To Err Is Human. And How! And Why. By DWIGHT GARNER

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/books/11book.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb5