Being Wrong

I just finished Chapter 1 and already I am finding things wrong!

That sounded more dramatic than I intended because I also am really enjoying this book. It begins with the notion that no one ever believes they are wrong about anything. This presumes that there is no such thing as inner conflict, or, in the current parlance, that we aren't made up of "parts."

The concept of parts has been a staple of psychodrama, gestalt therapy, IFS (Internal Family Systems), Focusing, and likely several other models of the self. It allows one part of us to believe something true while another part doubts it or believes it false. I, your reviewer, am often insecure about many of my beliefs. That is, I am not confident in their rightness. (One belief I have, though, is that confidence isn't necessarily a good thing.) I have encounted others who fit Ms Schultz's premise in that they are always sure they are right and I try and steer clear of them.

Furthermore, as a blitz chess player, I am quite often confronted with a move whose rightness I believed in moments before immediately countered with a demonstration of its shortcomings (and have had the pleasure of giving that experience to my opponents).

Chapter one quotes John Updike's observation on writing book reviews; it is “almost impossible to…avoid the tone of being wonderfully right.” In so far as I have failed in this regard, let me admit in advance to being wrong so as to therefore be less so.

. . .

I had forgotten I was reading this book until I came across the partially written review above. I decided to start it up again (I'm now about 25% into it) It wasn't long before I found something else wrong. She discusses the Sally-Anne test and "Theory of Mind" and says that autistics lack it. Suspicious, I googled and discovered this is a commonly believed myth lacking empirical evidence. Perhaps less controversial is the author's description of 26 out of 525 (women at Harvard Law in 1967) as "just over 5 percent," when google calculates it as just UNDER 5%. Still, I'm enjoying reading this book. At the moment, I want to give it 5 stars despite its errors.

I'm now about 2/3 through the book and, of course, I've found other "errors" (which I put in quotes because they are more differing perspectives in which I have a preference for my own (which I believe better because it explains, or even CONTAINS theirs). The most recent is the characterization of one's self as having separate parts as "just a metaphor" whereas I think of all conceptualization as metaphoric and that dismissing metaphor is the delusion that there's anything non-metaphoric in our conceptual understandings.

It turns out I was WRONG about the 2/3 throughness because almost a third of the book is footnotes, references, and sources. This is an important feature in a book on wrongness though I won't be reading that part.

This book made me wonder if there is a graininess to thought--that it is composed of discreet quanta each of which is sure its right. We would be digital then, every idea a 1 or 0. Shades of gray would then always be a matter of parts which never actually mix but argue forever with their opposite halves. Maybe maintaining such a balance acts as a hedge against wrongness, but (on the other hand) can also be seen as a refusal to take a stand, a fear of risk leading to a depressive standoff.