Kathryn Schulz Quotes

#1. Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong

Kathryn Schulz

#2. As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#4. Our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#7. Confirmation bias is the tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than to evidence that challenges them.

Kathryn Schulz

#8. [Our errors] represent a moment of alienation, both from ourselves and from a previously convincing vision of the world. But what's wrong with that? "To alienate" means to make unfamiliar; and to see things - including ourselves - as unfamiliar is an opportunity to see them anew.

Kathryn Schulz

#9. Freud, as I've already noted, believed that the false worlds of our dreams reveal deep and hidden truths about ourselves.

Kathryn Schulz

#10. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.

Kathryn Schulz

#11. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#12. But nor is the willing embrace of error always beyond us. In fact, this might be the most important thing illusions can teach us: that it is possible, at least some of the time, to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found in being right.

Kathryn Schulz

#13. 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?

Kathryn Schulz

#14. It's as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible.

Kathryn Schulz

#15. The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest if the brain.

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#17. The Catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#19. 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?

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#21. Knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials

Kathryn Schulz

#22. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.

Kathryn Schulz

#23. This idea began to emerge during the Scientific Revolution, through that era's hallmark development, the scientific method.

Kathryn Schulz

#24. Your own regrets may not be as ugly as you think they are.

Kathryn Schulz

#25. Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks.

Kathryn Schulz

#26. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#27. [W]hen we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.

Kathryn Schulz

#28. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.

Kathryn Schulz

#29. Error in extremis - extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar - becomes insanity. madness is radical wrongness.

Kathryn Schulz

#30. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#31. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

Kathryn Schulz

#32. We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality.

Kathryn Schulz

#33. Surely, then, this was a situation that merited the high-minded if somewhat sneering riposte of John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Kathryn Schulz

#34. it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.

Kathryn Schulz

#35. The fact is, with the exception of our own minds, no power on earth has the consistent and absolute ability to convince us that we are wrong. However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone.

Kathryn Schulz

#36. Our brains are not actually duplex apartments occupied by feuding neighbors, and how we bring about the complicated act of deceiving ourselves remains a mystery.

Kathryn Schulz

#37. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#38. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#39. Both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold

Kathryn Schulz

#40. Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality.

Kathryn Schulz

#41. The patient in question was a young woman whose parents brought her in because she complained incessantly of stomach pains. Freud diagnosed her with hysteria. A few months later, she died of abdominal cancer.

Kathryn Schulz

#42. Conversion stories are one of the classic Western narratives about the self.

Kathryn Schulz

#43. Reliance on other people's knowledge ... buys us all a lot of time. It also buys us, in essence, many billions of prosthetic brains.

Kathryn Schulz

#44. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#45. And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

Kathryn Schulz

#46. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

#47. In the aftermath of our errors, our first task is always to establish their scope and nature.

Kathryn Schulz

#48. 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.

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#50. Without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses

Kathryn Schulz

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

Kathryn Schulz

#52. Often, our beliefs about what is factually right and our beliefs about what is morally right are entirely inextricable.

Kathryn Schulz