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“When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.” So begins “Mr. Peanut,” the daring, arresting first novel by Adam Ross, an author of prodigious talent, which takes as its theme “the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.”
David and Alice Pepin have been married 13 years and are far past the blushing romance of their university days. “The middle,” Pepin tells his wife, “is long and hard,” an observation this book repeatedly makes about dieting, novel-writing and marriage itself. Alice, who teaches troubled children, is clinically depressed and has grown desperately obese. Her shape pleases her husband, but her obsessive diets do not, and their consistent failures belabor the Pepins’ life together. Partly in consequence, David, a successful computer game designer, is often engrossed in fantasies of Alice’s death, sometimes by his own hand. When Alice dies with David’s fingers in her mouth, as well as a handful of peanuts, to which she is deathly allergic, he claims it was suicide, while the police think murder.
At that point, the novel grows more deliberately odd. Pepin’s case is investigated by two detectives who are well acquainted with marital difficulties. One of them, Ward Hastroll, has a wife, Hannah, who has not gotten out of bed for five months, driving him, too, to vivid fantasies of murder. Hastroll’s name is an anagram for “Lars Thorwald,” the wife-killing villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (a movie the Pepins studied in the class where they met), and his actions sometimes mimic those of Hitchcock’s character.
The other detective is Sam Shepard, the real-life Ohio osteopath whose legal case became a landmark when he was convicted and later exonerated of the murder of his wife, Marilyn. In another long-ago class, the Pepins also learned about Sheppard’s case, commonly thought to be the basis for the “Fugitive” television series and movie.
The detectives’ investigation leads them to Mobius, a pint-size professional wife-killer whom they suspect Pepin hired. Mobius’s very name, of course, invokes the inescapable repetitiveness of marriage, which can kill off relationships by inhibiting any opportunity for change.
As this brief summary suggests, “Mr. Peanut” requires considerable decoding. This can be annoying, a little like going to a dinner party where all the guests seem bright and amiable but insist on speaking another language. Yet over all, the novel is an enormous success — forceful and involving, often deeply stirring and always impressively original.
Nearly 40 years ago I was a fellow at the Creative Writing Center at Stanford. The director, Richard P. Scowcroft, who had helped his revered friend Wallace Stegner establish the program, told those of us in the advanced fiction seminar that the one subject he had always feared writing a novel about was marriage, because it still seemed to him the most complex and frequently unfathomable of human relationships, notwithstanding his own long and successful marriage. Scowcroft’s remark is a testimonial to Ross’s bravery. In many ways it would have taken less courage to present a sympathetic portrait of Osama bin Laden than it did to write this novel, which flouts the treasured conceptions of love and marriage many of us depend on to make it through the day. “Mr. Peanut” is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage, with each partner holding the other responsible for his or her deepest unhappiness.
The point of view in this novel is overwhelmingly male. Except for about 20 pages from Marilyn Shepard’s perspective, we see only through the husbands’ eyes, which may account for why marital dissatisfaction is so often associated here with dangerous rage. The wives, in fact, all tend to be withholding. Each couple’s problems are peculiar, naturally, but in their own way familiar. Sam Sheppard philanders. Hannah Hastroll feels invisible to her husband. David and Alice Pepin have lost their connection in their heartbreaking failure to have a child. But in each relationship too much or too little has been said or done for so long that the partners blunder along in an oblivion of mute and tortured dissatisfaction, each marriage a game of blindman’s buff in which the partners occasionally long for each other but grope about, arms outstretched, eyes unseeing.
It is only because of the book’s unflinching honesty about the perils of marriage that we can celebrate and credit the hope it eventually offers. All three husbands ultimately recognize a pathway to marital happiness. “If he could feel her want,” one reasons, “if he could prove to her that he’d always be there to feel it, then they’d be complete.” It is no small thing that Ross has dedicated this novel to his wife.
“Mr. Peanut” takes risks not only with its subject but also with its form. The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality. In this it draws its inspiration from M. C. Escher, whose optical illusion “Encounter” is reproduced on the novel’s title page. In Escher’s print, the positive and negative spaces of a room’s wallpaper merge indecipherably into a circle of black and white figures dancing toward confrontation. These tricks of perspective mirror life, Ross seems to say. “The person in your mind isn’t the person in the world,” David Pepin remarks, nor, for that matter, is your partner, whom you inevitably view through the lens of your own projections, idealizations and fantasies.
Escher also inspires some of David’s video games and, more important, a novel he is writing on the sly. When lines from the book are eventually disclosed, they prove to be the same as those we have already encountered in “Mr. Peanut,” including its opening. The question of whether Ross’s book and Pepin’s are one and the same lingers, unanswered, but the device serves to potent effect when “Mr. Peanut” concludes with three (or is it four?) alternate endings, each entirely plausible and together suggesting the way any marriage wavers between potential outcomes.
Yet Ross’s sliding-scale approach to reality doesn’t always work. “Mr. Peanut” is often comically grotesque — David’s first hit computer game, “Bang You’re Dead!,” envisions school shootings — and frequently magical, as when Mobius appears. Elsewhere, an implausible expert in “transportational psychology” turns up to offer Yoda-like counsel to Pepin in the midst of a disaster-marred vacation with Alice. But the novel is grounded in its realistic moments, especially by its intense vision of the characters’ inner worlds, which affectingly resemble our own. The high point, perhaps, is Ross’s sensuous reimagining of the Sheppards’ marriage and Marilyn’s murder, which occupies more than a third of the book.
Going back to my days in Scowcroft’s seminar, I have taken it as an article of faith that a novel fully transports us only when it presents a coherent imagined world. Pigs may fly or authors may interrupt their own stories, but the ground rules must be consistent so that readers may step confidently outside of themselves for a while and, as the book goes on, draw a line between the author’s created universe and their own. This may not be a precept Ross shares, but for me the spell of “Mr. Peanut” fractures occasionally — for example, when it veers from Dr. Sheppard’s house in Ohio, rendered with mesmerizing verisimilitude, to Mobius’s jail cell in New York, where the same Sheppard, inexplicably transformed into a detective, endures a Karamazov-style inquisition from a murderer who can kill himself by holding his breath. Each piece is a tour de force, but they’re hard to reconcile in the same novel.
Yet this one qualm is far outweighed by the trove of rewards to be found in “Mr. Peanut,” especially its audacious and moving honesty about one of society’s fundamental institutions, and its hard-won hopefulness. This is a brilliant, powerful, memorable book.
Scott Turow’s novel “Innocent,” a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” was published last month.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
— Winston Churchill
I’m sitting in a coffee shop in a pediatric hospital in Boston, hard by a nine-foot-tall bronze teddy bear, with a man who is going to perform a surprising trick. I’m thinking of an article recently published in a prestigious medical journal, an article that reports the results of a research study, and he will tell me whether or not the study is likely to turn out to be right or wrong. It’s the sort of study that your doctor might read about, and that you might learn about from a newspaper, website, or morning TV news show. It may well be that the results of this study will change your life — they might convince you to start eating or avoiding certain foods to lower your risk of heart disease, or to take a certain drug to help you beat cancer, or to learn whether or not you are carrying a gene linked to vulnerability to a mental illness. But this man won’t need to hear any of the particulars of the study to perform his feat. All he needs to know is that it was a study published in a top journal.
His prediction: it’s wrong. It’s a prediction that strikes at the foundation of expertise and our trust in it.
The man is John Ioannidis, a doctor and researcher whose specialty is calculating the chances that studies’ results are false. For someone dedicated to spotlighting the inadequacies of his colleagues’ lifework, Ioannidis is pleasant, polite, and soft-spoken, even if he discreetly radiates the fidgety energy of someone who habitually packs too much into his day. He looks young for a man heading into his midforties, with a slight build, a wavy mop of fine, dark hair, and a thin mustache. Also a bit surprising about Ioannidis is that he is highly regarded by his peers. Communities usually find ways to marginalize those who expose their flaws, but the world of medical research, in which extraordinary talent and effort are prerequisites for attaining even the lowest rungs of recognition, has kept Ioannidis in demand via the field’s standard trappings of success: prestigious appointments, including one at the world-class Tufts–New England Medical Center and another at the University of Ioannina Medical School in his native Greece; frequent citations by colleagues of his work, some of which has been published in the field’s top journals; and a stream of invitations to speak at conferences, where he is generally a big draw.
There’s no standard career path to becoming a deconstructor of wrongness, and Ioannidis took a roundabout route to it. Born in 1965 in the United States to parents who were both physicians, he was raised in Athens, where he showed unusual aptitude in mathematics and snagged Greece’s top student math prize. By the end of college, he seemed on track for a career as a mathematician. But he had come to feel the family pull of medicine and, not wanting to turn his back on math, decided to combine the two and become a medical mathematician. “I didn’t know exactly what such a thing might be,” he says, “but I felt sure there was some important component of medicine that was mathematical.” He graduated first in his class at the University of Athens Medical School, then shipped off to Harvard for his residency in internal medicine, followed by a research and clinical appointment at Tufts in infectious diseases. The math had to this point remained in the background, but in 1993, while at Tufts, he saw his chance to even
things up a bit. There was growing interest in the new field of “evidence-based medicine” — that is, trying to equip physicians to do not merely what they had been taught to assume would help patients but what had been rigorously proven in studies would help patients. “Amazingly, most medical treatment simply isn’t backed up by good, quantitative evidence,” says Ioannidis — news that would likely come as a surprise to most patients. Distilling this sort of knowledge out of a chaos of patient data often requires more statistical-analysis firepower than clinical researchers bear, providing an opening for Ioannidis to make a mark.
Carrying his new interest to joint appointments at the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins in the mid-1990s, Ioannidis began to look for interesting patterns in those medical-journal studies that explore how patients fare with certain treatments. Such studies are essentially the coin of the realm when it comes to communicating solid evidence of treatment effectiveness to physicians. A good doctor, it is presumed, scans the journals for the results of these studies to see what works and what doesn’t on which patients, and how well and with what risks, modifying her practices accordingly. Does it make sense to prescribe an antibiotic to a child with an ear infection? Should middle-aged men with no signs of heart disease be told to take a small, daily dose of aspirin? Do the potential benefits of a particular surgical intervention outweigh the risks? Studies presumably provide the answers. In examining hundreds of these studies, Ioannidis did indeed spot a pattern — a disturbing one. When a study was published, often it was only a matter of months, and at most a few years, before other studies came out to either fully refute the findings or declare that the results were “exaggerated” in the sense that later papers revealed significantly lesser benefits to the treatment under study. Results that held up were outweighed two-to-one by results destined to be labeled “never mind.”
What was going on here? The whole point of carrying out a study was to rigorously examine a question using tools and techniques that would yield solid data, allowing a careful and conclusive analysis that would replace the conjecture, assumptions, and sloppy assessments that had preceded it. The data were supposed to be the path to truth. And yet these studies, and most types of studies Ioannidis looked at, were far more often than not driving to wrong answers. They exhibited the sort of wrongness rate you would associate more with fad-diet tips, celebrity gossip, or political punditry than with state-of-the-art medical research.
The two-out-of-three wrongness rate Ioannidis found is worse than it sounds. He had been examining only the less than one-tenth of one percent of published medical research that makes it to the most prestigious medical journals. In other words, in determining that two-thirds of published medical research is wrong, Ioannidis is offering what can easily be seen as an extremely optimistic assessment. Throw in the presumably less careful work from lesser journals, and take into account the way the results end up being spun and misinterpreted by university and industrial PR departments and by journalists, and it’s clear that whatever it was about expert wrongness that Ioannidis had stumbled on in these journals, the wrongness rate would only worsen from there.
Ioannidis felt he was confronting a mystery that spoke to the very foundation of medical wisdom. How can the research community claim to know what it’s doing, and to be making significant progress, if it can’t bring out studies in its top journals that correctly prove anything, or lead to better patient care? It was as if he had set out to improve the battle effectiveness of a navy and immediately discovered that most of its boats didn’t float. Nor did the problems appear to be unique to medicine: looking at other branches of science, including chemistry, physics, and psychology, he found much the same. “The facts suggest that for many, if not the majority, of fields, the majority of published studies are likely to be wrong,” he says. Probably, he adds, “the vast majority.”
Medical and other scientific expertise aren’t exactly the bottom of the barrel when it comes to expert wisdom. Yes, much-heralded drugs get yanked off the market, we get conflicting advice about what to eat, and toxic chemicals make their way into our homes. But you don’t have to dig far in pretty much any other field to see similar, or worse, arrays of screwups. I could fill this entire book, and several more, with examples of expertise gone wrong — not only in medicine but in physics, finance, child raising, the government, sports, entertainment, and on and on. (Just for fun, I’ve stuck a small sampling in Appendix 1.) The fact is, expert wisdom usually turns out to be at best highly contested and ephemeral, and at worst flat-out wrong.
Of course, compiling anecdotes and quoting experts about expertise doesn’t prove that experts usually mislead us. Actually, proving expert wrongness isn’t really the point of this book. I’ve found that most people don’t need much convincing that experts are usually wrong. How could we not suspect that to be the case? We constantly hear experts contradict one another and even themselves on a vast range of issues, whether they’re spouting off on diets, hurricane preparedness, the secrets to being a great manager, the stock market, cholesterol-lowering drugs, getting kids to sleep through the night, the inevitability of presidential candidates, the direction of home values, the key to strong marriages, vitamins, the benefits of alcohol or aspirin or fish, the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and so on. As the world watched its financial institutions and economies teetering and in some cases collapsing in 2008 and 2009, many found it maddening that the great majority of financial experts, from those who advise heads of state to those who advise working stiffs, not only failed to foresee the trouble but in many cases specifically took to the airwaves to counsel that there wasn’t much to worry about, and in general failed to have anything consistent and helpful to say about the problems. We can all agree that there is a growing obesity epidemic, but it sometimes seems as if no two experts agree on what works when it comes to losing the excess weight. And those of us who hope to see our children’s schools improve can choose between experts who say that the curricula need to be less rigid and test-oriented, and experts who say precisely the opposite. If anything, we live in a time of acute frustration with experts, even as many of us remain dependent on them and continue to heed their advice.
Putting trust in experts who are probably wrong is only part of the problem. The other side of the coin is that many people have all but given up on getting good advice from experts. The total effect of all the contradicting and shifting pronouncements is to make expert conclusions at times sound like so much blather — a background noise of modern life. I think by now most of us have at some point caught ourselves thinking, or at least have heard from people around us, something along these lines: Experts! One day they say vitamin X / coffee / wine / drug Y / a big mortgage / baby learning videos / Six Sigma / multitasking / clean homes / arguing / investment Z is a good thing, and the next they say it’s a bad thing. Why bother paying attention? I might as well just do what I feel like doing. Do we really want to just give up on expertise in this way? Even if experts usually fail to give us the clear, reliable guidance we need, there are still situations, as we’ll see, where failing to follow their advice can be self-defeating and even deadly.
So I’m not going to spend much time trying to convince you that experts are often, and possibly usually, wrong. Instead, this book is about why expertise goes wrong and how we may be able to do a better job of seeking out more trustworthy expert advice. To that end, we’re going to look at how experts — including scientists, business gurus, and our other highly trusted sources of wisdom — fall prey to a range of measurement errors, how they come to have deep biases that lead them into gamesmanship and even outright dishonesty, and how interactions among them tend to worsen rather than correct for these problems. We’re also going to examine the ways in which the media sort through the flow of dubious expert pronouncements and further distort them, as well as how we ourselves are drawn to the worst of this shoddy output, and how we end up being even more misled on the Internet. Finally, we’ll try to extract from everything we’ve discovered a set of rough guidelines that can help to separate the most suspect expert advice from the stuff that has a better chance of holding up.
As I said, most people are quite comfortable with the notion that there’s a real problem with experts. But some — mostly experts — do in fact take objection to that claim. Here are the three objections I encountered the most often, along with quick responses.
(1) If experts are so wrong, why are we so much better off now than we were fifty or a hundred years ago? One distinguished professor put it to me this way in an e-mail note: “Our life expectancy has almost doubled in the past seventy-five years, and that’s because of experts.” Actually, the vast majority of that gain came earlier in the twentieth century from a very few sharp improvements, and especially from the antismoking movement. As for all of the drugs, diagnostic tools, surgical techniques, medical devices, lists of foods to eat and avoid, and impressive breakthrough procedures and technologies that fill medical journals and trickle down into media reports, consider this: between 1978 and 2001, according to one highly regarded study, U.S. life spans increased fewer than three years on average — when the drop in smoking rates slowed around 1990, so did life-expectancy gains. It’s hard to claim we’re floating on an ocean of marvelously effective advice from a range of experts when we’ve been skirting the edges of a new depression, the divorce rate is around 50 percent, energy prices occasionally skyrocket, obesity rates are climbing, children’s test scores are declining, we’re forced to worry about terrorist and even nuclear attacks, 118 million prescriptions for antidepressants are written annually in the United States, chunks of our food supply periodically become tainted, and, well, you get the idea. Perhaps a reasonable model for expert advice is one I might call “punctuated wrongness” — that is, experts usually mislead us, but every once in a while they come up with truly helpful advice.
(2) Sure, experts have been mostly wrong in the past, but now they’re on top of things. In mid-2008 experts were standing in line to talk about the extensive, foolproof controls protecting our banks and other financial institutions that weren’t in place in the late 1920s — just before those institutions started collapsing. Cancer experts shake their heads today over the ways in which generations of predecessors wasted decades hunting down the mythical environmental or viral roots of most cancers, before pronouncing as a sure thing the more recent theory of how cancer is caused by mutations in a small number of genes — a theory that, as we’ll see, has yielded almost no benefits to patients after two decades. Most everyone missed what was happening to our climate, or even spoke of a global cooling crisis, until we came to today’s absolutely certain understanding of global warming and its man-made causes — well, we’ll see how that turns out. How could we have been so foolish before? And what sort of fool would question today’s experts’ beliefs? In any case, the claim that we’ve come from wrong ideas to right ideas suggests that there’s a consensus of experts today on what the right ideas are. But there is often nothing close to such a consensus. When experts’ beliefs clash, somebody has to be wrong — hardly a sign of an imminent convergence on truth.
And, finally, (3) So what if experts are usually wrong? That’s the nature of expert knowledge — it progresses slowly as it feels its way through difficult questions. Well, sure, we live in a complex world without easy answers, so we might well expect to see our experts make plenty of missteps as they steadily chip away at the truth. I’m not saying that experts don’t make any progress, or that they ought to have figured it all out long ago. I’m suggesting three things: we ought to be fully aware of how large a percentage of expert advice is flawed; we should find out if there are perhaps much more disconcerting reasons why experts so frequently get off track other than “that’s just the nature of the beast”; and we ought to take the trouble to see if we can come up with clues that will help distinguish better expert advice from fishier stuff. And, by the way, if experts are so comfortable with the notion that their efforts ought to be expected to spit out mostly wrong answers, why don’t they work a little harder to get this useful piece of information across to us when they’re interviewed on morning news shows or in newspaper articles, and not just when they’re confronted with their errors?
Given that I’ve already started throwing the term “expert” around left and right, I suppose I ought to make sure you know what I mean by the word. Academics study “expertise” in pianists, athletes, burglars, birds, infants, computers, trial witnesses, and captains of industry, to name just a few examples. But when I say “expert,” I’m mostly thinking of someone whom the mass media might quote as a credible authority on some topic — the sorts of people we’re usually referring to when we say things like “According to experts . . .” These are what I would call “mass” or “public” experts, people in a position to render opinions or findings that a large number of us might hear about and choose to take into account in making decisions that could affect our lives. Scientists are an especially important example, but I’m also interested in, for example, business, parenting, and sports experts who gain some public recognition for their experience and insight. I’ll also have some things to say about pop gurus, celebrity advice givers, and media pundits, as well as about what I call “local” experts — everyday practitioners such as non-research-oriented doctors, stockbrokers, and auto mechanics.
I’ve heard it said, half kiddingly, that meteorologists are the only people who get paid to be wrong. I would argue that in that sense most of our experts are paid to be wrong, and are probably wrong a much higher percentage of the time than are meteorologists. I’m going to show that although the process of wringing useful insights and advice from complex subjects may indeed be an inherently slow and erratic one, there are many other, less benign reasons why experts go astray. In fact, we’ll see that expert pronouncements are pushed toward wrongness so strongly that in the end it’s harder, I think, to explain why they’re sometimes right. But that doesn’t mean we’re hopelessly mired in this swamp of bad advice. With a decent compass, we can find our way out. Let’s start by exploring some of the muck.
From “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them” by David H. Freedman. Excerpt courtesy of Little, Brown and Company, the publisher. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.
—Molière
Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second order one at best. Unlike many of life’s other delights — chocolate, surfing, kissing — it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. We can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don’t seem to matter much; it’s more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be equally pleased about correctly identifying an orange-crowned warbler or the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we can enjoy being right even about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.
Like most pleasurable experiences, rightness is not ours to enjoy all the time. Sometimes we are the one who loses the bet (or the hotel). And sometimes, too, we are plagued by doubt about the correct answer or course of action — an anxiety that, itself, reflects the urgency of our desire to be right. Still, on the whole, our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right is matched by an almost equally indiscriminate feeling that we are right. Occasionally, this feeling spills into the foreground, as when we argue or evangelize, make predictions or place bets. Most often, though, it is just psychological backdrop. A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.
To be fair, this serene faith in our own rightness is often warranted. Most of us navigate day-to-day life fairly well, after all, which suggests that we are routinely right about a great many things. And sometimes we are not just routinely right but spectacularly right: right about the existence of atoms (postulated by ancient thinkers thousands of years before the emergence of modern chemistry); right about the healing properties of aspirin (recognized since at least 3000 BC); right to track down that woman who smiled at you in the cafe (now your wife of twenty years). Taken together, these moments of rightness represent both the high-water marks of human endeavor and the source of countless small joys. They affirm our sense of being smart, competent, trustworthy, and in tune with our environment. More important, they keep us alive. Individually and collectively, our very existence depends on our ability to reach accurate conclusions about the world around us. In short, the experience of being right is imperative for our survival, gratifying for our ego, and, overall, one of life’s cheapest and keenest satisfactions.
This book is about the opposite of all that. It is about being wrong: about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals cope when our convictions collapse out from under us. If we relish being right and regard it as our natural state, you can imagine 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. Like the term paper returned to us covered in red ink, being wrong makes us cringe and slouch down in our seat; it makes our heart sink and our dander rise. At best we regard it as a nuisance, at worst a nightmare, but in either case — and quite unlike the gleeful little rush of being right — we experience our errors as deflating and embarrassing.
And that’s just for starters. In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. This set of associations was nicely summed up by the Italian cognitive scientist Massimo 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.” In this rather despairing view — and it is the common one — our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.
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. 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.
Given this centrality to our intellectual and emotional development, error shouldn’t be an embarrassment, and cannot be an aberration. On the contrary. As Benjamin Franklin observed in the quote that heads this book, wrongness is a window into normal human nature — into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls. This book is staked on the soundness of that observation: that however disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.
Continues...
From “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” by Kathryn Schulz. Excerpt courtesy of Ecco, the publisher.
To Err Is Human. And How! And Why. By DWIGHT GARNER
BEING WRONG
Adventures in the Margin of Error
By Kathryn Schulz
405 pages. Ecco. $26.99.
WRONG
Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them
By David H. Freedman
295 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.
Despite their titles, the two books in front of us today — “Being Wrong,” by Kathryn Schulz, and “Wrong,” by David H. Freedman — are not biographies of Alan Greenspan. They’re not accounts of the search for Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D. They’re not psychological profiles of Nickelback fans or the imbibers of chocolate martinis, either.
Here’s what they are instead: investigations into why, as Ms. Schulz writes, with a Cole Porterish lilt in her voice, “As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.”
Bookstores will shelve these two volumes side by side, and critics like me will think, bingo!, and set them up for a blind date too. But they could not be more unalike. Ms. Schulz’s book is a funny and philosophical meditation on why error is mostly a humane, courageous and extremely desirable human trait. She flies high in the intellectual skies, leaving beautiful sunlit contrails. God isn’t her co-pilot; Iris Murdoch seems to be.
Mr. Freedman’s book is a somewhat cruder vehicle. It’s a John Stossel -like exposé of the multiple ways that society’s so-called experts (scientists, economists, doctors) let us down, if not outright betray us. It’s a chunk of spicy populist outrage, and it can be a hoot to watch Mr. Freedman’s reading glasses steam up as he, like Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” sniffs mendacity around the plantation. But Ms. Schulz’s book is the real find here; forgive me if I spend more time with it.
Ms. Schulz is a young writer — this is her first book — whose work has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone and Slate. She argues in “Being Wrong” that, of all the things we’re wrong about, our ideas about error are probably our “meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.” She continues, “Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition."
This is not a bulletin from the scientific or epistemological frontier. Thinkers have toyed with theories of error since Plato’s time, many of them generally agreeing with Albert Einstein, who said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”
But it’s lovely to watch this idea warm in Ms. Schulz’s hands. Her book is filled with diverting and sometimes heartbreaking examples of error, but it is not, in her words, a “wrongology slide show.” She is interested “in error as an idea and as an experience: in how we think about being wrong, and how we feel about it.”
The idea that error can be eradicated, she writes, can lead to frightening and reactionary impulses. (Gulags, purges.) She charts the three stages of our disbelief at other people’s ideas when they differ from our own. (We first assume that they are ignorant, then idiotic, finally evil.) She observes how much we adore being right, and how we blithely assume that we nearly always are. Then she pulls the rug out, noting that being wrong, because we’re blithely unaware of it, “feels like being right.”
She is epigrammatic. (“No one plans to end up on the wrong side of history.”) She has gobbled books and culture like Ms. Pac-Man. She’s comfortable with everyone from Jonathan Frnzen to Heidegger, and from Pliny the Elder to Beyoncé.
I don’t bring this up because it’s rare to find a range of reference in a work of popular philosophy. I bring it up because when she takes a detour into, say, “Hamlet,” it’s time not to groan but time to sit up. She’s thought about the play and has alert, persuasive and counterintuitive things to say about it.
Ms. Schulz notes how many of our beliefs are accidents of fate, hinging on things like our places of birth. She is pro argument, pro talking it out. She quotes the comedian Penn Jillette as saying, “One of the quickest ways to find out if you are wrong is to state what you believe.”
Most of all she is for skepticism. But she also points out that the ability to interrogate our beliefs is (in the words of a writer named William Hirstein), a “cognitive luxury.” It takes time, brains and patience.
“Being Wrong” is optimistic. “Error, even though it sometimes feels like despair, is actually much closer in spirit to hope,” Ms. Schulz writes. “We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right next time.”
Mr. Freedman, the author of “Wrong,” is a science and business journalist whose previous books include “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder — How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place.” (On-the-fly planning? Speaking of getting things wrong, didn’t we try that in Iraq?) His book looks outward, where Ms. Schulz’s looks inward.
He points out that most expert wisdom, especially about health issues, isn’t just sometimes but nearly always ultimately proved wrong. He is diligent about explaining the “disconcerting reasons” why this is so. He examines how the sausage that is major health studies is actually made. It’s not pretty.
Mr. Freedman observes the way that very small (and hence unreliable) surveys, often based solely on animal testing, are used to make extravagant claims about cancer or our diets. He notes how scientists discard data that doesn’t fit their theses. He talks about measurement errors and the academic pressures of publish-or-perish.
He finds that the science world, frighteningly, does not take kindly to whistleblowers. He blames scientific journals for printing the sexiest and most eye-popping studies, instead of the most careful ones. “Wrong” bristles with examples and lists. It’s as utilitarian as a rake; it’s news you can use.
Ms. Schulz’s “Being Wrong” is news you probably can’t use, at least in any immediate sense. But if admiring it is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Jane Austen is renowned for her wit, her lightness of touch, and the elegance of her prose style. There isn't a great deal of drama in her novels: people fall in and out of love; some of her heroines test our patience; and in the end there is usually a marriage. But the manner in which she orchestrates these events, and her shrewd insights into human frailties have made her an enduringly popular writer.
Pride and Prejudice(1813) has the famous opening line "It is a fact universally recognised that a man with a fortune must be in search a wife." It's a story of the empty-headed and garrulous Mrs Bennet, who has but one aim in life - to find a good match for each of her daughters. Her husband is a mild-mannered and indolent man, much given to making witty cynicisms, and he refuses to take this vulgar prospect seriously.
The pride of the title belongs to its hero Mr Darcy, and the prejudice to heroine Elizabeth Bennet, who has lessons to learn from life. This was Jane Austen's first major success as a novelist - though not the first of her books to be written. It's a perfect place to start - witty, sophisticated writing, and some well-observed character sketches. It seems as fresh today as ever.
Sense and Sensibility (1811) casts two sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as representatives of 'sense' and 'sensibility' respectively. Elinor bears her social disappointments with dignity and restraint - and thereby gets her man. Marianne on the other hand is excitable and impetuous, following her lover to London - where she quickly becomes disillusioned with him. Recovering and gaining more 'sense', she then sees the good qualities in her old friend Colonel Brandon, who has been waiting in the wings and is now conveniently on hand to propose marriage.
The first part of Northanger Abbey (1818) is set in drawing rooms of Bath. The heroine is imaginative Catherine Morland who falls in love with Henry Tilney, a young clergyman. When he invites her to meet his family at the Abbey however, she sees nothing but Gothic melodrama at every turn - since they were very fashionable at the time. Her visions of medieval horror prove groundless of course. This is Jane Austen's satirical critique of Romantic cliché and excess. But Catherine eventually learns to see the world in a realistic light - and gets her man in the end. This volume also contains the early short novels Lady Susan and The Watsons, as well as the unfinished Sanditon.
Mansfield Park (1814) is more serious after the comedy of the earlier novels. Heroine Fanny Price is adopted into the family of her rich relatives. She is long-suffering and passive to a point which makes her almost unappealing - but her refusal to tolerate any drop in moral standards eventually teaches lessons to all concerned. (All that is except standout character Mrs Norris who is a sponging and interfering Aunt you will never forget.) The hero Edmund is dazzled by sexually attractive Mary Crawford - but in the nick of time sees the error of his ways and marries Fanny instead. Slow moving, but full of moral subtleties. Emma (1816) Charming and wilful Emma Woodhouse amuses herself by dabbling in other people's affairs, planning their lives the way she sees fit. Most of her match-making plots go badly awry, and moral confusion reigns until she abandons her self-delusion and wakes up to the fact that stern but honourable Mr Knightly is the right man for her after all. As usual, money and social class underpin everything. Some wonderful comic scenes, and a rakish character Frank Churchill who finally reveals his flaws by making the journey to London just to get his hair cut.
Persuasion (1818) is the most mature of her novels, if one of the least exciting. Heroine Anne Elliott has been engaged to Captain Wentworth, but has broken off the engagement in deference to family and friends. Meeting him again eight years later, she goes against conventional wisdom and accepts his second proposal of marriage. Anne is a sensitive and thoughtful character, quite unlike some of the earlier heroines. Jane Austen wrote of her "She is almost too good for me". There is a shift of location to Lyme Regis for this novel, which reveals for the first time a heroine acting from a deep sense of personal conviction, against the grain of conventional wisdom.
The Complete Critical Guide to Jane Austen is a good introduction to Austen criticism and commentary. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings - from Walter Scott to critics of the present day. It also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist journals. It also has an interesting chapter discussing Austen on the screen.
Jane Austen - complete critical guide
Biography, guidance notes, and criticism of Jane Austen
This comes from a new series by Routledge which offers comprehensive but single-volume introductions to major English writers. They are aimed at students of literature, but are accessible to general readers who might like to deepen their understanding.
The approach taken is quite straightforward. Part One is a potted biography of Austen, placing her life and work in a socio-historical context. This takes into account the role of women in the early nineteenth century; the position of a female author in the world of book publishing at the time; the social conventions surrounding women and marriage; and the sheer political fact that she was living at the time of the French revolution and war between Britain and France. Part Two provides a synoptic view of Austen's six great novels - from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion. The works are described in outline, and then their main themes illuminated. This is followed by pointers towards the main critical writings on these texts and issues.
Part Three deals with criticism of Austen's work. This is presented in chronological order - from contemporaries such as Walter Scott to critics of the present day, with the focus on feminist and gender criticism, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism. Some of the readings Irvine outlines will be quite provocative and surprising to many readers - particularly those dealing with such issues as slavery in Mansfield Park and both sexual and homosexual readings of Sense and Sensibility.
The book ends with a commendably thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Austen journals. There is also a separate chapter which deals with Austen on screen. This discusses the controversial issue of Austen's work as it has been appropriated to project modern notions of English nationalism and the 'heritage industry'.
This will be an excellent starting point for students who are new to Austen's work - and a refresher course for those who would like to keep up to date with criticism. And it certainly is up to date - with references to publications only just over a year old at the time of publication.
Robert P. Irvine, Jane Austen, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp.190
Jane Austen - her life and works
1775. Jane Austen born in Steventon rectory, Hampshire, the daughter of a local rector. She was the youngest of seven children. Two brothers go on to serve at sea. Two others enter the church.
1780+. Her father was a competent scholar who encourages her education in English literature, French, and Italian.
1790. Early writing and experiments with what she described as 'nonsense, burlesque and satire'.
1795. Lady Susan - a short novel written in epistolary form. Elinor and Marianne exists as first draft of what was to become Sense and Sensibility.
1796. Begins to write First Impressions, which was completed as Pride and Prejudice the following year. Reads Fanny Burney (1752-1840) the creator of 'the novel of home life'.
Jane Austen: a Life is a biography which traces Jane Austen's progress through a difficult childhood, an unhappy love affair, her experiences as a poor relation and her decision to reject a marriage that would solve all her problems - except that of continuing as a writer. Both the woman and the novels are radically reassessed in this biography. Her life might have been superficially uneventful, but Claire Tomalin brings out the flesh and blood woman who lies behind the cool, ironic prose.
1798. Northanger Abbey a deliberate satire of the type of Gothic Romance (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk) then in vogue. It was sold - but not published. This and all her subsequent work was published anonymously.
1801. Father retires to live with family in Bath.
1805. Death of father. The Watsons written about this time.
1807. Family settles to live in Southampton.
1809. Family moves to Chawton, Hampshire (owned by Jane Austen's brother). She writes all her novels in a corner of one sitting-room surrounded by the entire family.
1811. Sense and Sensibility published. Title pages states 'By a Lady'. Immediate success.
1813. Pride and Prejudice published and goes into second edition same year.
1814. Mansfield Park published.
1815. Emma published. First translations into French appear.
1817. Writes Sanditon. Dies at Winchester. Buried in the cathedral. Persuasion published posthumously.
The Complete Critical Guide to Jane Austen is a good introduction to Austen criticism and commentary. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings - from Walter Scott to critics of the present day. It also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist journals. It also has an interesting chapter discussing Austen on the screen.
Jane Austen - selected literary criticism
F.W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Cambridge (Mass), 1979.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, revised 1987.
W.A. Craick, Jane Austen: the Six Novels, London: Methuen, 1965.
D.D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Education, London, 1975.
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels, Baltimore (Md) and London, 1971.
Jane Austen - biographical studies
David Cecil, A Portrait of Jane Austen, London: Constable, 1978.
R.W. Chapman (ed) Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, (2nd edn) London 1952, repr. 1979.
R.W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems, Oxford 1948, repr. 1970.
John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen, Baltimore and London, 1984.
Park Honan, Jane Austen: her life, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
Elizabeth Jenkins, Jane Austen: a Biography, London: Gollancz, 1949.
Marghanita Laski, Jane Austen, London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.
George Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen's Family, Manchester, 1983.
Welcome to the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England.
Much more than information about the Jane Austen Centre, this website features an online Jane Austen magazine with over 500 articles, a giftshop, information about the Jane Austen Festival, Regency tea rooms, walking tours, Jane Austen's Regency World magazine, an online quiz plus a comprehensive list of research relevant Jane Austen related links-we even have a monthly E-newsletter which will keep you up to date with the world of Jane Austen.
The Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street in Bath is a permanent exhibition which tells the story of Jane's Bath experience - the effect that living here had on her and her writing.
The exhibition is enhanced during 2008 with 'Costumes from BBC's Miss Austen Regrets featuring the dresses worn by Olivia Williams as Jane Austen. The stunning costumes are the work of BAFTA and EMMY award winning designer Andrea Galer.
Jane Austen is perhaps the best known and best loved of Bath's many famous residents and visitors. She paid two long visits here towards the end of the eighteenth century, and from 1801 to 1806 Bath was her home.
Her intimate knowledge of the city is reflected in two of her novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which are largely set in Bath.
The city is still very much as Jane Austen knew it, preserving in its streets, public buildings and townscapes the elegant well-ordered world that she portrays so brilliantly in her novels. Now the pleasure of exploring Jane Austen's Bath can be enhanced by visiting the Jane Austen Centre in Gay Street. Here, in a Georgian town house in the heart of the city, the visitor can find out more about Bath in Jane Austen's time and the importance of Bath in her life and work.
We have an attractive shop which offers an unrivalled selection of Jane Austen related books, DVD's, CD's,linen, jewellery, gifts, cards, stationery, lace and needlepoint.
Retrieved from:
IRVINE, Robert P., Jane Austen, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp.190
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A fly by imagination
And life passes so quickly...
Because literature is part of our history.
The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination. I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.
