Ekaete

“As I argue throughout this book, 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. When we come to see one of our own past beliefs as false, we also glimpse, for a moment, the persistent structural possibility of error: our minds, the world, the gap between them—the whole unsettling shebang. As important and life-altering (and even gratifying) as this revelation can be, it runs contrary to what I’ve described here as one of the chief functions of a community: to buttress our sense that we are right, and protect us from constantly contending with the possibility that we are wrong. Small wonder that such revelations are so unwelcome within communities of believers, and bring down so much trouble on the individual member who abandons his or her faith. When we realize that we were wrong about a private belief, the chief thing we stand to lose is our pride. But when we share a belief with others, the stakes of rejecting it escalate astronomically. They include, as we’ve seen, the practical and emotional advantages of conforming with a community. But they also include the community itself—the trust, esteem, companionship, and love of the people we know best. Even more gravely, they include the stability and familiarity of our identities (for instance, as a devout Muslim), and our faith in the very existence of truth. Short of life and limb (which are occasionally on the line as well), the price of being wrong could scarcely be higher, and the experience could scarcely be more destabilizing.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate toward trying to verify our beliefs, to the extent that we bother investigating their validity at all. But scientists gravitate toward falsification; as a community if not as individuals, they seek to disprove their beliefs. 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. But the important part is that it can be—no matter how much evidence appears to confirm it, no matter how many experts endorse it, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. In fact, not only can any given theory be proven wrong; as we saw in the last chapter, sooner or later, it probably will be. And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure. 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.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“Creole and Haiti stick to my insides like glue—it’s like my bones and muscles. But America is my skin, my eyes, and my breath. According to my papers, I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m not a citizen. I’m a “resident alien.” The borders don’t care if we’re all human and my heart pumps blood the same as everyone else’s.”
― Ibi Zoboi, American Street

“We take natural substances created over millions of years, fashion them into products designed for a few minutes’ use, and then return them to the planet as litter that we’ve engineered to never go away.”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story