in their ways, is also a product of cognitive development—or rather, of cognitive degeneration
• Dzięki błędom starzy znowu mogą być młodzi: "Thus the elderly can sometimes come to seem a lot like adolescents: hawklike in their keenness for other people’s shortcomings, steadfast in defense of their own rightness.)"
• Irna Gadd, a psychoanalyst in New York. “Our capacity to tolerate error,” Gadd said, “depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion.”
• Leon Festinger, who found that failed prophecies often lead to an upsurge in faith
• Thomas Szasz: “Doubt is to certainty,” he wrote, “as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them.”
• As Festinger described it, cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling that results from simultaneously holding two contradictory ideas.
• the first thing that came to mind wasn’t, I’m lost. It was, Who put that window there?”

Bibliografia

• Joseph Jastrow, The Story of Human Error
• Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
• Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
  • Schulz, K. 2010. Being Wrong. Adventures in the Margin of Error. London: Harper Collins.