Mary

“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

“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 – An Engaging Analysis of Cultural Dependency and the Resulting Environmental Crisis

“We have retinas that face backward, the stump of a tail, and way too many bones in our wrists. We must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves. We are poorly equipped to survive in the climates in which we now live. We have nerves that take bizarre paths, muscles that attach to nothing, and lymph nodes that do more harm than good. Our genomes are filled with genes that don’t work, chromosomes that break, and viral carcasses from past infections. We have brains that play tricks on us, cognitive biases and prejudices, and a tendency to kill one another in large numbers. Millions of us can’t even reproduce successfully without a whole lot of help from modern science. Our flaws illuminate not only our evolutionary past but also our present and future. Everyone knows that it is impossible to understand current events in a specific country without understanding the history of that country and how the modern state came to be. The same is true for our bodies, our genes, and our minds.”
― Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes

“The miracle of the human mind, after all, is that it can show us the world not only as it is, but also as it is not: as we remember it from the past, as we hope or fear it will be in the future, as we imagine it might be in some other place or for some other person. 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. As that suggests, our errors sometimes bear far sweeter fruits than the failure and shame we associate with them. True, they 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, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error