The Wrong Stuff

My Country Right or Wrong: Conscientious Objector Josh Stieber on Being Wrong About the Military

Kathryn Schulz — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:03:00 GMT

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a 13-year-old kid named Josh Stieber vowed that as soon as he was old enough, he would join the military. His goal: to help protect his country and spread its values of freedom and democracy around the world. With the war still on when he graduated from high school, Stieber enlisted in 2006 and was deployed to Baghdad in 2007. A devout Christian and a staunch political conservative, Stieber became troubled by the gap between the values he was told the military embodied and those he experienced on the ground. Partway through his deployment, he realized that his perspective had changed so drastically that he would rather go to prison than remain in the military. Instead, he learned about, applied for, and obtained Conscientious Objector status. (For more on conscientious objectors, see my interview with J.E. McNeil , head of the Center on Conscience and War .)

In the interview below, Stieber, who is now 22, spoke with me about how his expectations and his experiences of military life collided, what it feels when "everything you've defined yourself by has fallen apart," and how George W. Bush and Gandhi each played a pivotal role in shaping his military career.

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Tell me a bit about your background.

I grew up in suburban D.C. in a pretty religious family and went to an evangelical Christian school. My family was very much involved in the church, and my father's pretty political; when I was in high school I worked with him on the Bush campaign.

How did you think about war as you were growing up?

The high school I went to was supervised by the church that my family attended, and one of the books we read in government class was called The Faith of George W. Bush . Bush was presented as an example of what a strong Christian man should look like, and the global war on terror was presented as an opportunity to rescue an oppressed people and spread democracy through the Middle East, along with Christian and Western values.

What was it about Bush that exemplified the ideal Christian man?

A lot of it had to do with his assertiveness: the idea of moral certainty, the way he spoke in absolute values of good and evil, and the idea that you don't negotiate with terrorists, you don't talk to people on the other side. You're right, and you have morals on your side, and you're willing to be outspoken about them and willing to criticize others for not living your way of life.

What made you decide to enlist? Do you come from a military family?

Both my grandfathers served, but my dad didn't. I would say that Bush book influenced me a lot. By about midway through high school, I was pretty certain that that's what I was going to do.

What about your classmates? Were many of them enlisting as well?

No, that was one of the interesting things. Everybody in my class agreed with me religiously and politically, and it kind of frustrated me that no one else was putting it into practice. Toward the very end of high school, I started asking a lot more questions and becoming more critical of the system, because I saw a lot of people talking a good game but wondered why I was only the only one really doing anything about it.

Why do you think you were the one putting your beliefs into practice?

My parents are both people who act on their beliefs. I don't always agree with how they act, but they definitely demonstrated for me a correspondence: If you believe something, you need to act on it.

What was your experience like after you enlisted?

Pretty quickly after I got in, I started to see inconsistencies between how the military was talked about in such glorified ways [when I was] growing up, and then how it was acted out in training. Training was very desensitizing. We screamed slogans like, "Kill them all, let God sort them out." We watched videos with bombs being dropped on Middle Eastern villages with rock and roll music in the background. People really started to celebrate death and destruction, and that definitely didn't match up to what I'd expected. I'd told myself that I was willing to kill if necessary, but that wasn't the same as celebrating it.

Were other people around you noticing these inconsistencies as well?

To varying degrees. I think a lot of people didn't really feel it, though. Honestly, at the time I didn't realize how psychologically influential that kind of thing is, either. You know, they do it in kind of a discreet way; we would march and sing one song and it would be perfectly harmless, and then the next song would be about killing women and children. So you mix it up back and forth and I guess you don't really realize the implications. But later on when you're in action, I think it does play a role.

How did you handle it at the time? Were you feeling uncomfortable and actively wrestling with these issues, or was it more of a background concern?

At the time, I kept telling myself that the ends justified whatever questionable means we were taught. I had kind of a moral back-and-forth around that. And then I went back and forth politically between whether or not we were keeping the higher ideal of spreading truth and democracy or just cleaning up the mess we had made. But I still just went along with things and said to myself, "Even if I disagree with a lot of different aspects of training, it's OK so long as I don't let it influence me.

Did you tell anyone about your concerns?

I did write back home to family members and different leaders in my church to say, "This kind of thing doesn't seem to match up with all these things I was taught." The answer usually was that same thinking — that the ends justify the means.

Part of me felt that they couldn't understand, that they didn't know what I was going through and couldn't relate. But at the same time, I didn't know what else I could do. They didn't have a great answer and neither did I.

When did your willingness to go along start to shift toward a sense that you couldn't remain in the military?

That didn't take place until I actually deployed and was confronted with making crucial decisions. One of the values I'd been taught and that you hear all the time in the rhetoric of political and military leaders was that democracy is a good thing and it thrives on the will of the people.

That came into question a couple of months after we got to Baghdad. We were moving off the main base and going to live in an old factory in the poor industrial part of town. As we were moving in, the local population came out and held a large peaceful protest and told us very straightforwardly that they didn't want us in their part of town. We ignored that and pushed them out of our way and established ourselves in the factory. Within a couple of days, we had built a large barrier around the full city block that we were living in and continued to displace people who lived and worked there. So this idea that we were there to liberate the common people and help their will flourish — the way we handled that situation seemed to be the complete opposite of it.

What kind of reaction to that did you see on the ground? If you perceived the discrepancy between American rhetoric and American actions, I assume many Iraqis did, too.

Yes, absolutely. They had tried telling us nonviolently that they didn't want us in their neighborhood, and when that didn't work, they tried telling us violently, by using snipers and roadside bombs and that kind of thing. And once they started to get violent, we started to get violent, too. It went back and forth and each attack seemed to be more severe than the last one. Eventually the escalation led to a kind of desperation on the part of a lot of soldiers. There's really no way to defend yourself against a sniper shot or a roadside bomb, so some of our leaders felt that the only way we could defend ourselves was to intimidate the local population into preventing the violence in the first place. So our battalion commanders gave the order that every time a bomb went off, we were entitled to open fire on whoever was standing around.

The way I interpreted that was that we were told to out-terrorize the terrorists. That was really troubling for me; I found it wrong both morally and strategically. If that happened to me, that wouldn't make me more likely to help out whatever army was doing that; it would make me more likely to oppose them. I was in a couple of situations where I was ordered to do that and I refused that order. So that was when I was really forced to make a decision about what I stood for.

So much of military life is about discipline and hierarchy — the willingness to follow orders and uphold a command structure and community cohesion. Given that, how did you decide to refuse the order, and what were the consequences?

It was a split-second decision. When I heard the initial instruction of what to do if that scenario happened, I had just kind of hoped it wouldn't happen. But in the moment when it did happen, I couldn't justify shooting an unarmed civilian. I said I wasn't going to do it, and got criticized by a number of my leaders. But it was something I just felt I couldn't do. In terms of the consequences, I eventually got fired as a gunner and got placed as a radio operator instead.

Were you talking with others about your misgivings?

Yeah, I was trying to talk to as many people as I could and tell them why I thought it was wrong and pretty much a recipe to turn the entire population against us. Some people were willing to discuss it and others were not. When it came down to it, most people said they were going to do whatever it took to make it home alive.

That's easy to understand. Fear is a great corrosive to ethics. Did you worry about your own safety, and did it affect the decisions you made?

Yeah, I thought about it a lot. And there were things I did that I didn't feel comfortable with. Standing by when a prisoner got beaten — that kind of thing was a decision not to speak out, and I made decisions like that. So even if I wasn't actively doing something that I thought was wrong, I was definitely passive in cases where I shouldn't have been.

Eventually I just got to the point where I was so torn up about what I was taking part in that I really stopped caring about my own physical safety. You know, when everything you've defined yourself by has fallen apart, you don't care that much what happens to you. And I definitely went through a time like that.

That sounds like a pretty good description of depression.

Yeah, I went though a phase where I had a lot of the symptoms. I didn't really sleep, I didn't feel like eating much, when we were on patrols I didn't care about protecting myself. To a large extent, life really lost its meaning for a while.

Was there a tipping point when you realized you had to get out?

One night, I was guarding a prisoner with a friend of mine, a guy I had gone to church with before we had deployed. So we're sitting there and my friend starts making threatening statements about what he wants to do to the prisoner. It wasn't too uncommon to abuse prisoners, but I didn't feel like it was right, so I asked my friend about the American ideals that we grew up hearing about. I said, "Why would you do that to this guy? Isn't one of the values that we were raised with is that somebody's innocent until proven guilty?" My friend said, "No, this guy is Iraqi, he's part of the problem, he's guilty, and here's what I want to do to him." That wasn't unusual. It had gotten to the point where most people blamed the entire Iraqi population and said that if they would just fix their own country, we could go home.

I thought back to all the stuff I'd heard sitting next to this guy in church, and I asked him, "Well, even if he is guilty, what about the idea of loving our enemies and returning evil with good and turning the other cheek? How do you reconcile all those teachings?" My friend said, "I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around." Hearing him say it that way just made it sound so ridiculous. Here we supposedly had faith in this guy who very clearly was punked around, and ended up living and dying with sacrificial love. From then on, I really had to face the fact that I couldn't have it both ways. Either I was going to try to find this inward reality where sacrificial love was possible for a higher goal, or I was going to let self-defense be my ultimate value.

How did you make that choice?

At the time, as much as I wanted to live up to my ideals, I didn't really see any practical ways of doing it. That was a kind of lack of faith on my part. But then I learned a lesson, pretty much by accident. On the base there were a couple of shops that sold bootleg copies of DVDs, and they'd have eight videos on one disc. One time I bought a movie I wanted to watch, and the DVD had the Gandhi movie on it too, so I went ahead and watched it. And I thought: You know, the stuff that we're doing violently is only making the situation worse, so maybe this guy was onto something. Maybe there are other ways of solving problems.

I understand that before you learned about conscientious objection, you'd decided to go to jail rather than remain in the military.

Yeah. I came to that decision after having read about a lot of the things that Gandhi did and seeing that you could do something about the situation you were in. You weren't just stuck in it. It really came down to this idea that I wouldn't want other people to do to me or my family or community what we were doing on a regular basis to other people. This inward reality that I had started to explore and that had started to bring meaning back into my life — preserving that became more important than preserving my external reality.

I had a couple of weeks to spend with my family and friends back home, and I told them about my plan [to go to military prison]. My parents kind of flipped out and did a lot of research and found out about conscientious objection, which I didn't know about, or didn't know was still an option in the military.

When you say your parents flipped out, were they mainly concerned about the idea of you going to prison, or were they unhappy about your rejection of military life?

My immediate family was kind of shocked by it all. I think it took a lot for them to really think through it and try to reconcile it with what they already believed. On a personal level, they were supportive of me and said that they'd help with whatever decision I made, but on a philosophical level, they couldn't really hear me out. That was pretty much true for my friends and community, too. Overall, people were supportive of me personally, but I don't know how much it changed the way they view things.

Is that still the case — that your family supports you but disagrees with what you did?

For the most part, yeah. We have respect for each other, but we're pretty far apart in terms of beliefs. Both my parents are still firmly convinced that the war was the right thing. My dad's pretty involved in the Tea Party movement, so things get kind of dicey whenever we talk about politics or religion, but so long as we stay away from that, we're able to be pretty respectful. I've got a younger brother who I was able to talk to a lot throughout the process and we've grown close and see pretty eye-to-eye on a lot of things, so that's been positive.

Even so, it sounds tough to have most your family not really understand you. Are you lonely?

Yeah, that's definitely a challenge. One of the things that makes it really hard is that some of the underlying ways that I think, I do attribute to my family in positive ways. The idea of responsibility — I remember when I was a kid and would get in trouble and try to blame someone else for what I'd done, my parents would always tell me to focus on myself first rather than going around criticizing others.

I think a lot of what I've done has been a manifestation of those values, and to see the people who taught them to me enact them in such different ways, or at times it seems other things have taken priority over those values — that can be challenging. Of all the people in the world who should see things the same way I do, who should be passionate about the same things I am and offended by the same things I am, it would make sense that it would be the people who taught me to think this way. When that's not the case, that can be very hard.

What about people you knew in the military? How did they respond to your decision to seek conscientious objector status?

At the beginning there were a couple of leaders who were pretty upset at me. I was ridiculed by some of them. One in particular got really upset at me and called me a terrorist and a traitor and a lot of other names in front of the rest of the company. I tried to practice what I had learned in Iraq — that responding violently often made the situation worse, but that by sitting down and trying to understand people who thought differently than we did, we were able to create progress. So even though he said a lot of hurtful things, I tried to be patient and reach out to him, and slowly he went from being angry at me to being slightly friendly and then actually encouraging. When I finally got approved [for conscientious objector status], this guy who had been about as angry as I had ever seen a person actually gave me a hug and wished me good luck.

One thing that's tricky about changing your mind about such a huge thing is that it can undermine your faith in other convictions, too. Like: "I no longer believe X thing that I learned growing up, so what about Y and Z?"

Yeah, I definitely underwent that process. I started from a point of assuming that I had all the answers and that people had to live my way of life. I was pretty convinced that I was right on all the moral issues and the traditional political stances. Now I've become a lot more open and tried to appreciate other ways of doing things. I've realized that I don't have the final answer on everything.

What's next for you?

I'm going to school full-time now and debating between becoming a history teacher or going into social work. And I'm also doing some writing on the side; I'm hoping to get out a book about my experiences.

If you could hear anyone else talk about being wrong, who would it be?

I guess for me personally, the most interesting would be to hear from the people who came up with a lot of the justification and rhetoric of the war that I so strongly believed in. Somebody like Colin Powell would be really fascinating, but I know getting something candid from someone that high up is pretty difficult.

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Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with former Watergate felon turned evangelical leader Chuck Colson , sex critic and educator Susie Bright , Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall , Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld , marriage counselor Harville Hendrix , Google research director Peter Norvig , Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Once a Marine, Always a Marine ... Maybe: J.E. McNeil on Conscientious Objectors and Wrongness

Kathryn Schulz — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:47:00 GMT

"When you join the military," says J.E. McNeil, executive director of the Center on Conscience on War , "one of the hundreds of forms you sign says, 'I didn't apply to be a conscientious objector for the draft, I've never been a conscientious objector, and I'm not a conscientious objector now.' " That requirement makes sense, McNeil says: "You don't want a military made up of conscientious objectors. They're not very useful in combat."

Fair enough, but what happens when members of the Armed Services realize that they no longer believe in the war they are fighting, or in fighting at all? In another installment in this series , 22-year-old Iraq War veteran Josh Stieber tells the story of changing his mind about military service. In the below interview, we get a bird's-eye view of the situation facing conscientious objectors from McNeil, whose faith-based nonprofit organization has been defending the rights of conscientious objectors since WWII.

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How hard is it to obtain CO status once you're in the military?

There's a Department of Defense regulation that provides that if a person has a change of heart and for moral, ethical, or religious beliefs comes to conscientiously oppose their own participation in war in any form, they can either ask to be discharged or ask to be a non-combatant.

But it's not easy, and it takes time. You have to file an application form with many questions: What do you believe that leads you to file this application? How did you come by those beliefs? When did those beliefs change so that you no longer could be in the military? What do you believe about the use of force? What in your life shows that your beliefs have changed?

Then what?

You submit that form to your commanding officer, who appoints an investigating officer. Then you meet with a psychiatrist, who determines whether or not there are mental health issues that would cause you to leave the military. Then you meet with a chaplain — who may or may not be of the same religious faith as you — who determines whether or not you are sincere. Then the IO [investigating officer] has a hearing, to which you can bring witnesses to say, "Yes, he used to be gung ho about the military and now he hates everything to do with it."

After the hearing, the investigating officer makes a recommendation and the commanding officer makes a decision. In every other decision except for medical discharges, a commanding officer is not second-guessed. But under military regulations, these [CO decisions] go up the chain of command to the Pentagon, and any one of the people along the way can say, "No, he's not a CO," even though they've never met the guy.

How many conscientious objector application are approved each year?

It depends on the branch, but it ranges between 75 to 50 percent. And it also depends on where we are in a war. At the beginning of the Vietnam War, something like 90 percent of application were denied. At the end, 90 percent were granted. The same thing is happening now with Iraq and Afghanistan; more are being granted, and faster, than they were at the beginning.

Do you find any common denominator among conscientious objectors, in terms of characteristics, background, outlook, or anything else?

Only this: I find that almost everyone who comes to us tends to be very conscientious across the board. Whatever they do, they do it well. I think that's one reason that people get annoyed with them when they seek a discharge: because they were good at what they were doing. They often excel; they're often award-winning. One of these guys kept getting awards in the Navy while his CO application was pending, because he was going to be conscientious in his job right up until the moment when he could walk away from it.

But other than that, no. We've got a guy who was a conservative Christian, and it was becoming an atheist and a libertarian that caused his change of heart. Other times we get guys who were atheists and become Christian. There really isn't one story.

What kinds of factors do people cite as triggering their reversal on the military?

It really varies, although there are some patterns. When people have a change of heart in boot camp, it's often because of the cadences: "Kill, Kill, Kill" or "What makes the grass grow green? Blood, blood, blood, brains and guts, blood makes the grass grow green." You can go on YouTube and hear some lovely cadences about napalm. There you are doing double time about the granny who turned into a torch. For some people, that's enough.

I remember one CO application where the woman was being hazed because she wouldn't say "Kill, kill, kill" but she felt that if she said it, God would strike her dead on the spot and she'd go to hell. She said, "I realized: This is not something I can say, this is not something I can do, and this is not someone I can be."

What about people who change their minds later in the process?

Other people kind of bop along until they get a deployment order and have to face what it is that they're going to go do. Especially with national guards and reserves, you can go down to Guatemala and build a road and feel like you're doing good stuff, and then you get a deployment order and you know you're going to be asked to shoot people. And you go, "You know, I joined the national guard to build levees, not to blow people's heads off." There's an internal confrontation at that point, and it can become very difficult.

Do most people contact you before deployment, then?

No. For many people, the change of heart doesn't happen until they're in combat or have come back from combat. I'll never forget that right as we were invading Iraq, I got a call from a guy who was an Army ranger. He'd been at it for seven and a half years, all of it active duty. He said, "When I was in Afghanistan, I had a child in my sights, and I just realized that I couldn't do this anymore. I only had six more months on my contract, so I figured I'd come back from Afghanistan and wouldn't re-up. But they stop-lossed me in and they're deploying me to Iraq. And I just can't do it."

I can tell you lots of horrible stories of what it is that turned people away in battle — people who killed a kid who was walking toward them with a grenade, only then they realized it wasn't a grenade. Things like that. Things worse than that.

For people who change their minds during active duty, do you find that incidents like those — where it becomes difficult to continue to think of yourself as the good guy — are the most frequent trigger?

That's a common one, but it's not the only one. There are more mundane causes as well. For some people, it's having children. Or there's the story of Josh Casteel , who was interrogating someone and the person he was questioning said, "Your God tells you to love your enemy. How do you reconcile that with what you are doing?" Josh suddenly realized that he couldn't, and that was that.

To what extent does youth play a role in these changes of heart? Many people get involved with the military when they're quite young, and most of us don't have fully formed belief systems at 17 or 18.

That's right, and the military is well aware of it. That's why they're happy to recruit you when you're 17 and 18, because hopefully they can shape your worldview to the one they want. It's also why the United States government rejected signing the child soldier protocol of the U.N. for so long: because we can recruit 17-years-old with a parent's signature.

You definitely see some of these kids growing up and starting to think it through and coming to a crisis. It's not uncommon for us to get guys who start their time in the military drinking and partying, and then as they get older and more mature, they start doing more reading and thinking and studying, and they conclude that this is not a life they feel they can live.

It seems to me that one of the things that must be hardest about realizing you can no longer serve in the military is that being a member of the Armed Services is very much about identity —

Once a marine, always a marine.

Exactly. So when you decide you can't be involved anymore, you're really concluding not only that you were wrong about a choice you made, but also about an identity you'd adopted. What's that like for people?

I've heard from a lot of guys who feel completely isolated in their units, sometimes deliberately so. And sometimes they are rejected not just by their unit but by their family. I can think of several people whose families have said, "If you're a CO, you're a coward and you're not my son or not my daughter."

One of the reasons we started posting photographs of successful CO applicants on our Web site is to try to show people that there's another community out there, that COs represent a broad range of people and you can find a place among them. We try as hard as we can to provide emotional support, because the experience is very isolating. A lot of guys are just so grateful that there's anybody who at all understands what they're talking about. Last week we had a guy who had felt isolated and miserable and was virtually suicidal until somebody said the words "conscientious objector" to him, and he was just so excited that he wasn't going crazy — that there was a name for how he felt and other people who feel that way.

In talking to people who've undergone radical shifts in their belief systems, I've heard some stories where the shift was very gradual and others where there was a sudden epiphany. Do you tend hear one kind more than the other?

They can be either, or even both. Sometimes it's just a long, slow process. Other times, there's a long buildup followed by a flash: a moment where it's, "No, this is the breaking point, this is the end." And sometimes the whole thing seems to happen in a flash, like the guy who was doing the interrogation.

We call the flashes "Road to Damascus moments." What's interesting is that Army regulations provide for the ability to have a Road to Damascus religious conversion but not a nonreligious one. We tried to take that to the Supreme Court and got pretty close, but it didn't happen. That's one of the unfairnesses in the system.

Wait, what? You're saying that according to Army regulations, you can have a religious epiphany but not an ethical one? You can come to God in a moment, but all nonreligious moral change has to be gradual?

Right. In a couple of Korean War-era cases, the Supreme Court ruled that because the First Amendment says we don't have an established church, conscientious objector status can be based on moral or ethical grounds, not just religion, and the regulations in all the [military] branches reflect that.

But in the Army, the regulations say that if the petition for CO status comes from a nonreligious basis, it has to come from "study and meditation." "Study and meditation" does not allow for a Road to Damascus conversion.

Wow. Fascinating. Other than this issue, are there aspects of the conscientious objector regulations you regard as unfair and have tried or are trying to change?

One major issue is selective objection. Lieutenant Watada was the classic example: He was willing to fight in Afghanistan, but he was not willing to fight in Iraq. He felt that his religious beliefs forbade him to fight an unjust war, and he felt that the invasion of Iraq was unjust. That's not recognized. What that means is that we have a law that tracks to the religious beliefs of a very, very narrow sector of society. Because let's face it: Quakers, Mennonites,and Brethrens — even when you throw in Seventh Day Adventists and a few other churches — these people do not make up a significant percentage of the population of the United States.

Most churches, including Catholics, Methodists, and Episcopalians, recognize the "just war" concept: Some wars are just, and some wars are unjust. So we feel the statute has established a narrow faith litmus test, and that it should be possible for someone who is a conscientious objector to an unjust war to receive a discharge. That was the law in Great Britain. It's not the law in Israel, but it's sort of de facto: Many members of the Israeli military refuse to fight in the Occupied Territories and aren't punished for it. So it's not an undoable thing, and it would more accurately reflect the beliefs of a much larger number of people.

Someone who was less than sympathetic to your work would say that most COs aren't experiencing sincere belief change — that they're fine as long as military life is all about training and ROTC and hanging out in the United States, but as soon as they get into combat they freak out and just want a ticket out of there. What would you say to that?

I would like them to explain to me why so many of these guys don't realize that they're COs when they're in Afghanistan and Iraq; they realize it when they come home. If it was just about "I want to get out of here," they would do it overseas, not two months after they get back, three months after they get back, a year after they get back. I would be getting calls from Fallujah every day, instead of from Omaha.

Some people are going to be cynical; fine, they can be cynical. I think the reality is that we ignore the possibility that people can experience real change, on this issue or any other, at our own peril.

I've been talking mainly about people concluding that they themselves were wrong about war. But I'm curious about whether deception or misinformation also play a role? Do you find that many people feel they were deliberately misled about the realities of military life?

There's a joke about military recruiters: "How can you tell when they're lying? When their mouth is moving." I've used that line in front of military audiences and had people in the military come up to me afterward and tell me that I'm way too nice on recruiters. That's true. I am nice to them, because I think they have the worst job in the military. For a while it was not uncommon for the military to send guy with PTSD to recruit. Recruiters have a higher suicide rate than the general population stateside, and they have terrifically stressful jobs; for a recruiter to get one recruit, they have to make something like 300 contacts.

But you know, they get great training. The military has done millions and millions of dollars in marketing research about who to target and how and what to say, and they're extremely good at it. They know that in one neighborhood you promise this and in a different neighborhood you promise that. One of my favorite stories is about this kid who called me up and said, "A friend of mine was very happily joining the Marines and I took him down to sign the papers and I don't know how it happened, but after I left, I had joined the Marines. I've never wanted to join the Marines. I can't understand how I joined the Marines. But I joined the Marines, and I need your help."

So that tells you how persuasive they are. And they are not fighting fair. They are not giving these kids the real information — information about things like rates of suicides, rates of sexual assault, the reality about the educational and job training opportunities, the reality for minorities in the military.

One last question: if you could hear anyone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

I've seen The Fog of War , and it was intriguing, but [Robert McNamara] never once said, "I was wrong." He's a classic "mistakes were made" guy. That would be who I really want to hear from [if he were still alive]. I suppose that reflects my age, and how long I've been doing this work.

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Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

From the White House to the Jailhouse to the Pulpit: Chuck Colson on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:05:00 GMT

Every conversion story is, at heart, a story about being wrong. Whether they are agonizingly slow or all but instantaneous, whether they happen in a garden or in prison or on the road to Damascus, conversions don't just represent the embrace of a new worldview. They also represent the utter rejection of the convert's past. Consider, for example, Chuck Colson, and the strange tale of how (as this magazine once put it) "a Watergate crook became America's greatest Christian conservative."

Today, Colson is a prominent evangelical leader and founder of the Prison Fellowship and the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview . During the Nixon administration, though, he was, by all accounts (including his own) secular, self-obsessed, and scary. Officially, he was special counsel to the president. Unofficially, he was Nixon's hatchet man and "the White House tough guy." In 1973, as the waters of Watergate rose around him, Colson simultaneously found God and found himself in prison for obstruction of justice. Below, he and I talk about why he converted, what he regrets most about his involvement with Watergate, and why Christianity is "the religion of second chances."

You have a fairly dramatic conversion story. What first prompted it?

I was the principle strategist behind the 1972 reelection campaign of Richard Nixon, and when it was all over I should have been absolutely on top of the world. I'd succeeded, we won, it was a historic landslide. But instead I found myself staring out of the office window thinking, "So what?" I was getting ready to go back to my law firm and was going to make a fortune — literally, a half a million dollars a year. And I felt dead. Really dead.

Then I met a man who'd been a client of mine before I'd went to the White House. I'd not seen him the whole time I was in the White House, and when I went back to be his general counsel again, he was totally different, completely changed. I asked him what had happened to him. And he said these words: "I've accepted Jesus Christ and committed my life to him."

Well, I'm not from the Bible Belt. I come from New England, and I'm not used to people talking like that. I was startled, and I just sort of stared at him uncomfortably.

Was that just social discomfort, or was it an inner discomfort — the first stirrings of your conversion?

It must have been the latter, because about four months later, I called him up one night and said, "I'd like to come see you." I drove over and spent an evening on his porch — this was August of 1973 — and he read to me from a little book entitled Mere Christianity , by C.S. Lewis. It was about pride, and it described me to a T.

That night when I left this gentleman's home, something happened that had never happened to me before. I was getting into my automobile and I sat there and I couldn't drive because I was crying too hard. I spent an hour on the side of the road right next to my friend's home, crying, thinking about my wife, wanting to know God, wanting to be clean. I'm a former Marine captain and I was the White House tough guy, and I used to never cry — and if did, I wouldn't let anybody know it. I thought the next morning I would wake up and be embarrassed. But I felt better than I had in years.

Can you recollect what you were crying about?

Sure, I can remember vividly. I was feeling totally lost and lonely and helpless and really conflicted about my own sinful behavior. A lot the stuff I was charged with in Watergate, some of it was true and some of it wasn't, but my attitude towards other people and my self-obsession — I had a lot to think about in my life that I wasn't very proud of. For the first time in my life, I realized I'd made a mess of things.

I'm trying to figure out the timeline here. When did that evening in your car happen in relation to Watergate?

That was in August of 1973, and that fall, my life absolutely plummeted. Initially the lawyers had told me I was not a target of the Watergate investigation. Within one month of my conversion, they told me I was a target, and I began to see the whole thing closing in on and me and getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

People think it was a jailhouse conversion — that my life fell apart and I converted. But I knew before that I was a different person. I began to have different values and a different attitude. I began to study the Bible. I was in a small prayer group with a group of men who really nurtured me and taught me lots of what I needed to know as a Christian and helped me to live my faith.

I admit I was one of those people who assumed it was a jailhouse conversion — that the pressures of Watergate prompted your spiritual crisis.

They really ran on parallel course. When the new [Watergate] prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was appointed, the first thing he said in his press conference was, "We have to look at the role of Mr. Colson." So I knew then that I was going to be dragged into it. That was two months before I went to visit my friend, so certainly by then I was beginning to feel the pressures of Watergate.

I was also feeling very depressed because I had worked around the clock for two years to get Richard Nixon reelected. He was my friend, I liked the man, I believed in him, and I'm watching everything I've worked day and night to build collapse around me. That was a very disillusioning experience. As much as being worried about my own future, I think that was what had me searching for something more meaningful in life.

How many of the Watergate revelations did you already know about?

A lot of it came as great surprises. I had no idea about the meetings that had taken place. As the prosecutors said when they brought the indictment against me, they could only charge me on two counts because I hadn't been in the vast majority of the meetings that constituted the cover-up. I also didn't know there was a taping system, so that was shattering. I spent most of 1973 being shocked by headlines, and not believing a lot of them at first.

Speaking of being wrong! It must be pretty stunning to learn such things about people you'd been working closely with for years.

Yeah, but you don't make any close friends in the White House. No one does. So that part wasn't so bad, but I realized how easily everything you put your heart and soul into for two years, three years, four years could go down the garbage. That was the disillusioning part.

If Watergate didn't prompt your conversion, do you feel that your conversion affected how you handled Watergate?

Oh, yes. One day I did a show with Mike Wallace. This was when Watergate was absolutely at a fever pitch and the trials were going to begin and by this time I'd been indicted. He asked me how I could be a friend of Richard Nixon, given the things Nixon had said on the tapes. And I said, "Well, he's my friend and I don't turn my back on my friend."

I got home that night and realized that there was no way I could be a good witness for Christ if I compromised on what I could say, or was not as fully honest as I could be. So I decided the best thing I could do was plead guilty. I sent my lawyers into the Watergate prosecutors to say I wouldn't plea bargain, and that I had not done what they charged me with [conspiracy to cover up the Watergate burglary], but here was something I had done [obstruction of justice] — and if they wanted to charge me with that, I would plead guilty. And I did.

When you look back on that era, what's your biggest regret?

My biggest regret is that I saw things going on that I should've known were wrong or I knew were wrong but then I rationalized them away. I didn't say anything. I should've spoken up a number of times and said, "Wait a moment, this isn't right," and I didn't. That's my greatest regret.

What do you think stopped you from speaking out?

A couple of times it was because I was in meetings with the president and [Henry] Kissinger where they said, "This is life and death national security, people are going to die if we expose these sources." So part of it was national security. Part of it was, to be perfectly honest, I wanted to stay in the inner circle. It was self interest.

Thinking back on it today, how would you characterize yourself pre-conversion?

I think I was the typical Type A person who rushes through life mostly using people. I thought much more about my own self-interest than anybody's else's. That led to the breakup of my first marriage; I was responsible for that.

When you think about that person now, how do you feel about him? Do you identify with him, do you see yourself in him?

I can't imagine I lived the way I did. I cannot imagine. I shudder when I think about it, because I feel so totally differently about life. Now, please don't get the impression that somebody who's a really bad guy and then all of a sudden finds Christ, the next day he's a saint. It doesn't work that way. I've been 37 years as a believer in Jesus Christ, and I've discovered that every year you grow a little more than the year before. It isn't like all of a sudden you turn a switch and you go from A to B. You do in one sense, because your whole worldview is very different; you realize you've got to see things the way God sees them, not the way you do. So that part changes fast, but it doesn't immediately reflect itself in how you live. That part takes time.

Paul, who was the greatest apostle of the Christian Church, said, "I die daily." He meant the old Paul had to die so the new Paul could live, and I think if we're honest with ourselves, we all need to do that.

What was the effect of your conversion on your social life? I can't imagine the new you fit very well into your old D.C. political circles.

I used to go to all the cocktail parties and drank too much and smoked constantly. I stopped doing that, but I still went back to the same people. Many of them couldn't quite figure me out, but I didn't abandon my old friends. I've always been loyal in my life, so I kept a lot of my old friends. And I have to tell you, over a period of time, many of them became believers.

Even to this day, I go out of my way to spend time with people who are in the same position I was in before my conversion, because I know how much they need to find Christ, and how much they need to have hope in their lives. I don't just stop seeing people.

Interesting. Given that you shudder when you think about your past self, I would expect that your past social circles would feel profoundly alienating.

My attitude about the cultural question is a very different issue. When I think back to all the cocktail parties I went to where everybody was trying to be seen with the most important person in the room, or where everybody was elbowing everybody else out of the way — today I just can't imagine doing that. The few times I've gone back to political events — I'm fond of my own friends in politics, but I can't wait to get away.

I've always had a populist attitude, I was always offended by elitism. When I applied to college, I applied to Harvard and Brown and was accepted at both, and Harvard called me in to tell me they had offered me a full scholarship. I thought the dean was kind of uppity and I just got turned off by the atmosphere, so I went to Brown, which was considered the poor cousin of the Ivy League in those days. I just always wanted to be a little bit different. I didn't like the elitist style of people in the Northeast, and today I found myself really repulsed by it. So maybe I already had those streaks, but they've been intensified.

Let me ask you about your time in prison. You were there for, what, about half a year?

I went to prison in June of 1974. I spent seven months there, and hated every minute of it, obviously. But I got out and was glad, because it was part of what I needed as a Christian: to see how other people lived, to be in a position where I was helpless and had to learn how to lean on God. And in the 35 years since I've been released from prison, I've spent all my time in ministry, most of it in ministry to prisoners.

What was it about your experience that inspired that decision?

When I was in prison, I saw the absolute futility of the prison system. There's no way you can take a bunch of criminals, stick 'em in a dormitory where they sit around at night comparing the crimes they committed and how they're going to do it next time, and expect to rehabilitate them. It's demeaning, it's demoralizing, it doesn't give people aspirations to do the right thing. It almost encourages the wrong thing. So I got out of prison and I realized: This isn't working.

That's what got me to start the prison ministry. But as I was trying to put Bible studies in all the prisons, they were growing so fast I couldn't keep up with them. The figures were astounding. When I got out, there were 239,000 people in prison. Today there are 2.3 million. So I started asking myself, "Why is this happening?" The prevailing view well into the 1970s was that crime is caused by environmental factors — by dysfunctional childhoods, by racism, by poverty. So the criminals became victims, victims of society, which to me didn't make sense. Then I came across two people who were doing studies on criminal behavior, and they came to the conclusion that crime is not caused by environment or poverty or deprivation. It is caused by individuals making wrong moral choices, and that's exactly what I was experiencing working with thousands of prisoners. So I got in touch with those guys and learned a lot from them.

Why are those incompatible views? It seems to me that negative environmental influences could make it harder to make good moral choices.

Professor [James Q.] Wilson at Harvard did a study on causes of crime and decided it was caused by lack of moral training during the morally formative years. So it's a character issue and it's a family issue, breakdown of the family, which got me really interested in the biblical worldview.

[Psychiatrist] Samuel Yochelson said something very, very significant; he said crime is caused by people making wrong moral choices. The answer to crime therefore is the conversion of the wrongdoer to a more responsible lifestyle. I think that's exactly what a Christian conversion is: to leave a wrongful style of life behind and realize, if you want to follow Christ, you have to live a different way. I think that's the answer to the crime problem, which is why I've spent all my career on it.

A lot of your fellow conservatives are lock-em-and-leave-em types; they're perfectly happy with the status quo of the criminal justice system. Why do you think that is?

When I first got out of prison and started talking about this in the late '70s and early '80s, most of my conservative friends thought I'd lost my mind, and most of them were against me. Then I began to develop my arguments and write about them — I wrote two books on moral justice and restorative justice: the notion that, instead of just punishing people, you put them to work and [have them] make restitution and do service — and frankly since then there's been a big change.

I tell my conservative friends who disagree with me, "You guys aren't being conservative. You're taking a big government solution, you're thinking prisons are going to change people and that's just not the case." I think I've converted a lot of my old conservative skeptics.

A lot of people who work on prison reform issues hail from the left, including the far left. What's it like to work alongside people with whom you disagree about so many other things?

I find you can work side by side. I've had no problems with that; I enjoy some of these people. There are some I find mean-spirited and just don't want to work together, but most of them do. Especially in Congress. The latest bill that was just passed on level sentencing — so that cocaine users don't get off easier than crack users — people are saying, "This campaign was led by an odd assortment of people, the ACLU and Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship." And the prison rape bill was engineered by conservatives; Jeb Sessions, a republican from Alabama, for goodness sakes, took the lead along with Ted Kennedy.

So we've been building some unlikely alliances. We disagree profoundly on questions of religious liberty, but we certainly agree that prisons aren't rehabilitating and that the prison system is a high-cost, unproductive solution. You learn to take people where you find them and not put them in a stereotypical category.

Let me ask you a few questions about wrongness and religion. We sometimes associate being wrong with being evil; if you read Saint Augustine, for instance, he grapples with the question of whether or not mistakes are sins. What do you think Christianity teaches about making mistakes?

Of all the religions and philosophies in the world, Christianity is the most interested in people who've made mistakes, because it says you can repent and be forgiven and start over again. Buddhism doesn't offer that, nor does Hinduism, nor does Judaism, nor does Islam. Christianity is the religion of second chances. I've preached in prisons in 40 countries and I've preached in 800 prisons in America, and I talk about the fact that you can be forgiven of your sins and be given a new life. In Hindu countries, their eyes open like saucers because they've never heard that. I think Christianity is one of the most tolerant of all religions when it comes to making mistakes.

Christianity also preaches humility and an awareness of our human fallibility. Yet evangelicalism presupposes that you have access to the absolute truth about God. How do you square those two things?

I don't think it's hard to do at all. If you're a Jew, you believe exactly what you're taught, which is that you're born of the covenant people. If you're a Hindu, you believe exactly what Hindus teach about reincarnation, about karma and consciousness, about the idea that we are a dream in the mind of God. These are all truth claims. And I respect everybody's right to make a truth claim.

My truth claim is that Jesus says, "No man comes to the Father but through me." Therefore I want people to come to Christ because I want them to be forgiven of their sins. It is a truth claim, but it is not an exclusive truth claim, because what Jesus is saying is: Everybody is free to come. You don't have to be born in to a certain heritage. You have to believe a certain thing. Everybody is free to come and be forgiven. That's my truth claim.

What exactly does it mean to "respect" everyone's truth claims, given that in the end you're trying to get everyone to recognize your truth claim as the real one?

We can't all be right. Ultimately I want everybody to find what I have found in life, I want to share it with people. But I also recognize that all religions have good things in them, and a lot of them share many common values. I believe moral teaching is universal, I believe we are made with a desire for certain goals and outcomes, that that's just the way we're wired. So Hindus have some very good values, Muslims do too. I don't feel exclusive. I think a lot can be learned from different faiths.

In the end, you've got to decide for you, what is the right road to God? And Christians in that sense don't have any wiggle room. We're not given any leeway in that.

What do you see as the role of doubt within religious faith?

I see doubt as a confirmation that someone is a true believer. If we believed completely, if we didn't have any doubts, we would be incapable of loving God volitionally. Richard Dawkins famously said, "If God really were God, he would have made himself well known to people." Precisely the opposite. He wouldn't make himself better known, he'd make himself less known. If we got to the point where we knew everything about Him and we had no doubts at all, love wouldn't be love. It would be like looking out your window at the tree outside; you'd just take it for granted.

You've experienced two almost completely different lives, two completely different worldviews. Can you imagine undergoing other major conversions in the future? Are there things you believe today that you can conceive of rejecting in the future?

Well, I'm a Baptist, and maybe I'll discover someday that adult baptism isn't required. Maybe I'll discover that I've had a misunderstanding of some of the doctrines of the faith. I certainly haven't spent a life studying or writing like Aquinas or Augustine did. I don't profess to have all the answers. I think there's probably a lot of things I could discover I was wrong about.

But I can't conceive that I could be wrong about the fundamental questions. Do I believe Jesus Christ is who he says he is? Does he speak with the authority of God himself? Is there a trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit? No, I cannot imagine I could be wrong about those things.

What about outside of religion? For instance, can you imagine having a change of heart on some of your political beliefs?

[laughs] I have those all the time.

Really? Like what?

You get disappointed in people, you think they're doing the right thing and then they let you down. Maybe this is the best way to explain it. I reject ideology, because ideology is manmade. It doesn't matter whether it's the right or the left. I believe you should live your life by the guidance of revealed truth. Revealed truth comes to you, in the case of the Christian, through experience, through natural law, through preserving a moral order, through being very respectful and humble because you realize you have much less wisdom than the giants who've come before you. That to me is the conservative disposition. I find that very humbling. So, yeah, I think I could wake up tomorrow and say, "Maybe I was wrong about X or Y or Z."

If you could hear someone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

Oh, my goodness. Half the politicians in America.

Which half?

Ha. Do you want me to name one person?

No, not necessarily. You can name as many as you like.

Well, how many people are willing to admit it? I've established beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the things written about me were false, but I can't get certain people to acknowledge that. I don't care if they do or don't, it's not something I lie awake wondering about.

But who would I really like to hear express a litany of all the mistakes they made? I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. All of us would have a lot of talking to do.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with sex critic and educator Susie Bright , Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall , Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld , marriage counselor Harville Hendrix , Google research director Peter Norvig , Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

XXX: Sex Critic Susie Bright on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:15:00 GMT

Gentle readers, a survey: Are you appalled or aroused by the idea of a threesome? Do you share Christine O'Donnell's views on masturbation, or are your browser's other open windows showing porn? Have you ever regretted a sexual experience? Do you sometimes wonder if you're doing it "wrong"? Have you figured out yet where babies come from?

As these questions suggest, there's a rich area of overlap between my area of expertise (wrongness) and that of famed "sexpert" Susie Bright. One of the country's foremost sex educators, activists, and writers, Bright is an outspoken advocate of sexual equality and freedom. She was one of the co-founders of On Our Backs , the first sex magazine by, for, and about women, as well as the founder and longtime editor of The Best American Erotica series. Her memoir, Big Sex Little Death , will be published in April 2011. In this interview, she and I talk about why the Vatican is the original sexpert, whether anti-sex crusaders are also anti-intellectual, and which physical activity is (to her own surprise) making Bright sweat these days.

***

Let's talk about the morning after, which I think of as one of the really iconic moments of personal wrongness.

[Laughs.] I think of the morning after as being a classic case of ambivalence, rather than flat-out regret. I mean, clearly you wouldn't have gone for it if you weren't aware of your self-interest. I'm always aware of my self-interest. The reasons that you shouldn't have done it, or you should have done it a little differently—all those "woulda, coulda, shouldas" can prey on your mind in a terrible way.

But I often think people are a bit cruel to themselves about how they evaluate a sexual experience. Just because your mother might not have approved or you're not going to get married—just because it doesn't meet someone else's standards—doesn't mean it didn't have its fabulous, transcendent, insightful, awesome moments. So I guess I hold those "morning after" situations a little more gently. Sometimes I wish things had gone differently, but to denounce it and say, "This should never have happened"—rarely have I gone there.

Lucky you. Sex and relationships can be so complex and messy that I think a lot of people do wind up going there at some point in their lives—waking up after a sexual experience, literally or figuratively, and thinking, "Oh, man, that was the wrong decision."

I think the most painful situation in my own life was when I was much younger, a teenager, and I went to bed with a best friend's lover. It was so impulsive, and right in the middle of it he started crying, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is terrible." I had great esteem for their love; it wasn't like I was trying to take something away or break them up or hurt anyone. It was a messy, intoxicated, going-with-the-flow kind of moment.

When I think back on it, it just seems like that foolish, impulsive, youthful moment. The ability to imagine the frustrations and hurt feelings that lie ahead—that comes so much easier when you're more mature and you've been there, done that. I didn't even have to get to 18 before I understood that the consequences of interrupting people's marriages in various ways are toxic. Just don't do it. Don't mess with it. You'll be sorry.

I'm interested in this idea of impulsiveness. In looking at why we get things wrong, I thought a lot about all the various ways we make decisions—by impulse, by consulting other people, by trying to assemble the evidence and conduct some kind of rational assessment. I assume that impulsivity governs sexual decisions more than other kinds, and I wonder if you think that makes us more or less likely to regret them.

I don't know. I think there are so many appetites and pleasures and needs that we act on quickly, and yet there isn't a sense of social stigma and shame around them. I had something to eat the other night that made me terribly sick to my stomach, and I suffered for it for a day afterward. But no one's going to say, "Shame on you, Susie! How could you have done that?" Instead we laugh, we indulge. We're much more forgiving; you know, live and learn.

I've taken huge sexual risks and often it's turned out awesome. So it's not like I regret my impulses or think, "Oh, if only I'd thought everything out and planned every move." People who think they can do that about sex are in for a serious surprise.

I hear a fair number of coming out stories that are almost like conversion stories. Like: I thought for sure I was going to get married in my mom's wedding dress, or maybe I even did get married in my mom's wedding dress—

And then I saw the light!

Right, exactly. And my whole original vision of my life and what it was going to be like fell out from under me. Was it like that for you?

No. I'm just the opposite. I imagined that one would simply be attracted to people for all kinds of reasons and there wouldn't be a final determination. That's just me. I think I'm dead in the middle of the Kinsey spectrum . I have always felt attracted to both men and women. My first sexual experience, I went from never having kissed anyone, never having held hands, nothing, just me reading a story book and kissing my pillow, to a threesome where I did everything, all in one afternoon during the World Series.

Is this where I make a joke about third base?

Ha. But you know, the interesting thing about it was it did kind of confirm my notion of what sex would be like: I'm with a man and I'm with a woman and I really like both of them and I'm attracted to both of them and it feels good.

Only later on did I begin to realize for some people, it's definitely not about being in the middle [of the Kinsey scale]. The notion that everyone is bisexual—or for that matter that everyone is anything, any fixed anything—that's baloney. Any sex educator worth their salt knows that you can't pigeonhole people. Including yourself. You're dead if you do. If you think, "Oh, well, you're set in stone, now we're going to predict everything from here on out"-you can't do that. You'll end up lying to yourself and everybody else.

I was thinking about your somewhat funny identity as an expert in sex—which I say as someone who has a somewhat funny identity as an expert in wrongness—

Just don't let anyone call you a wrongpert.

Ha. Why not? "Wrongpert." I love it. It's certainly no worse than "wrongologist," which I've been called so much that I gave in and started using it myself.

Agh. It's like this feminine diminutive that's the kiss of death. You'll notice that men who take an intellectual or professional interest in sexual education do not get called "sexperts," for the good reason that it makes you sound like an idiot. I rue the day that my friends came up with that nickname. Someone just asked me the other day, "Were you the first sexpert?" And I'm like, "Oh, God, now we're going to do origin of the species?"

It has been impossible in this puritan country to be a scholar and an intellectual about sex. Do that at your peril. Look what happened to Kinsey; it wasn't all accolades and flowers. People who've taken sex seriously haven't gotten the same kind of recognition as, say, linguistics or mathematicians. It's an essential of human nature, but if people have a moral agenda against it, they will trivialize it. Like "sexpert."

The linguistics analogy is interesting. It's so acceptable to study language in order to better understand the human mind and the human animal. And yet somehow sex, which is just as intrinsic to who we are, doesn't have anything like that kind of highly respected, longstanding, institutionalized field of inquiry.

That's because the church has said that it is in charge of rigorous sexual analysis. The Vatican is the original sexpert. It's always the religious institution that tries to set the agenda. It's like: "We've decided what the natural laws are and here's what you can and cannot do. We've looked at everything and we've considered what is deviant and what is not, and now you can go forth and play our little game." When their authority is checked, that's when they respond by trivializing the insurgents, the provocateurs, the questioners.

So how do you deal with people like that—people who think everything about you and the work you do is wrong? Or do you just choose not to deal with them at all?

Yeah, great question. I mean, some of them are so unhinged. They take a violent attitude; they're on a crusade, and they're going to gore me with their sword of righteousness. The people who tend to go after you hammer and tong tend to be the manipulated rank and file of a rather cynical leader who is sitting at home counting their banknotes. The people at the top—at best they're indifferent, at worst they're the grossest, most frightening hypocrites. And they have whole troops of little people to get their hands dirty. That part is frightening.

One thing that's interesting to me is that even when that hypocrisy is exposed, it doesn't seem to do much to change the minds of their followers—which I suppose is in keeping with what we know about how hard it is to overturn entrenched belief systems.

We've seen so many of them exposed in recent years—the men of C Street , the people who railed against sexual liberty and freedoms while privately carrying on like a Roman orgy. One disappointment, to those of us who have been fighting the good fight, is that you think that when people like David Vitter get exposed, their rank and file is going to be disgusted and walk away from them. But lots of times, they don't. It's like they're so wedded to the orthodoxy that if they question it, they're going to crumble. And they don't want to crumble. They don't want to have a psychotic break right now, right there on the kitchen floor.

Something has to be there for them to hold onto. And what do you give them? Especially when you say, "You know what, you're never going to be that certain again." When people ask me, "What is your vision of sexual liberation?" as if I'm going to hand them some new crucifix—you've got to be out of your mind. Maturity means taking a respectful attitude toward uncertainty. You can be honest. You can stop lying to yourself. You can find ethics that way. But if you think you're going to just wrap your lasso around the next big truth, you're out of your mind.

I understand the attraction to certainty, but why this certainty? Why the conviction that sexuality is so dangerous, so corrosive, in need of constant controlling?

Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? The thing keep asking everyone these days is: Why is it that some aspects of science are quite readily embraced by almost everyone, but not this one? There's a big surge of popularity in favor of gravity, for instance. Yet when it comes to the things we have learned about our sexual anatomy and physiology, there is this deliberate rejection of scientific knowledge. It gets discussed, it gets proven it, and then we go right back to the Garden of Eden. Nobody wants to hear it. Women have libidos? No, no, no. Women don't like sex. They're not visual. They just want to settle down and have children. And men just want that piece of tail and they want it now and it's not emotional.

I'm very curious, what is the stake in this false consciousness? I am appalled that I'm still going out to this day to college campuses and people are like, "I don't know, does the clitoris exist?" Or "I just don't know why I'd feel attracted to more than one person during my lifetime." Or "Is it bad that I find pictures of naked people arousing?" Why are we still having these discussions?

Is it your sense that some things are getting better? On the one hand, the political, legal, and cultural situation for queer and transgendered people has clearly improved. On the other hand, you've got Christine O'Donnell saying masturbation is the evil to end all evils.

Exactly. I'm so glad you brought her up. This is the most popular sentiment about masturbation in the media right now—this dingbat, this professional moron. She gets paid to be an idiot. She gets run for office by a bunch of callous cynics who have their own financial interests at heart, and I guarantee you they're masturbating up a storm and fucking anything that moves. And yet this is now the voice of authority on human sexuality. Are you kidding me?

So I guess you're saying things are not getting better.

We're in retrograde right now. Sexual knowledge is the privilege of the highly literate, the highly educated, the bohemian. It's esoteric.

Some people actually glorify that esoteric status—as if being in the dark or thinking that sex is dirty and bad is an important part of what makes sex sexy. Do you think there's anything to that?

They don't have a leg to stand on. I've raised kids who don't believe in sin and hell and don't think that sex is intrinsically shameful, and they have just as much mystery and intrigue and romance in their lives as anybody else. You don't become a robot if you're raised with access to knowledge and a critical mind. There's so much we don't know. It's like astronomy: We have not visited other planets, we don't have a clue.

Who do you think should—

Be president? Me.

Ha. Duly noted. But actually, I was going to ask who you think should teach kids about sex and what we should be teaching them.

I would question your phrasing. Sex is part of life. It's not a vocational school. Who should teach our kids science? Who should teach them ethics? Who should teach them the practical skills in life? Sexuality enters into all those things. Clearly I believe in education and public libraries and institutions of public learning across the board, I believe in a clear-minded, matter-of-fact, calm discussion of how bodies work. But it's not like, "OK, children, turn to Page 46, we're going to be learning how to masturbate today."

Thanks to this great new textbook by Christine O'Donnell.

Ha. But what I'm saying is, we all need to be take responsibility for educating our kids and ourselves about sex. We need to get over this culture of prudery. It's prudery that kills people, not sexual education. When you look at what happens with AIDS and other places where sex was targeted as the illness, the vermin, the terror—over and over again, that kind of destruction is based on profound ignorance.

It sounds like what you're saying is that the anti-sex impulse is also anti-intellectual.

Of course it is. It's pro-ignorance, it's anti-literacy. I used to describe my speaking tours as erotic literacy campaigns. I remember one of the first ladies, I think it was Nancy Reagan, was really big on literacy, and I was like: I'm going to be the first lady of erotic literacy. They're anti-democratic and anti-intellectual, and they're elitist. I can't repeat that enough. The enforcement of sexual ignorance by all those self-appointed moral guardians is the epitome of elitism. That is why I despise them, more than anything. They believe there's a different set of rules for them than for everyone else. They want access to everything because they can handle it, but they don't think you can, and they want to decide who's in and who's out.

That's anti-intellectual, but it's also anti-democratic. I always found sexual politics to be a cornerstone of democracy. Sexual speech is the first speech that's repressed.

What do you think parenting has taught you about being wrong?

Being a parent taught me a lot about uncertainty. There's your own more or less constant uncertainty, of course. But also, kids yearn so much for absolutes: Is it all good or is it all bad? You can be the kind of parent where you're like, "OK, little honeybear, here's the thing that 's 100 percent good; you just hang on to that." But hopefully you take a more nuanced view. You tell them, you have to look at the situation. You have to look at the clues, you have to scour the ground. You have to honor context and complexity.

There's this line I read on your Web site: "I had sworn on a stack of Communist Manifestos I would never go to college, so in the beginning, I was quite chagrined"-which I think is the most hilarious 20-word encapsulation of an ethos and an identity I can possibly imagine. And obviously that's something you were wrong about-

[laughing] College is a bourgeois illusion. I still believe that. All the reasons that I feared and loathed it were true. But I went anyway, and there turned out to be some good things, too.

Here's why I bring it up: Is there anything you swear by today that you can imagine someday deciding you were wrong about?

[laughing more] Well, come on, how would I know?

Yeah, yeah, I know, that's whole thing about wrongness: Of course we can't know which of our current beliefs we're wrong about, or we wouldn't believe them. But I still think it's an important exercise to stop and think: OK, which of my convictions can I even vaguely imagine relinquishing? We've all been wrong about some of our past beliefs, after all, so presumably we'll be wrong about some of our present ones as well.

OK, OK. Can I tell you something that's been recent? I have to have some hindsight. There's no way I'm going to guess what the next incredible humiliation is going to be.

Sure, go ahead.

I never thought I would be athletic or take an interest in exercise or raising my heart rate other than dancing and having sex. Sometimes I admired other people's physical prowess, but I was just like, "It hurts, it's bullshit, it's so stupid—

It's a bourgeois institution.

[Laughing] It just wasn't for me. I thought: I'm a bookworm, and I will never do that. And that has been proved wrong. I can't believe I'm a runner. I still cannot believe that's me. I never sweated like this in my life. I was 50 when I started becoming athletically active, and it's been quite a shock to me.

How did that change come about?

I lost both my parents in a short period of time, and the stress of their loss and seeing them go through the end of their life was so intense. There wasn't enough valium in the world to control my anxiety. And one day without even thinking about it, I just started running. I wanted to run until I couldn't think anymore. I just wanted to run and run and run and run and run. It was blind. I didn't think about it, I didn't call somebody and ask them how to do it, I didn't have on the right shoes, I just ran. And then finally I was gasping and drooling and fell on the ground, and I thought: Wow, I think I need to do this tomorrow.

So it was a reaction to extreme stress and grief at first. And then it was, "Do I want to spend my 50s having heart attacks and getting diabetes?" I looked around me at everybody in their 50s, and there was the group that was barely hanging on, and then there were these other people who were having a very full life, who seemed able to have all kinds of physical pleasure. And I didn't want to be the person who was constantly in pain. So this has been a big revelation to me.

I love that story. In one sense, it's kind of a small thing to be wrong about, and yet in another sense it's really sweeping. Whether we're an athlete or a bookworm-things like that are so fundamental to our identities, and they can feel so unchanging. And then they do change, and so do our social lives, our communities, our bodies, our sense of who we are.

Yeah. That kind of release and challenge is now a huge source of strength to me, emotionally as much or even more so than physically. So that was a great thing to find out that I was wrong about. That's my favorite mistake.

What a lovely note to end on. One final question: If you could hear anyone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

Oh, wow. Right, I saw this on some of your other interviews. It's tempting to pick somebody you really can't stand because you want to see them on the hot seat. Didn't someone say Dick Cheney?

Yeah, some Bush administration officials have made cameo appearances right about now.

OK, so my real choice. Huh. I'm the worst person for this. I could never be a judge in a contest or a beauty pageant because I get overwhelmed by the idea that we should just pick one. I can't bear to pick a winner. I want everybody to be recognized for their own special wrongness.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall , Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld , marriage counselor Harville Hendrix , Google research director Peter Norvig , Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Stress Doesn't Cause Ulcers! Or, How To Win a Nobel Prize in One Easy Lesson: Barry Marshall on Being ... Right

Kathryn Schulz — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:35:00 GMT

Not that long ago, Barry Marshall was an obscure physician studying the etiology of ulcers at a hospital in Perth, Australia — several thousand literal and figurative miles from the center of the medical universe. His work was unconventional, not to say heretical, and in 1986, he was invited to discuss it at a gastroenterology conference in the United States. His wife came along and, while doing some sightseeing, overheard a conversation among some other gastroenterologists' wives who happened to be sitting in front of her on a bus. "They were talking about this terrible person that they imported from Australia to speak," Marshall told me. "You know: 'How could they put such rubbish in the conference?' "

In 2005, that "terrible person" won the Nobel Prize in medicine . Marshall, along with his colleague and fellow Nobel winner Robin Warren, proved that up to 90 percent of peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori — not by stress, as medical wisdom had long held. In most of the interviews in this series, I've talked to people about being wrong: about what they've learned from their own mistakes, and about how their work — whether as an astronaut or speculator or lawyer or marriage counselor — affects how they think about error. But in this interview, Marshall and I talk about being right. In particular, we discuss how it feels when everyone thinks you're wrong, what it takes to get the scientific establishment to change its mind, and what it's like to finally be proven right. All that, plus a guest appearance by Adrienne Marshall, Barry's wife, who describes how she felt when Barry decided to test his ulcer theory by drinking a batch of bacteria.

***

Can you describe the received medical wisdom about ulcers before your research?

Peptic ulcers became more common in the 20th century, at the same time that these theories of Freud and other psychoanalysts became popular. And somehow those meshed, and this tradition emerged that ulcers were caused by stress or turmoil in one's life. I don't know where the data came from, but there was this idea that stress caused high acid levels; maybe there was a small amount of evidence for that, although I haven't been able to find it when I've looked. Anyway, all those things added up to convince people that ulcers were caused by stress. There was no proper data of any kind. It was smoke and mirrors as much as anything else, but terribly convincing for everybody.

Are you saying that there was no basically no empirical evidence to support the stress-and-acid hypothesis?

You can always find stress in someone's life if you want to. You ask a few questions and eventually it's, "Yes, I admit, I was worried about something recently." So they tried to find evidence for stress causing ulcers, and whenever they had an experiment which worked, it would just be blown out of all proportion, and everyone would get so much publicity out of it that you would think, "Ah, at last, it's proven." But the data was very bad. And in fact there was plenty of evidence showing that stress didn't make much difference.

What kind of medical advice was dispensed to all these patients with ostensible stress-induced ulcers? "Relax"?

Basically, yes. The medical advice was take antacids and modify your life style. The first drug that came out in the '70s was Tagamet, an acid blocker. By the time Robin Warren and I came along with this idea about bacteria, that was selling $3 billion of medication per year; it was the world's number one drug. And then that type of medication was the number one drug for about 10 years after that, with global sales of $8 billion or something. But it didn't work very well. It was quite sad, really; people were so disappointed, because as soon as they stopped taking their drugs, the ulcers came back.

What was it about you that made you more immune to all this received wisdom about ulcers?

I guess all my life I've made my own decisions. My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis — all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in. She used to be annoyed with me because I would challenge everything she said and not believe anything unless someone could show me the facts. For some reason, that's just the way I was.

Is that what got you interested in ulcers — the apparent lack of facts?

Something like that. The thing that initially excited me was: "Ah-ha! A falsehood!" Robin and I had been looking into these bacteria, and we found that they can survive in stomach acid. You probably don't think that's particularly weird, because you know that there are bacteria that live in Old Faithful and hot springs and so forth. But it really wasn't well-known in the early '80s that there were bacteria that could survive in all these harsh environments. So it started out as: Let's just prove that these bacteria live in the stomach and try to find out how they do that.

That led to ulcers via the side door, if you like, because we were trying to find out who had the bacteria — and lo and behold, we noticed that everybody with ulcers had them. So we said, "Hang on a minute, scientists have been trying to find the cause of ulcers for 50 years. Have they checked out the possibility that it could be an infection?" The answer was, "No, because it's impossible for bacteria to live in the stomach. We wouldn't even consider that."

At what point did you start to suspect that your own theory was right?

We pretty well knew that we had discovered the cause of ulcers within two years of starting the work. One reason was that I was starting to treat a few people with antibiotics, and nine out of 11 seemed to be cured. At the time, the cure rate for ulcers with any other treatment would have been one out of 11. So even though that work was anecdotal and not blinded and not publishable, it was very convincing.

I assume another reason you were so certain is that — rather famously — you swallowed a bunch of Helicobacter bacteria to prove that it caused stomach problems. Not to be blunt, but: What were you thinking? Was that just a way of bypassing the human studies review board process? Were you so convinced that you were right and just impatient to prove it?

It was a decision point. I had to find out if the bacteria could really affect a healthy person and cause gastritis. I'd been working very hard in the previous 12 months on piglets, but I have to tell you that piglets aren't piglets for very long. They just about grow before your eyes, so after six months I had nearly full-sized pigs in our offices and I was wrestling with them and it was chaos. And you can't infect pigs very easily, it turns out, so that failed rather miserably. And the skeptics were so determinedly skeptical that I felt like: I'm never going to prove to these guys that the bacteria are harmful. By then everybody knew that 40 percent of the population had the bacteria and did not have ulcers, so that was making life difficult for me. So I took some bacteria off a patient and cooked it up.

If nothing had happened, it really would have been a spanner in the works for the whole theory. I thought, "If it doesn't work, I'll quiet down about the whole thing; maybe I'll just run away and do some other career for a while because I'm wrong." But then of course it worked.

What did your colleagues think?

I didn't quite explain to my boss what I was doing. He was passing the endoscope on me and I was lying there gagging away, he says, "Barry, I'm not sure why you asked me to do this test on you, and I don't want you to tell me." It was don't ask, don't tell. I wrote the experiment up in the third person, because it was very disreputable to be doing a self-experiment of one and then writing it up, and the editor of the medical journal of Australia stuck his neck out and published it. Afterward a couple of people figured out that it was really a self-experiment on me, but I didn't own up to it straight away.

You didn't realize it was going to be a great PR stunt?

No, I didn't. I was always very embarrassed talking about it. Then the word leaked out, and it's kind of a funny story, actually. After our Lancet paper was published in 1984, Robin and I went out to dinner with our wives, and we were having a few drinks and I let slip that I'd done the experiment. So then he goes home and in the middle of the night, he gets a phone call from a journalist in the United States who'd gotten the time difference wrong. The journalists said, "I'm from Star ," and Robin thought it was like Time magazine or something, and he gave this very in-depth interview about these bacteria that might cause ulcers. At the end the journalist said, "How can you be so sure these bacteria are really harmful?" and Robin says, "Well, Dr. Marshall drank them, and he got so sick he half killed himself!" That was the alcohol talking.

So they write this article in Star that's like "Australian Researcher Experiments on Guinea Pig Lab Assistant!"

I have to ask: How did your wife feel about this little stunt?

[Hollering into the distance] Adrienne, come up here! [To me] I'm not allowed to tell other people what she thinks.

That seems like a good policy.

Adrian [laughing]: I was a bit worried about him. He was very sick, and he didn't talk to me about it ahead of time or I would have probably suggested strongly that he not go ahead with it. But I was more surprised by the reaction of his colleagues when it came out that it was actually a self-experiment. He already had a reputation for being a bit rash and a bit of a hothead, and I fully expected his colleagues to write him off as a complete lunatic. But it was the exact opposite. They all thought it was a wonderful thing to do, which surprised us both, I think. He got a lot of credibility for it, which I wouldn't have expected.

By the time of that self-experiment, Barry, you were reasonably sure that you were right, and you'd been saying so in public for quite some time. Can you describe the general response you received when you first began to publicize your work?

When you start off with a new idea like this, all your scientific pals set out to prove you wrong. That's the scientific process. In my case, people were especially interested in showing that I was wrong, because at the time I was not at the pinnacle of gastroenterology, or even in the mainstream. I didn't know all of its secret teachings, if you like. I would just charge in with this stuff about bacteria, and nobody wanted to be told that they had spent their life doing research on something that somebody in western Australia figured out in 12 months. You can imagine that would be a bit difficult to stomach.

That makes it sound like the driving force was ego and insider/outsider status as much as it was the scientific process.

Well, and money. I think there was a strategy in the pharmaceutical industry to keep the new bacteria theory of ulcers under wraps. At the time we made the discovery, a new antacid was coming out every year or two that was stronger or better in some way, and as each drug was rolled out, the pharmaceutical companies funded scientists to do clinical studies on people with ulcers.

If these had been truly scientific people who were genuinely interested in discovery, as soon as they heard about the new bacteria [theory], they would've said to the investigator, "We're testing 300 patients with ulcers; can you just take an extra biopsy and check for bacteria? We want to know what's going on here." But they didn't do that, because the only purpose of these trials was to get a new indication and extended registration for the FDA. If you look at it from a business point of view, it could only do your market harm and lower your share price to find out that you could actually cure people with antibiotics. And that was their point of view.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. It's easy to characterize your story as the triumph of an evidence-driven outsider over a bunch of insiders and their vested interests, but isn't what happened actually a pretty good example of how science is supposed to work? As you said a moment ago, the scientific process involves trying to prove other people wrong, and in that sense, the fact that you were subjected to a lot of intense questioning and skepticism and so forth seems appropriate.

Right, sure, that's part of it. In retrospect, I was partly to blame, because I would get data that was rather preliminary and try to publish it because it was exciting and novel and original, even though we didn't yet have any kind of double-blind studies.

But also, we felt it was important to act. Maybe it would have been different if we'd been talking about [a cure for] a skin rash or something; maybe you can afford to wait five years until that's proved. But people died from ulcers all over the place and were having their stomachs or half their stomachs removed; there were permanent, mutilating operations and deaths going on around us. And yet to test our idea, you just needed to take some antibiotics. So we weren't very ashamed about trying to get our message out, even though it was rather preliminary.

Thomas Kuhn distinguishes between what he calls normal and extraordinary science, the latter being the type that brings about a complete change — the famed "paradigm shift" — in a field. Which one do you think describes your work? One can arrive at new ideas and theories and solutions without ushering in a whole new paradigm, after all.

It was definitely a paradigm shift, because it got this stress thing debunked. And the implications of that are much bigger: What else is supposedly caused by stress that we can debunk? A lot of these things that are supposedly caused by stress, you try to track down the reason for that link, and there isn't one, except the fact that we don't have any better cause. Everything that's supposedly caused by stress, I tell people there's a Nobel Prize there if you find out the real cause.

So that's one thing that happened. The second thing is that by 1980, everyone was feeling pretty confident that infectious diseases were going to be wiped out and there wasn't going to be any more problem with them. H1N1 is enough to wake us up to the fact that we don't know everything about infectious disease, but it really happened with Helicobacter first. People had been seriously studying ulcers for 50 years, billions of dollars were spent, and then — what do you know, it's a bacteria. So you have to ask, what other infectious diseases are we missing? I reckon a lot of these mysterious chronic diseases are related to some infectious agent that's been a trigger. It might have happened when you were a child and now it [the infectious agent] is long gone, but it sets you up for a problem later in life. We'll see if I'm right.

Speaking of which, did you find it frustrating that so many people felt you were wrong?

It didn't really faze me too much that everybody thought I was wrong, but it annoyed me that I was having trouble getting research grants and so forth. And at times I'd get internally angry, especially when I was junior and people in senior roles and positions of power could block my plans and go ahead and order for someone to have surgery or continue on with some treatment which was useless.

But it must have been annoying for them, too, because you couldn't tell me anything. I just knew so much. After a couple of years, Robin Warren and I knew more about every aspect of ulcers than practically everyone in the world, because we read nothing else for two years.

When and how did you start to convince people?

Part of it had to do with David Graham, who was chief of medicine at Baylor, in Texas, and a thought leader in gastroenterology. Graham started off as a real skeptic but quickly turned around. To his credit, Graham never said that I was wrong. He said, "I don't know, and I'm going to find out." And a couple of years later, he said, "I've checked it out and it looks pretty good, it looks like it could be true."

And then in 1993 or '94, the NIH had a consensus conference, and Tachi Yamada summed it up. Yamada is currently the head of [the Global Health Program of] the Gates Foundation; he's a very, very smart guy, and he said, "Looks like it's proven: Bacteria cause ulcers, and everybody needs to start treating ulcers with antibiotics."

It was just like night and day after that. The whole thing just went ballistic.

How did it feel to finally be acknowledged as right in such a public and universal way?

It was very satisfying to prove [my critics] wrong. People used to say to me afterward, "Barry, do you feel vindicated?" And I'd say, "I felt vindicated 10 years ago, because I knew what the result was going to be." There's a saying, "Science is not a democracy." It doesn't matter how many millions of people there are on the other side. There's one right, and it's perfectly possible for all the rest to be wrong. And ultimately all those guys were proved wrong, and they either retired or they came over the side of Helicobacter .

I love that it took retirement. It's like that quip by the physicist Max Planck, who said that science proceeds by funerals.

It wasn't quite death, but close. David Graham said, "The great thing about Marshall's theory is that if he's wrong, it's going to be so easy to disprove." The point he was making was that if it's a good hypothesis, you can test it. And ours was very testable; you just had to give people antibiotics and see if they got better. And they did. So everybody who was trying to prove us wrong, if they were good scientists, they just changed sides.

If they weren't good scientists, they kind of clammed up and kept doing what they were doing. If they were running a stress-based business — and there were certainly people, particularly in New York, who did psychoanalysis for ulcer patients and ran stress institutes and things like that — a lot of these guys, it had been their whole life. I do feel sorry for them, but I'm glad it wasn't me, that's all I can say. I'd probably be having a lot of trouble with my ego if I'd found out that all my life's work was for naught.

These days, do you find that everyone believes your theory?

Well, not patients, necessarily. Even now I see people who've got ulcers, and they think they're caused by stress. And I say, "Where have you been for the last 20 years? Have you been under a rock?" It just amazes me that there are still doctors out there that don't know this.

Who's to blame for that? Are health care providers and public health workers failing to spread the word, or is the idea just so entrenched in the culture that it's difficult to eradicate?

It's like a religion or something. It's like there's a certain part of your life when you learn things, and then you just stop. I'll say to patients, "Don't you know that ulcers are caused by bacteria? You need some antibiotics." And they'll say to me, "No, no, no. My doctor told me that in my case, it's definitely stress."

Let me turn the tables for a moment. What have you yourself been most wrong about?

It was very difficult to convince me that Helicobacter doesn't always make people unwell. Because I was interested in ulcers, I was seeing people who were very sick from it, but my colleagues would say, "You know, Barry, 40 percent of the Australian population have Helicobacter , and most of those people don't really have any symptoms." And I'd say, "Well, you didn't really ask them the right questions, you've got to ask them this and that." I spent several years trying to separate out people with Helicobacter from people who don't have it on the basis of things like, do they feel nauseated, are they burping, do they have bad breath or headaches — all those kind of vague systems.

I've had to pull back on this. Now I say, "Probably 75 percent of people with Helicobacter have nothing wrong with them." They go through life with minimal syndromes. It's like having dandruff in your stomach. If you had that, you wouldn't ever know about it. Your stomach would look a bit weird if you looked inside, but you wouldn't feel anything at all.

That being said, I'm still trying to hold my ground on this. There's a history of ulcers in my mom's family, and although she swears she has no stomach symptoms at all, I said, "I better just treat you the same way as everybody else." So I gave her antibiotics. Three weeks later she said to me, "You know, since I took those antibiotics, I've just been feeling great. I have more energy, I feel more positive." I've heard that from a lot of people over the years. So I think there may be a subtle syndrome where you're not at your top performance if you have Helicobacter in your stomach. If you've had something mild all your life, then you don't really know what normal is until you take the problem away.

Who else would you want to hear interviewed about being wrong?

What about George Bush? I tend to be pretty right-wing, and I have to say most people that I associate with at the university are a bunch of lefties, including my wife. But it's going to be interesting over the next 20 or 30 years to see how history judges George Bush, and how the Middle East will turn out. It probably takes generations for those things to change. But you provide a bit of stability, a bit of education for women, Internet, cell phones, travel — it's very difficult to keep a country all locked up after that.

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld , marriage counselor Harville Hendrix , Google research director Peter Norvig , Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:25:00 GMT

In the spring of 1981, a 12-year-old boy was beaten and forced to watch as his 11-year-old female cousin was raped by a stranger in a park in Cleveland, Ohio. Several weeks later, a man named Raymond Towler was stopped by a ranger for running a stop sign in the same park and brought into the police station for questioning. * After hesitating for 10 and 15 minutes, respectively, both the boy and the girl eventually chose Towler's picture from a photo array. On the basis of that identification, and despite testimony by multiple witnesses that Towler had been home at the time of the crime, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. This May, after 28 years behind bars, Towler was exonerated when DNA evidence showed that he was not the girl's rapist. He was 24 on the day he was convicted and 52 on the day he walked out of prison.

With his exoneration, Towler became the 258th person to be freed by the Innocence Project . Founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, the Innocence Project uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions while also advocating for reforms to the criminal justice system to help prevent future mistakes. In the interview below, I speak with Neufeld about the origins of wrongful convictions, how police and prosecutors face up to their mistakes (or don't), and why he doesn't speculate about the outcome of his cases anymore.

***

How do most wrongful convictions come about?

The primary cause is mistaken identification. Actually, I wouldn't call it mistaken identification; I'd call it misidentification, because you often find that there was some sort of misconduct by the police. In a lot of cases, the victim initially wasn't so sure. And then the police say, "Oh, no, you got the right guy. In fact, we think he's done two others that we just couldn't get him for." Or: "Yup, that's who we thought it was all along, great call."

It's disturbing that misidentifications still play such a large role in wrongful convictions, given that we've known about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony for over a century.

In terms of empirical studies, that's right. And 30 or 40 years ago, the Supreme Court acknowledged that eyewitness identification is problematic and can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, it instructed lower courts to determine the validity of eyewitness testimony based on a lot of factors that are irrelevant, like the certainty of the witness. But the certainty you express [in court] a year and half later has nothing to do with how certain you felt two days after the event when you picked the photograph out of the array or picked the guy out of the lineup. You become more certain over time; that's just the way the mind works. With the passage of time, your story becomes your reality. You get wedded to your own version.

And the police participate in this. They show the victim the same picture again and again to prepare her for the trial. So at a certain point you're no longer remembering the event; you're just remembering this picture that you keep seeing.

Other than misidentifications, what other factors play a role in wrongful convictions?

The second most common cause is the misuse of forensic science other than DNA. In most of our cases, DNA [identification] didn't exist at the time of the conviction, so prosecutors relied on other types of forensic science. It could be serology, which was the old A/B/O blood typing. It could be bite marks. It could be fingerprints. It could be other forensic disciplines: tire marks, shoe print comparisons, fiber comparisons. None of these is bulletproof — some of them aren't even credible — so we see a lot of wrongful convictions stemming from those.

And there are several other very common causes as well. You have police and prosecutor misconduct. You have incompetent defense attorneys. You have jailhouse snitches, who as you can imagine are not the most reliable sources. And you have false confessions. Twenty-five percent of wrongful convictions involve false confessions. Most people can't imagine why anyone would ever confess to a crime they didn't commit, unless they were beaten into it. But these people weren't beaten. They wouldn't even meet the legal definition of coercion. It's just that the [interrogation] methods that are effective for getting confessions from guilty persons are so powerful that they net innocent people as well — particularly innocent people who are juveniles or have some kind of intellectual impairment or mental health problem.

I'm curious about police and prosecutor misconduct. I assume that most people in these jobs aren't actually trying to convict innocent people. So how does such misconduct come about?

I think what happens is that prosecutors and police think they've got the right guy, and consequently they think it's OK to cut corners or control the game a little bit to make sure he's convicted. The thinking goes, "God forbid a guilty guy go free because of smart lawyering by the defense" or what have you. They're so convinced that they are right that they feel exempt from behaving right. They don't realize that it's wrong to be unethical. And not just because it could convict an innocent person. It's simply wrong to be unethical.

How do prosecutors typically respond to the work of the Innocence Project, given that you're essentially challenging the validity and quality of their work?

You can divide prosecutors into two classes: those who believe in DNA wholeheartedly and want to cooperate with us, and those who oppose us. There's still a whole category of prosecutors and detectives who say, "No, I'm sure [the guy I convicted] is guilty. I can't tell you how, I can't give you a logical explanation, but he's guilty."

What's scary is that these people are part of a system that's predicated on logic and reasoning to see that justice is done. Yet they will ignore all logic and reason to protect their egos and their psyches. And it requires a complete disconnect, too, because these guys rely on DNA to convict bad guys all the time. But when the DNA works against them, they say something must have gone wrong.

Can you give me an example?

We took a deposition last week of a guy who was the lead detective in the prosecution of a young man named Jeffrey Deskovic . Jeff Deskovic was a 16-year-old white kid in Peekskill, N.Y., with no criminal record, when a 15-year-old girl was raped and murdered on her way home from school. This was in 1990. Jeffrey went to the police and said, "I knew her, I liked her, is there's anything I can do to help you solve this crime?" Well, the detective he spoke to had been told by somebody in the police academy that people who commit crimes often come forward offering to help. So this guy locked his sights on Jeffrey and after multiple encounters, the kid confesses. They then did DNA testing on the semen recovered from the girl, and Jeffrey was excluded. But [the prosecutors] never disclosed that; they simply dropped the rape charge and argued at trial that she must have had consensual sex with somebody else and Jeffrey was the murderer. Twenty-five years later, we took that DNA profile and ran it through the convinced felons database, and the profile of the semen matched a serial rape-murderer who was serving life in prison for attacking and killing another teenage girl in another town in Westchester a year and a half after the victim in Jeff's case was killed.

Given that factual backdrop, you'd think that people would say, "You're right, we made a terrible, terrible error, we investigated the case incorrectly, and it led to this tragic result." But no. Even with the DNA evidence, even though the serial murder-rapist gave a full, detailed confession and provided all kinds of details that no one knew, but the real perpetrator could know, this detective just last week said, "I'm sorry, that's ridiculous, Jeffrey Deskovic is guilty. The only false confession in this whole matter is the false confession given by the serial rape-murderer."

Would you say that detective was an outlier, or is that kind of denial routine?

I'd say, just based on my own experience, that about half the time police and prosecutors bury their heads in the sand and insist that they were right no matter what the evidence says. Look at the New York City police in the Central Park jogger case. It's right on point. They're in terminal denial. They still haven't got any insight. A woman is viciously attacked by somebody, raped, and left for dead. Five kids are picked up in the park that night, they're all interrogated, the interrogations are not recorded but the ultimate confessions are. Later the kids say the confessions were coerced and that they're innocent, but they get convicted.

Years later, DNA testing shows that some other guy who had three rape convictions and didn't know any of these kids committed this rape. Everyone in the DA's office who did the investigation has now concluded that this guy acted alone, and they vacated the convictions [of the youth]. The police department hired their own experts to write a bogus report saying, "The DAs were wrong, our confessions were valid, these guys must have been involved." They just can't get beyond that. It's remarkable.

This isn't the first time I've heard stories like this, but I never stop being disturbed by that degree of denial, given the seriousness of the stakes.

It is disturbing. But the truth is, when I run up against this, I don't worry for our clients. Our clients are going to get out. They've got the testing. A prosecutor can say the earth is flat until the cows come home, and eventually we're going to prevail.

What's troubling are all the people who we haven't done testing for, or for whom there's no biological evidence. If a prosecutor or a detective is totally unable to admit they're wrong in one case, what that tells you is that they will be making dozens and dozens more erroneous decisions, because they're not allowing new information to affect their views. If you can't admit you're wrong, you should just stay home and knit sweaters. You shouldn't be involved with any occupation where your decision-making can have an impact on other people's health, life, or liberty.

Stated that way, it sounds like the problem boils down to specific individuals. Do you think that's the issue — so called "bad apples" — or do you think there's something about the legal system or the psychology of what happens when you get involved with a wrongful conviction that actually makes a lot of people resort to denial?

I don't think it's specific to the legal system. I think generally speaking it's difficult for people to admit they're wrong, and the higher the stakes, the more difficult it becomes. So what you really want to do is educate people that it's OK to be wrong. It doesn't mean you're a fool. It's not going to be the end of your life.

I'll give you an example. I'm on the board of a medical center and a medical school, and I've watched the culture of medicine change somewhat over the last 20 years. It used to be much more difficult for doctors to admit error; they would hold on to their original beliefs and were completely inflexible. Today many more people understand that if you do an investigation into a medical error, the individuals involved are not going to be taken out and hung. They're not going to be fired. They're not even necessarily going to be sued. Instead, you'll use what you learn from those errors to improve the system. And through that I've noticed a much greater willingness on the part of health care providers to admit error and move on.

Is there any analogous shift happening in the law?

No. In the criminal justice system, the culture hasn't changed. We don't have inquiries when wrongful convictions occur; they just happen and that's the end of it. We should have a system in place where you do audits when you get a wrongful conviction — where you look at a person's body of work to see if this was a one-off situation or there was evidence of a systemic defect, either with an individual, with a police department, or with a way of doing things. If you could show people that what you were going to do with this data was simply improve the system, I think the culture would change and people would be more willing to admit they were wrong.

What about legislative shifts? As the fallibility of these various investigative tools becomes more obvious, is the legal system starting to implement reforms?

The only way you get national change is through a Supreme Court decision or an act of Congress. But we are moving incrementally to get reforms implemented in a city here, a state there. But it's certainly not the vast majority. It's not even a sizeable minority. It's a few. There's a great deal of resistance because people don't want oversight. Nobody likes oversight, even though we all need it.

In those localities that have implemented reforms, what happened to prompt that change?

It usually takes a kind of perfect storm. You'll have some very compelling narratives of wrongful conviction. You'll have very progressive leadership in the legislature. You'll have a forward-thinking police chief or prosecutor who gets it and wants to be ahead of the curve. But there's only a couple of state legislatures that have introduced these kinds of reforms. Ohio and Vermont gave us reform packages in the last 12 months. New Jersey did it several years ago. That's about it for states. For individual counties or cities, there's a few dozen in the country.

I think many Americans have this perception that our legal system is basically sound and trustworthy, and that wrongful convictions are anomalous. How right or wrong is that perception? To what extent do the 258 wrongful convictions to date reflect the scope of the problem?

The 258 figure is unquestionably just the tip of the iceberg. In many of our cases, the biological evidence has been lost or destroyed in the intervening years, so clearly our exoneration numbers would be much, much, much higher if we could bring more cases to lab. Over the years, our exclusion rate [in which the DNA result excludes the convict as a possible perpetrator of the crime] has been about 50 percent. That's not to suggest that the false conviction rate is 50 percent, because obviously we have a self-selecting data set of people who write to us and claim to be innocent.

Similarly, for 20 years, the FBI has been keeping data on cases that get sent to them by local law enforcement agencies for testing. These are cases where a prime suspect has already been identified based on other kinds of evidence — a confession, an ID, circumstantial evidence, whatever. Over the years, they've had a 25 percent exclusion rate; one-quarter of all initial prime suspects are excluded based on DNA. Now, that, too, doesn't mean the wrongful conviction rate is 25 percent, because some percentage of those cases would have been either dismissed or acquitted even if there hadn't been DNA testing (although the acquittal rate is very low in this country). But what these numbers tell you is that, my God, there are a lot of people in prison from before DNA evidence who are innocent.

Are those numbers dwindling now that DNA testing is routine?

Well, it's certainly better to have DNA testing than not, but it's a misperception to imagine that it's going to solve the problem. People think, "Oh, now we have DNA evidence, so this issue will gradually disappear." The truth is it doesn't disappear, because you can only use DNA testing in a small minority of violent crimes. If there's a drive-by shooting, there is no blood left behind. If there's a robbery, there is no semen left behind. In many crimes, police departments have to rely on less reliable means of investigation to decide who to prosecute.

That's why we have these recommendations for reforms, because we know that DNA alone is not going to solve the problem. Unless we change some of these other root causes of wrongful conviction and make the process more reliable, we will continue to wrongfully convict people at alarming rates.

Do you think working on these issues for so long as changed your own attitude toward rightness and wrongness?

Well, that and marriage. [Laughs] They've both made me much, much more willing to say, "I'm wrong."

I'll tell you something. One of the things we used to do at the Innocence Project is we would try, just informally, to predict which cases would end up being exonerations and which ones would end up confirming guilt when the DNA came back from the lab. And I was wrong more than I was right. What that tells me is that I was raised in the system before DNA evidence, where I relied on all these other types of investigative tools to determine guilt or innocence. That's one of the important things about DNA for me: It taught me how unreliable my own intuition is. Now when people say, "What do you think is going to happen?" I say, "Whatever happens happens, I have no idea and I don't want to speculate."

Last question. If you could hear anyone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

Cheney or Rumsfeld.

They're popular choices.

Good. I like to know that I'm very mainstream.

* Correction, Aug. 18, 2010 : This article originally misidentified Raymond Towler as Raymond Fowler.

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with marriage counselor Harville Hendrix , Google research director Peter Norvig , Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Those Three Little Words ("Honey, You're Right"): Harville Hendrix on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:08:00 GMT

Whatever else you want to say about it, wrongness is a capacious subject. Since this blog began, I've interviewed people about the relationship between error and medicine , encyclopedias , computers , space travel , corporate culture , hedge funds , mountain climbing , storytelling , Israel , omelets , education , Leona Helmsley , and the Cleveland Indians , among many other subjects. And yet, somehow, I've yet to broach the issue of how our thoughts and feelings about wrongness affect one of the most important — maybe the most important — arena of human life. I'm talking, of course, about love.

Enter Harville Hendrix . Hendrix is the author of the best-selling Getting the Love You Want , along with the also-best-selling Keeping the Love You Find and many other books. With his wife and business partner, Helen LaKelly Hunt, he pioneered the concept of "conscious partnership" and developed a form of counseling he calls Imago Relationship Therapy . Oprah Winfrey, who has hosted Hendrix on her show 17 times, refers to him as "the marriage whisperer." I sought Hendrix out to ask him why most of us are so attached to being right and so threatened by being wrong — and what we can do to rethink those attitudes about wrongness to improve our relationships with our partners, our families, and ourselves.

Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. I've been thinking a lot lately about the desire to be right and what a powerful effect — usually a negative one — it has on relationships.

It's a question that's very relevant to me and one I've thought about a lot. Every couple I see, both partners think they're right. And as you point out, that doesn't tend to go well. You know, there's an old phrase, "You can either be right or be in a relationship." Which really means you can either insist on being right—never mind whether you really are or not—or be in a relationship.

Why do you think most of us are so insistent about being right?

There are two ways to think about that. One is a very natural and nonpathological analysis, which has to do with the way we are designed as human beings. I call it "concentric consciousness." For all of us, we are at the center of our own universe, and everything else is the periphery. So it makes sense that we think that the way we see things is the way they really are. That's natural.

If we were talking about philosophy instead of psychology, we'd call that realism: the idea that the world is precisely as we perceive it to be.

Exactly. There's a philosophical theory called the correspondence theory of truth, which pretty much describes most people's ordinary, everyday, nonreflective way of thinking about themselves and the world. Simply put, it means the belief that there is an exact correspondence between what I see and what's really out there: "My perspective is universal and what I see is what is real." That's a very real part of the human experience.

And yet anyone in the intellectual history of the culture understands that there's no such thing as direct perceptions. That went out the window when Copernicus pointed out that the sun is at the center of the universe, not the earth. By the 15th century, philosophers understood that human perception involves interpretation, and that idea has been developed considerably by postmodern philosophers and psychologists. All we have is the capacity to interpret phenomena. We do not have access to the thing in itself, as Kant would have said. All we have is a representation of the thing, and that representation is clouded by our own subjectivity.

Nonetheless, as you started out by saying, we often insist that we do have access to the thing in itself — that we're right and can know that we're right. Something tells me that a universal dose of Philosophy 101 wouldn't really solve the problem — that the underlying issue is largely emotional.

Some people are wounded in childhood by an intrusive or neglectful parent, and that produces emotional pain, and emotional pain produces self-absorption. And when you are wounded and become self-absorbed, your natural inclination to see yourself as the center of the world and everything else as on the periphery is amplified to the point where you cannot be flexible with data. You can't actually take in new information very well. When you're wounded early, you organize the world in a certain way, in order to give yourself some sense of inner cohesion. You make up your mind about the way things are, who you are, who your parents are, and although that helps you survive, it also means you have all these very rigid ideas surrounding what is fundamentally a fragile inner core.

And the experience of being wrong about those ideas threatens that inner core?

If you're wounded in some way, yes. You form all these perspectives, but for you, those perspectives are not perspectives. They're perceptions: the world as it really is. To have those perceptions turned into perspectives, which would be the healthy thing to do—that threatens your fragile internal organization. And because you rely on the stability of those perceptions—rather than on a stable self—to feel safe in the world, the idea that those perceptions are fallible produces huge amounts of anxiety. As I see it, one of the core reasons we can't admit to being wrong is that doing so threatens our internal cohesion and throws us into chaos.

If you grow up in a healthy family, by contrast, you grow up with that same concentric consciousness, with the same correspondence theory of truth, but you have a solid core. You have flexibly, adaptability, you have the capacity to be curious, so when someone says, "Oh, I didn't like that movie," and you did, you can say, "Well, what did you think about it?" But if you're wounded and defended and scared, you just think, "Well, if you don't like that movie, that means you're wrong or stupid, because the way I see it is the way it is."

I'm interested in this idea that having your perspective challenged produces anxiety. That comports with something another therapist said to me, which is that our capacity to tolerate being wrong hinges on our capacity to tolerate emotion.

I think that's right. To entertain the possibility that you're wrong is to feel anxiety about your inner organization, as well as shame, embarrassment, and even guilt about the erroneous perspective. And shame and guilt are almost intolerable emotions. So in order not to experience that anxiety and shame and guilt, you become rigid in your perceptions.

How does that rigidity play out in our relationships?

Well, for starters, most couples do not know that the correspondence theory of truth is inaccurate. They don't think philosophically; they operate out of the idea that their experience is what's true. So they feel they have to diminish or devalue and sometimes even annihilate their partner's perspectives, because to see things from that person's point of view would mean you'd have to give up on the absolute truth of your own, and that would trigger anxiety and everything that follows from it—chaos and shame and guilt. So this adamant commitment to your own perceptions translates into destroying your partner's perceptions. Not that people are aware that this is what they're doing, of course; they think they're just defending the truth.

In Western culture, we have this narrative about romance in which falling in love is about finding a previously missing part of our self — our "better half," our "soul mate." Or, as Phil Collins put it, "two hearts living in just one mind." I assume that part of what's so difficult and uncomfortable about disagreement in relationships is that it constitutes a kind of implicit betrayal of that idea.

In the early stages of love, you actually do experience a kind of merger of consciousness. People who are falling in love seem to kind of fuse together for a while; you sort of surrender your own personhood. But at some point you differentiate. You say, "I am me and not you, and this is what I think and not that." And "Actually, I don't really enjoy that kind of movie," or "I really like butter pecan ice cream better than vanilla, even though it was fun to eat it with you sometimes." For the other person, it's like: "You really think that? Did you lie to me?" But nobody lied. There's a kind of collusion in romantic love not to breach reality.

You know, it reminds me on a personal scale of something that happens on a political scale of well. I'm thinking of utopias — how we have this dream of a perfect society characterized by unanimity and perfection but, in fact, utopias tend to either fall apart or turn disastrous fairly quickly. Whereas if you accept that differences of opinion exist instead of trying to eradicate them, you can achieve a more stable society. It sounds like the same goes for relationships — that the dream of unanimity and perfection is ultimately destructive.

It is destructive because it is impossible. None of us share our partner's perspectives in every detail, and the power struggle that happens after the romantic phase is always triggered by something showing up in the relationship—in the person's behavior or belief or thought or action—that you had denied or overlooked, or that the other person had withheld. That's what produces the tension that puts people into conflict. And then you go into polarity: "I'm right." "No, I'm right."; "You did that." "No, I didn't." "Yes, you did."

This process that couples go through is what I call negation of each other. They don't really consciously know that when they say, "That's not what you said," or "That's not right," or "That's so stupid," that in fact they're annihilating each other, but they are. And they do it over and over and over again. You just get annihilation and counter-annihilation until they reach an impasse when they can't talk anymore. And that's what comes walking into our offices. They can't resolve that.

Can you break down this idea of negation and annihilation for me? What specifically happens for people emotionally when these kinds of disagreements appear in relationships?

I think the first emotion is anxiety. When people begin to finally get it that, "Oh, he really does like butter pecan ice cream" or "He really does have that thought," that triggers enormous anxiety. Anxiety is the motivating feeling that comes up behind all the other ones—bargaining, anger, depression, everything.

How would you define anxiety?

Anxiety is the anticipation of danger. Fear is the experience of danger: You see a tiger in front of you, you have a fear reaction, you do whatever you need to do to protect yourself, which is usually to run or hide. Anxiety is the fear that the catastrophic is going to happen. If I suddenly discover that my partner has had an affair, I anticipate all kinds of catastrophic consequences: I will lose this relationship, I will lose my security, I will lose my status in the community, I will maybe lose my children. All kinds of catastrophic scenarios come to mind, depending on your own fears and also your own value system. But it's all a forward projection. Fear is the experience of the present being dangerous. Anxiety is fear of the future.

Got it. So once people's anxiety is triggered by these disagreements, what happens next?

Typically the anxiety is followed by anger. Anger is an attempt to coerce a person into surrendering their reality, so that there's only one reality in the relationship instead of two. And when the anger triggered by the anxiety doesn't work, people experience depression. Depression is the experience of the loss of power: "I can't make my world happen."

Once they go into depression, couples—if they stay together—will then enter a bargaining stage. The bargaining goes like this: "Well, OK, I'm different and you're different, so let's make a deal about whose reality is going to be in the forefront." It's like, "Okay, you're a Baptist and I'm an Episcopalian, so we'll go to a Baptist church one Sunday and an Episcopalian church the next Sunday." They're trying to orchestrate a kind of interchange of realities, and they often think that this is a really enlightened move and the one that should and will save their relationship. So when it doesn't work, people go into despair. And then they come to me hoping that I will help them make better deals. But making better deals never works, because deal-making still involves giving up some part of yourself.

So what do you do with couples that have reached that point?

With my wife, Helen Hunt, I developed Imago relationship therapy , and as part of that, we have developed a process we call "dialogue." Dialogue is a generic word, but we have a special structure for it; we call it mirroring, validating, and being empathic. And what we've found over the years is that, with couples, you have to hold them in the process and give them some coaching in learning to listen. People have to learn to listen and listen and listen and listen until they finally get it that their partner has their own inner world—that you like apples and your partner likes oranges and that it's okay to like oranges.

One of my axioms is that if you want to be in a relationship, you have to get it that you live with another person. That person isn't you. She's not merged with you. She's not your picture of who she is. She doesn't live inside your mind. She doesn't know what you're thinking, and you don't know what she's thinking. So you have to back off and move from reactivity to curiosity. You have to ask questions. You have to listen.

It sounds like you're not just coaching people to accept their role in any given disagreement — like, "OK, maybe how I react to my in-laws isn't fair, maybe my partner has a point." You're asking them to accept disagreement in general, without automatically interpreting it as rejection or creating friction around it. That's a pretty tall order. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: Does it work?

We find that over time, if they're in a safe and regular environment, most couples can begin to tolerate difference instead of seeing it as bad. That's when we see them moving toward health. And then when they stay in that process and discover that nothing catastrophic occurs when you accept that what your partner says is true for them , the anxiety relaxes. That's when you know you're getting to more solid ground: when people move to, "Well, tell me more about that, I'm really curious: What is it like for you to think that or feel that or do that? What's going on when you're late and don't call?" Curiosity then becomes a bonding experience, and that can then lead to excitement and to wonder: "Gee whiz, I have two worlds: I have my world and your world, and both of them are right, and we no longer have to be in a power struggle about it. We can be in mutual acceptance."

I will say, though, that I've never found anyone willing to surrender their perceptions until they're in a safe environment—unless they are absolutely forced to do so because reality crashes in on them in some dramatic way: because they learn that their husband or wife has an affair or has embezzled a bunch of money or what have you.

Let's talk about those kinds of situations, because they're some of the most dramatic experiences of wrongness most of us will ever experience. Not many of us will ever be involved in, say, a wrongful conviction, but a whole lot of us get cheated on or get betrayed or just generally invest our trust in an untrustworthy person and suffer the consequences. In your experience, how do people respond to this kind of dramatic collapse of an emotional belief?

The first thing that happens is shock, of course—enormous shock that an unwanted reality is in fact true. In a catastrophe like divorce, it's particularly shocking because that's the one thing that seems to rupture what we would call the attachment impulse the most. Attachment is so necessary and central to our sense of trust and safety in relationships, so when that attachment bond is ruptured, it's hugely anxiety-provoking. People do all kinds of crazy things in order to protect themselves from the pain of the rupture.

If the catastrophic discovery is something like, your partner has three kids in another city, you can't make that reality go away, so you go into depression. But again, I think the operative word here is anxiety. Unpredicted realities produce enormous amounts of anxiety for most people. What you do with that anxiety depends on your mental health and your level of maturity. If you're mature, you may find it a problem to be solved rather than a catastrophe. But it takes very healthy people to do that, and we don't have a whole lot of those people on the planet yet.

Speaking of all the other people on the planet, if you could hear any one of them interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

George W. Bush.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with Google research director Peter Norvig , Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Error Message: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:04:00 GMT

Google, the company, entered this world in 1998. I'm not sure how long it took for Google , the verb, to follow — but I do know that millions of people engage in that particular activity many, many times each day. For half of all Internet users worldwide, Google is the portal to the collected and digitized wisdom (and folly) of humanity. Google's search engine has changed how we conduct research, plan vacations, resolve arguments, find old acquaintances, and check out potential mates. It's also given us new ways to interact with maps, mail, books, news, and documents, radically reshaping the way we think about almost every imaginable medium.

Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, has been involved in this project since its toddlerhood. Norvig joined the company in 2001 and, from 2002 to 2005, served as its director of search quality — a position that put him charge of the company's core Web search algorithms. Below, he and I talk about (among other things) how engineers think about error, what's good about failing fast, and why Google buys cheap computers.

***

I'm interested in the way that attitudes about error vary across professional cultures — doctors typically think about error very differently than pilots and politicians and so forth — as well as across the cultures of different companies, even within the same field. How would you characterize the overall attitude toward error at Google?

There's a story going back to the founding of Google: One of the venture capitalists came to [company founders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] and said "OK, the first thing you have to decide is, is this company going to be run by sales or by marketing? They said, "We think we'll take engineering." He laughed and said, "Oh, you naive college kids, that's not the way the real world works." And they said, "Well, we want to try it." Ten years later, that experiment is still running; engineering is still the center of the company. And it seems like it's worked.

And, like you say, it does create a very different attitude toward error. If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.

What about errors not in experimentation but in implementation or execution? What do you do about mistakes like that, which can presumably compromise your product?

As an engineer, you're just used to the idea that there are errors. No matter how good you think you are, the industry standard is that if you write 100 lines of program, there's probably going to be one error in it. So you have to build all your systems expecting that. We built an entire development process around the idea that errors exist and the need to minimize their impact.

What does that process look like?

Well, first, there are two kinds of error we deal with. One is, there's a clear error in the code: It's supposed to do one thing and it does something else. In that case, you know when you've got it wrong, and you'll know when you've got it right. The second is, how good are the results? Say you do a search and it shows you links; there is no definitive right or wrong to the question of, "Did it work?" But you can say, "Well, this one worked better than that one."

That's interesting. Thomas Kuhn, the great historian and philosopher of science, makes a similar point — that you can't say whether an individual theory is right, you can only say which of two theories fits the facts better.

Right. And we test at both levels — the clear-cut case where it's wrong, as well as the one where you're trying to figure out what works better. At the first level — and we share this with most software companies — before anyone can check in a piece of code that they've written, somebody else has to sign off on it. And then we have all these review processes and test processes at multiple levels to see if [your code] gives the right answer. A large proportion of the code you write is testing what somebody else wrote or what you yourself wrote. The work you're doing is often about, "Am I getting the right answer?" rather than, "How do I compute the right answer?"

What do you do about technological failures? I assume that sometimes it's not the software but the hardware that goes wrong and that the price of those problems can be pretty steep.

I think Google was early in accepting hardware errors. Other companies have tried to say, "Well, if you can buy big, expensive computers that are more reliable, then you'll have fewer breakdowns and you'll do better." Google decided to buy lots of cheap computers that break down all the time, but because they're so much cheaper, you can design the system with multiple backups and ways to route around problems and so forth. We just architect the system to expect failure. Google was very innovative in this area and saved a lot of money as a result.

How did that innovation come about?

In part, I think it was visionary. But, in part, it was just that the problem we are attacking made it easier. If you're doing a Web query and some of the computers break in the middle and you don't get exactly the same result as someone else doing the same query, well, OK. You don't want to drop the top result; if I do a search of the New York Times , I want nytimes.com to be the top result. But what should the 10th result be? There is no right answer to that. If a hardware error means we dropped one result and somebody had a different result at No. 10, there's no way of saying that's right or wrong. Whereas if I'm a bank, I can't say, "Oh, one out of every million transactions, I'm just going to lose that money." I can't have that level of failure. But at a search company, you're more tolerant of error.

I've been at both ends. My previous job was at NASA, where you really don't want your shuttles to blow up very often. So there they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their astronauts' lives. Here, we're kind of at the other end. Failure is always an option at Google.

I want to talk about innovation, because it seems to me that the price of trying new things is that most of them fail. How do you build a tolerance for that kind of failure into a public corporation that's accountable to its bottom line? Getting things wrong might be necessary to getting things right, but failure can be costly.

We do it by trying to fail faster and smaller. The average cycle for getting something done at Google is more like three months than three years. And the average team size is small, so if we have a new idea, we don't have to go through the political lobbying of saying, "Can we have 50 people to work on this?" Instead, it's more done bottom up: Two or three people get together and say, "Hey, I want to work on this." They don't need permission from the top level to get it started because it's just a couple of people; it's kind of off the books.

Two or three months isn't very much time. How do you decide at that point whether an idea is going to succeed or fail?

When you talk about being wrong, I think of that mostly from a statistical inference point of view, and within the company, we're really good at making decisions based on statistics. So if we have an idea — "You know, here's a way I can make search better" — we're really good at saying, "Well, let's do an experiment. Let's compare the old way with the new way and try it out on some sample searches." And we'll come back with a number and we'll know if it's better and how much better and so on. That's our bread and butter.

OK, but what about things that can't be measured experimentally?

Right, that's the question. When it comes to something that doesn't really have statistics, that's harder for us. Take something like launching Gmail, where it wasn't a question of, "Can we make it work?" It was a question of, "Well, gee, who are the other players in this game?" It was Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, and they were all either partners or rivals or both to us, so then the question is, "How are they going to react if we do this?" And we had this idea to offer it for free but to have ads on the sides, so it was like: "Are people going to think that's creepy?"

You can't really do experiments for things like that; you can't get at it through statistics. I suppose you can have focus groups, but focus groups really aren't important; it's more about what the press is going to say. So those types of decisions have to be made more on gut instinct rather than a statistical basis. And as a company, that's harder for us.

Can you parse the idea of gut instinct for me? What is it? What are you actually relying on when you make those so-called instinctive decisions?

Good question. I guess it's experience. It's projecting into the future based on what you've done in the past. Is this going to work? Are we going to be able to build it on time? Is it going to perform as expected? You get a feel for things like that by having built similar projects.

The harder part, I think, is judging the likely reaction. Yes, we can build this, but are people going to like it? Or: Is somebody else going to build a better one first? Or: How are other companies going to react to this? I guess that's also an experience thing, but that part's much harder, because it involves not just what we can do, but how other people are going to respond to what we can do.

So how good would you say your gut instinct is? When you fall in love with an idea or a project — when your intuition says, "We should go for this, this is going to work" — are you usually right?

I think we often have good intuition about where things are going in general. As a company, we made a big bet on mobile and the Android platform because we knew that people were going to be using their phones rather than their desktops for computing, and that gamble worked out. But the details —w as creating the android platform the right way to do it? Should we have partnered with someone else or created a different system? — that was harder to say. A lot of the time, the strategic ideas are clear, but how to get there is not.

Earlier in this series, I interviewed Ira Glass , the host of This American Life , and he said that for every story we hear on the show, they start developing 10 or so and go into production on three or four. He also talked about sitting in on a meeting at The Onion and learning that they kill 30 or 40 pretty funny headlines in order to generate one really funny one. What about you guys? What would you say is your failure-to-success rate?

It's hard to say, because it varies a lot. Some teams are taking on projects that they pretty much know can be done. Let's say you've got some storage system that's not fast enough or big enough and we need to design one that's going to be better. Essentially we have to build that; we have no other choice. So we know it's going to get done. Maybe it won't quite meet the specifications — maybe it takes a little too long and maybe it's not quite as fast — but it gets done. So there you have a very high rate.

Then with things like search quality, we have all these ideas of how to make search better, and I'd say maybe half of those end up working. Sometimes you start down a path and then you find out it doesn't help, it doesn't make any difference.

Half strikes me as a pretty good ratio. What about the success rate for the kinds of experiments your users see, like all the stuff in Google Labs ? Do those catch on fairly often, or is it mostly like, "Well, that was a nice idea."

Most of the things you see in Google Labs are there because we didn't quite know what to do with them, so certainly less than half of them become hits. I don't know what the exact number is. Some of them are already winnowed out by the time they get there; if we thought they were really big, they'd be on the main site rather than the Labs site. Some of them are there because it was easier; maybe there's a security issue or brand-image issue with making it part of the main site, and we didn't want to go through that process if we don't have to. So we said, "Well let's throws it on Labs and if it becomes really popular, we'll think about how to integrate it."

Despite all the experiments Google has initiated since it began, the vast majority of your profits — I've heard between 97 percent and 99 percent — come from just one thing: advertisements related to search. Obviously, then, income generation is not the metric you're using to decide if a product succeeds or fails. What is?

You're right that most of the money comes in through ads. But you can think of everything else as bringing in customers so that they'll click on the ads. We know the value of adding a new customer, and we can see what the usage is of individual sites. So we can say, "This feature is popular, our usage is going up, and because usage is going up, we're making more money." We do things to make Google better so people will come to Google and click on the ads.

What's interesting, though, is that we're now at the scale where we can also do things that just make the Web better. We do a lot of open-source projects, because if we release code and some other company makes something really cool that makes the Internet better, we benefit, too. About half of Internet users are using Google search, so if another company builds something and two people start using the Internet because of it, we're going to get one of them.

Google has been remarkably successful at creating popular products. How does the company create a culture that's conducive to generating new ideas?

Well, we have great people, and that's a huge part of it. But I think the main thing is just trying a lot of ideas. We've built the ultimate system for making demos internally. If a startup company has an idea, it's like, "Well, I need a copy of the Web to make my idea work, I need a thousand computers, I gotta go raise money to do that." So they spend months or years raising money and building infrastructure.

Whereas we have all of that. Somebody can learn how to use it in their first day and say, "OK, I have an idea, and these pieces are already here, and I can just connect them together and see if it works." And if it doesn't work today, next week I'll have another idea. And I haven't wasted months going down one path. It's like playing with tinker toys or something. You plug 'em together, you try something, and if you think it's good, you keep going. And if it isn't, you put them down and start on something new.

I'm struck by how long some products stay in beta testing at Google. Gmail, for instance, was launched in 2004 but wasn't upgraded from beta status until 2009, by which point it had 146 million users. What's the reasoning behind that?

There's two parts to that, a technical engineering part and a public relations part. From the technical engineering point of view, you define a project and say, "These are the features this should have, and until it has all those features, it's still beta." But then there's another decision which is: When is it worth launching? Something can be missing a couple of features and still be worth launching, and we've chosen to do it that way, whereas other companies seem less likely to do so. I don't know why the PR people are open to that here. Maybe it gives the impression that Google is always changing and products aren't quite finished. And maybe they want to give that impression.

The whole beta model is completely at odds with conventional production and manufacturing; you never see General Motors release a beta version of a car, for instance. What's the cost-benefit tradeoff involved in releasing versions of products that you know are still flawed and incomplete?

There's a big difference between the products we have, which mostly live on our servers where we have the ability to update them every day, and a car, which once you ship out becomes very expensive to recall. Traditional software is somewhere in between; if you're selling CDs that you put in boxes and ship to stores, there's a cost to updating that, but it's less than the cost of a car. But for us, it's a process of continual change. We expect to change our servers every day; that's natural for us.

Is part of the benefit to you the open-source advantage — the fact that your customers find the flaws for you?

Yeah, sure, both explicitly — in terms of them saying, "Hey, here's a problem," and also implicitly, in terms of how they interact with it. We see the statistics, we measure how often they click on the first result, how often they have to do a follow-up search, and we get an idea of whether they're satisfied or not. And then we make a change and see if the statistics look better.

Last week in this column, I spoke with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger about how we use the Web to organize, validate, and disseminate information. Google's stated mission is to organize the world's information. Does the company do anything to prioritize more accurate or at least more credible results in its searches?

In a sense, the core innovation behind Google — this notion of page rank, of how many other people are pointing to your result — is a crude measure of credibility. And that came about because of frustration with the quality of the results yielded by earlier search engines. The first search engines were built on a kind of library-sciences technology: To do a search, you looked for documents that mention those key words the most times. So you would often end up with results that were off-target but happened to have a high density of the keywords. Page rank said: If everyone else is pointing to this page, it must be a good one.

That's still how it works to a degree, but multiple things have happened since then. One is that now there's a war between the good guys and the spammers — people who are trying to artificially inflate certain pages by reverse — engineering our system and building pages that can falsely claim credibility. So we have to watch out for that. And then part of the problem with credibility by citation is that it takes time. You don't instantly gather links the first day something is published, which makes it harder to follow new news items and so on. So we need a way to weigh the freshness of a new result versus the accumulation of credibility over time. But yes, we are always looking at quality and credibility as well as salience.

Interesting. It sounds like page rank uses consensus as a stand-in for credibility. That slippage is hardly unique to Google-all of us use consensus as a stand-in for credibility sometimes-but it can be pretty misleading.

Yeah, that's always a problem. One way we try to counter that is diversity. We haven't figured out any way to get around majority rules, so we want to show the most popular result first, but then after that, for the second one, you don't want something that's almost the same as the first. You prefer some diversity, so there's where minority views start coming in.

What do you think have been Google's biggest mistakes?

I can't speak for the whole company, but I guess not embracing the social aspects. Facebook came along and has been very successful, and I may have dismissed that early on. There was this initial feeling of, "Well, this is about real, valid information, and Facebook is more about celebrity gossip or something." I think I missed the fact that there is real importance to having a social network and getting these recommendations from friends. I might have been too focused on getting the facts and figures — to answer a query such as "What digital camera should I buy?" with the best reviews and facts, when some people might prefer to know "Oh, my friend Sally got that one; I'll just get the same thing." Maybe something isn't the right answer just because your friends like it, but there is something useful there, and that's a factor we have to weigh in along with the others.

What about you yourself — what have you personally been most wrong about?

One thing is how fast things change. I was in a meeting a while ago and somebody was discussing a new project — this was in an area I hadn't touched for a while — and I said "Oh, isn't it the case that such and such?" And they kind of snorted derisively and said, "Yeah, well, that's the way the Web was four years ago, but that approach doesn't work anymore." I think that's happening constantly. You think you have this experience — and we talked about how important experience is for having intuitions — but experience can go out of date very quickly.

If you could hear someone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

Last night I saw Jeff Ma speak — he's the MIT student who did the card-counting in Vegas, which the movie 21 was about. He talked about one of his first days betting and how there are certain situations where the statistics say, "If you're in this position, you should double your bet." So Ma finds himself in that position and doubles his bet and then the dealer deals himself 21 and Ma loses $50,000. Then a couple of hands later he was in the same situation and now he's down $100,000. So he went back to his room and said, "What did I do wrong?" He thought about it and said, "I didn't do anything wrong; the statistics are what they are and I did the exact right play for the statistics. The dealer just got lucky." So he went back and kept playing the same strategy and ended up winning $70,000 or something over the weekend. He makes the point that if you're making the right decision, even if you get a bad result, you're not really wrong.

And if I could interview a dead guy — and automatically improve my French, while we're wishing for the impossible — I'd take [French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon] Laplace. I think that he deserves most of the credit for Bayesian probability theory , and most of Bayes' fame comes from having his name on the theorem, not for actually doing the work.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger , NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

This Interview Is A Stub: Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:15:00 GMT

After Google, Wikipedia might be the single most powerful new influence on how we as a culture organize, disseminate, and access information. For millions of Web-connected citizens, the online encyclopedia is the place of first resort for looking up everything from Shirley Sherrod to sickle-cell anemia . There's no question about its scope or popularity: It has 3.3 million articles in English alone (compare that to the roughly 120,000 articles in the online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica ) and attracts nearly 78 million visitors each month. There's also no question that it's an astonishing triumph of open-source development: The entire colossus was built by a bunch of largely anonymous and entirely unpaid contributors.

There is, however, a great deal of argument — and consternation — about the accuracy of Wikipedia entries. (A headline in the Onion made the point nicely: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.") That's why I went looking for Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales, then quit the project over disputes about its governance and the quality and credibility of its content. Sanger is also a trained philosopher with a focus on epistemology — the study of knowledge — which made him an attractive person to talk to about how technology is changing what we know, what we think we know, and how we think we know it. After leaving Wikipedia, Sanger founded Citizendium , a rival online encyclopedia, and now spends most of his time on WatchKnow , a nonprofit organization that uses wiki principles to organize and rate nearly 20,000 educational videos for kids.

What got you interested in encyclopedias? Did you have some kind of longstanding fascination with them, or was it just an accident of history?

It was pure accident. I was circulating an idea for a Web site around different Internet acquaintances and one of them happened to be Jimmy Wales. He responded by saying, "Well, I'm trying to get this encyclopedia project going; would you be interested in coming to work on it?"

That was Nupedia — he had registered the domain name, but at that point it was just an idea — and I got hired for that job. And then I found that it was a fascinating problem to organize people online to create encyclopedias.

People have been trying to validate, organize, and disseminate information for a long time. Did you look back to other efforts in history to do so?

When I was first starting Nupedia and Wikipedia, everything was moving so fast that I didn't have time to go back and read Diderot and D'Alembert and all that, which would have been useful. I did read them later. I can't remember when I read The Professor and the Madman , but that made a big impression me.

That's pretty funny, considering that it's a book about the relationship between the editor of a major reference work and a certified lunatic.

It actually resonated very much with the experience I had trying to organize Wikipedia. It's very interesting to me that here you have the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary , and one of his most prolific contributors was in an insane asylum. A lot of the most prolific Wikipedians, or at least many of them, also seem to have a screw loose. But that doesn't mean their work is useless.

Do you have a theory about this? Is there something about the project of organizing knowledge that attracts slightly nutty people? Or that turns normal people nuts?

There are a lot of theories on that, actually. But I think the most important thing to say is that Wikipedia has very few practical constraints about people behaving according to normal rules of politeness and fair dealing. They've got a zillion rules, of course — that's part of the problem — but there is no easy way to rein in the bad actors. And unfortunately the bad tend to drive out the good. A lot of the more sane, sensible people out there are just can't take too much of it.

Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical schisms.

I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end, although also some agreements. The first problem was what we were just talking about: reining in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.

The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism — it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that — but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject — that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.

Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers — although not all of them, of course — and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

It seems to me that this conflict between amateurs and experts boils down to a conflict between egalitarianism and credibility. You gestured toward this conflict in an essay on the Edge.com , where you wrote, "It's Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I'm on the side of Truth." Do you find that it really is a zero-sum game — that, as a practical matter, we need to choose between these two goods?

I doubt very much that it's a zero-sum game. I think it's absolutely a great thing that people regardless of their credentials can contribute to the shaping of knowledge. And I think we have to creatively design ways of recognizing both the value of amateur work, on the one hand, and the objective value of the knowledge of people who are experts in various fields.

And that's what you were calling for at Wikipedia, right? For human experts to exert at least some baseline control over the content?

Well, I suppose. But you know, I don't like the word "control," because I myself am pretty libertarian in my outlook on these things, quite frankly. It makes me nervous to think of handing the keys over to the experts. But one thing that Wikipedia could do that would not spoil the system — except in the sense that it would cause a huge ruckus among Wikipedians — is simply create a program in which articles are reviewed or rated by experts.

This idea is not new. It's something that we discussed before I even left. It's sort of a perennial idea on Wikipedia, in fact, but they've never done it.

What would qualify someone as an expert?

Well, I can tell you how we do it on Citizendium. Generally we say that to contribute as an editor in a professional field, you need to have the credentials to practice in that field. So if you want to be an editor in law, then you should have a law degree and a few years of experiences. For more academic fields, we generally require a Ph.D.

None of that is to say that we aren't open to other people, but they have to establish their expertise up to that level in some other way. So if someone has a master's degree or even a bachelor's degree in history but has written a bunch of well-respected books — if there's enough evidence for another history editor to recognize the person as legitimate — then we would bring such a person onboard.

Have you read some of the criticisms of expertise that have come out in the last several years — for instance, Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? or, more recently, David Freedman's new book, Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us and How to Know When Not to Trust Them ?

No, I'm afraid I haven't looked at those books. I'd like to — they sound fascinating.

I suspect that most people who aren't involved in the making of Wikipedia, who interact with it as an end product, feel that it's basically good enough. They get that it's not perfect, but they have the impression that it's essentially pretty reliable. In your opinion, how right or wrong is that impression?

I think it's pretty dangerous to rely in an uncritical way on Wikipedia. Wikipedia frequently gets things wrong — or, more often, states things in a misleading or biased way. The problem isn't as bad in the hard sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences, certain views tend to come to the forefront, or the leading views on a subject are completely omitted or are left as a footnote. When it comes to subtly representing a dialectic, Wikipedia does a very bad job. But maybe people don't go to Wikipedia to try to master a debate.

What about factual matters? Are those reliable?

When it comes to just basic facts — statistics about geography or demographics, things like that — then as far I can tell, and as far as I've ever heard, those are fairly accurate. They are probably not much less reliable than any traditionally fact-checked source.

One of the ways we get things wrong is by belonging to a community that enforces, often tacitly, one set of beliefs while obscuring or rejecting another. Do you think Wikipedia constitutes a community in that sense, and if so, how would you describe its belief system?

If you're talking about political biases, I actually think that that's one of Wikipedia's least-worst problems. [Laughs] It's really not as bad as the people at, say, Conservapedia seem to think. I do think that there is a liberal bias on most topics where such a bias is possible, and I think that's probably a reflection of the fact that, again, the people who work the most on Wikipedia tend to be really comfortable with the most radically egalitarian views. And those people tend to be either liberals or libertarians.

I think the kind of biases that are in some ways more interesting and more pervasive have to do with individual biases not on political issues but on a host of very specific academic issues. An article can reflect the bias of a few people who just happen to be most motivated to work on it. This is a general problem with Wikipedia: What is praised as consensus decision-making or crowd-sourcing often just means that the person with the loudest voice or the most time on his or her hands is the one who's going to win.

Do you think that as information technology changes, the responsibility of getting it right is changing, too? Is the onus shifting away from the creator of information and toward the consumer?

I think the people who are putting the information out in front of an audience and presenting it as factual are the people who are responsible for it. Unless we're actually in there editing the articles, then it doesn't make sense to say that we have an obligation to make sure that the article reads the way it ought to read.

But maybe the question is, how ought we to read it? Should people use Wikipedia in the same way they would use, say, Encyclopedia Britannica, or do we need to start thinking and acting differently?

What Wikipedians themselves would say — and I agree with them on this one — is that Wikipedia has finally awakened in people an understanding that even carefully edited resources can frequently be wrong and have to be treated with skepticism and that ultimately we are responsible for what we believe. That means constantly going back and checking what we thought was established or what we thought we knew. Wikipedians often say that you should never trust any one source, including Wikipedia.

That's not anything new; it's always been the case that you should check your source against another source. It's just that the way that the Internet has exposed the editorial process has, for more critical-minded people, made it absolutely plain just how much responsibility we ourselves bear to believe the right thing.

Which online resources do you yourself turn to most often when you're looking for information?

Which resources I turn to greatly depend on what sort of information I'm looking for. One of my favorite information resources is Google Maps and Bing Maps . I've often used Google Scholar for an essay I've been working on lately. When I'm looking for some quick fact, of the sort one finds from an almanac or other reference book, I generally search in Google and then pick a non-Wikipedia source. If there doesn't seem to be anything as efficient, I'll fall back on the Wikipedia source. If I'm doing serious research, I don't spend much time on Wikipedia at all, I'm afraid. I do look in on Citizendium's offerings from time to time, when I think it might have something on the topic. I also not infrequently grab various books from my bookshelves, the old-fashioned way.

When you started Citizendium, what kind of practical measures did you use to try to counteract the problems you'd seen at Wikipedia?

The main policies that distinguish Citizendium from Wikipedia are that we make use of real names [for contributors], we do make a low-key, guiding role for expert editors, and we started the project with some ground rules. I think we certainly did succeed in making a much more polite, collegial project. And the average contribution to Citizendium is of much higher quality than the average contribution to Wikipedia.

As measured by what? Caliber of the writing, caliber of the thought, accuracy of the content?

Everything. All of the above.

One of the objections over at Wikipedia to the idea of assigning a special role to experts was that it would slow growth by creating a bottleneck. Were they right to worry about that? You started Citizendium in 2007 and predicted explosive growth, but you currently have only about 14,000 articles to Wikipedia's 3 million-plus.

I don't think that the way editors participate in the project constitutes a bottleneck at all. If there's one bottleneck that has made it more difficult for us to grow than Wikipedia, it's the sign-up bottleneck. One of the things that allowed Wikipedia to grow explosively and with as little friction as possible is that it was not necessary to even create an account in order to participate. On Citizendium, you have to sign up for an account and get yourself approved with an e-mail address, so that adds some friction, that does constitute a bottleneck.

But beyond that, once you're into the system, if anything there's less friction than in Wikipedia. It's easier to work on articles, you'll experience less resistance on the part of the people who are at work on the wiki with you.

What have you yourself been most wrong about?

[laughs] Oh, boy. That's a hard one. I've been wrong about so many things. I don't know what the most important error is that I've ever made; it would require much more thought to figure that out. But I can tell you the one that bothers me more than any, because it's one that, off the cuff, does seem to have made the biggest difference. When I was getting Wikipedia started, I didn't realize just how deeply important matters of governance were going to be. I wasn't thinking about the problem we would face if we were truly successful. I think there's a lot of things I could have done in the first few months that would have allowed the project to take off the way it did and yet avoided some of the long-term governance issues.

Like what?

Among other things, I could have established a charter that would allow important editorial decisions to be made through a representative body, as opposed to essentially mob rules — what they [Wikipedians] are pleased to call consensus but which of course really isn't.

What do you think kept you from doing that?

I was constantly thinking about how to manage the project, but most of that was about managing the day-to-day aspects rather than the long term development. I think I was really taken with the success of the project, and I was busy just trying to build it up and encouraging people to get involved. I didn't anticipate the potential downsides.

Whom do you wish you could hear interviewed about being wrong?

Hmm. This is one of those questions where as soon as I hang up I'm going to think of what I should have said. There's any number of people from the Bush administration. And I think it would be very interesting if you could interview Jimmy Wales.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Exit Interview: Dead People I Wish I Could Interview About Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:13:00 GMT

Back in May, when the Slate editors and I launched the Wrong Stuff, the plan was that it would run for eight weeks — eight interviews with eight very different people about the role of error in their lives and their fields. We were wary of committing to a longer run, since it wasn't clear that people would have as much appetite for reading about wrongness as they have for, say, vampires, or Mel Gibson, or the BP oil spill.

I should have known better. As it turns out, people love to read about being wrong (or at least, about other people being wrong), and Slate has kindly invited me to continue the series. So beginning next week, the Wrong Stuff interviews will be back. That's the good news.

The bad news is that there are some people I'd love to interview who will not be appearing even in the extended version of this series. Never mind the various dream candidates who have turned me down. ("I'd like to interview you about being wrong" is the kind of phrase that makes certain PR departments instantly delete your e-mail.) I'm thinking, instead, about the people who can't talk to me for the extremely good reason that they are imaginary. Or dead.

I started thinking about this courtesy of one of my very-much-alive interviewees, hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer . At the end of every Q&A, I've asked all of my subjects the same question: "Who would you like to hear interviewed about wrongness?" I've loved the answers to that question, from Anthony Bourdain's ("Dick Cheney — and I'd like him to be water-boarded during the interview") to Diane Ravitch's ("Basically everybody I've been associated with for the last 20 years"), but I was struck above all by Niederhoffer's response. Alone among the interviewees, he replied that he wanted to learn about wrongness from those who are no longer with us: Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and his own father.

I could add to that list: Galileo, who corrected what is arguably the most canonic of western mistakes and then was forced to recant his own rightness. Shakespeare. (Who wouldn't relish talking about error with the man who gave us Othello, Lear, Romeo, and The Comedy of Errors ?) Pope John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council. Plato, who, for good or for ill, gave us the idea of a utopia — a society free of mistakes (and, not coincidentally, artists).

But Niederhoffer didn't stop at dead people. He also suggested that we could learn a lot about wrongness from people who have never lived — that is, from fictional characters. In an e-mail to me, Niederhoffer wrote about the idea of wrongness in Moby Dick , and noted that the harpooner in Melville's novel "would have made a great interviewee."

So he would have — to say nothing of Ahab himself. Or of Emma Bovary , one of literature's greatest victims of self-deception. Or Sherlock Holmes , that literary embodiment of an unattainably accurate relationship to logic and evidence. Or Nathan Zuckerman , the narrator of many of Philip Roth's novels, and as such the navigator of a dense web of illusion and error. Or Elizabeth Bennett, heroine of Pride and Prejudice , who early on describes her eventual true love as "the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry" and who stars in one of literature's most appealing and enduring stories of dramatic wrongness.

Next week, I'll be back with an interview about wrongness featuring a living, breathing person. But in the meantime, readers, tell me this: If you could hold a conversation about error with anyone at all among the departed or the fictional — who would it be?

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This blog features Q&As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with NASA astronaut-turned-medical-error-guru James Bagian , hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Risky Business: James Bagian—NASA astronaut turned patient safety expert—on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:01:00 GMT

In the weeks after I launched this series, several readers e-mailed me to suggest that I interview a man named James Bagian. When I began looking into his background, it became clear to me why: Name a high-stakes industry, and odds are Bagian has been involved in trying to make it safer. He is, among other things, an engineer, an anesthesiologist, a NASA astronaut (he was originally scheduled to be on the fatal Challenger mission), a private pilot, an Air Force-qualified freefall parachutist, and a mountain rescue instructor. And then there's his current job: director of the Veteran Administration's National Center for Patient Safety. In that capacity, Bagian is responsible for overseeing the reduction and prevention of harmful medical mistakes at the VA's 153 hospitals.

Given that most of us are far more likely to find ourselves in a health clinic than a space shuttle, it's sobering to hear Bagian compare the overall attitude toward error in his various fields. "If you look at the percent of budget we spend on safety activity in healthcare versus, say, nuclear power or aviation or the chemical industry, it's not even close," he told me. "Granted, that's just one metric, and I'm not saying money is the be-all end-all. But if people in industry look at what happens in healthcare, they say, 'Man, this doesn't look like anything we recognize.'" In the below interview, Bagian and I talk about how to make medicine safer, why he doesn't like the word "error," and what it was like to dodge the Challenger bullet.

***

How does the healthcare industry compare to engineering and aeronautics when it comes to dealing with human error?

Not favorably. Much of my background is in what's called high-reliability industries — the ones that operate under conditions of high hazard yet seldom have a bad event — and people in those fields tend to have a systems perspective. We're not terribly interested in what some individual did. We want to know what led up to a bad event and what changes we need to make to reduce the likelihood of that event ever happening again.

When I got into healthcare, I felt like I'd stepped into an entirely different world. It was all about, "Let's figure out who screwed up and blame them and punish them and explain to them why they're stupid." To me, it's almost like whistling past the grave. When we demonize the person associated with a bad event, it makes us feel better. It's like saying, "We're not stupid so it won't happen to us." Whereas in fact it could happen to us tomorrow.

Why do you think healthcare lags so far behind in this respect?

For one thing, in healthcare there's tons of variation, in both biology and behavior, so physicians are rightly skeptical of the cookie-cutter approach. They think you have to tailor everything to the individual. There's some truth to that, but the tailoring should be based on what helps the patient, not on your own personal preference.

And then, too, medicine is much older than these other fields, eons old, and for most of that time there wasn't PubMed or the AMA or what have you. It was all about the expertise of the individual practitioner. It's a short step from there to assuming that problems in medicine stem from problematic individuals. That's why we have this whole "train and blame" mentality in medical culture; someone makes a mistake, you train them not to do it anymore, and then you punish them if it happens again. I think we've ridden that horse about as far as we can.

That suggests that the biggest obstacle to reducing medical error is medical culture, rather than our understanding of the human body or the quality of the available technologies and treatments.

It's all those things, but first and foremost, yes, it's cultural. But I should say before we go any further that I don't usually use the term "error." For starters, it distracts people from the real goal, which isn't reducing error but reducing harm. And it also feeds into precisely the cultural problem we're discussing. It has a punitive feel, and it suggests that the right answer was available at the time, which isn't always the case.

I appreciate that attitude, but some things really are medical errors, right? Bad outcomes don't only happen because a certain piece of information was unknowable or a certain event was unforeseeable. Sometimes doctors just write the wrong prescriptions or operate on the wrong body parts.

That's true, but if at the end of the day all you can say is, "So-and-so made a mistake," you haven't solved anything. Take a very simple example: A nurse gives the patient in Bed A the medicine for the patient in Bed B. What do you say? "The nurse made a mistake"? That's true, but then what's the solution? "Nurse, please be more careful"? Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable that way. Some are better than others, but nobody's perfect. You need a solution that's not about making people perfect.

So we ask, " Why did the nurse make this mistake?" Maybe there were two drugs that looked almost the same. That's a packaging problem; we can solve that. Maybe the nurse was expected to administer drugs to ten patients in five minutes. That's a scheduling problem; we can solve that. And these solutions can have an enormous impact. Seven to 10 percent of all medicine administrations involve either the wrong drug, the wrong dose, the wrong patient, or the wrong route. Seven to 10 percent. But if you introduce bar coding for medication administration, the error rate drops to one tenth of one percent. That's huge.

If the biggest obstacles to improving medical safety are cultural, how do you go about changing the culture?

Some of it is about philosophy. We're very, very clear about the fact that patient safety is not someone else's issue. We say, "Everyone here is your patient." Even if they're not directly yours, they're being cared for by this organization, and if you see something that puts someone at greater risk, it is your moral responsibility to intervene with their caregiver to make sure the right thing happens. You don't just say "That's not my business." Baloney. If it was your kid, would you get involved? Then why don't you do it for this patient?

And some of it is about tools. You can't change the culture by saying, 'Let's change the culture.' It's not like we're telling people, "Oh, think in a systems way." That doesn't mean anything to them. You change the culture by giving people new tools that actually work. The old culture has tools, too, but they're foolish: "Be more careful," "Be more diligent," "Do a double-check," "Read all the medical literature." Those kinds of tools don't really work.

What kinds of tools have you introduced that do work?

One thing we do that's unusual is we look at close calls. In the beginning, nobody did that in healthcare. Even today probably less than 10 percent of hospital facilities require that close calls be reported, and an even smaller percentage do root cause analyses on them. At the VA, 50 percent of all the root cause analyses we do are on close calls. We think that's hugely important. So does aviation. So does engineering. So does nuclear power. But you talk to most people in healthcare, they'll say, "Why bother? Nothing really happened. What's the big deal?"

How do you get people to tell you about their close calls, or for that matter about their actual errors? Getting people to report problems has always been tricky in medicine.

Yeah, reporting is a huge issue, because obviously you can't fix a problem if you don't know about it. Back in 1998, we conducted a huge cultural survey on patient safety, and one of the questions we asked was, "Why don't you report?" And the major reason — most people think it's going to be fear of malpractice or punishment, but it wasn't those. It was embarrassment, humiliation. So the question became, How do you get people to not be afraid of that? We talked about it a lot, and we devised what we called a blameworthy act, which we defined as possessing one of the following three characteristics: it involves assault, rape, or larceny; the caregiver was drunk or on illicit drugs; or he or she did something that was purposefully unsafe. If you commit a blameworthy act, that's not a safety issue, although it might manifest as one. That's going to get handled administratively, and probably you should be embarrassed. But we made it clear that blameworthiness was a very narrow case.

At the time that we conducted this survey, we were already considered to be a good reporting healthcare organization; our people reported more than in most places. But in the ten months after we implemented this definition, our reporting went up 30 fold. That's 3,000 percent. And it has continued to go up ever since — not as dramatically, but a couple of percentage points every year.

It's pretty sobering that the reporting rate can go up so much. I realize that that's good news, but it also suggests that there was (and to a lesser extent presumably still is) a lot of bad stuff going on out there that we never hear about.

That's true. But the only reason to have reporting is to identify vulnerabilities, not to count the number of incidents. Reports are never good for determining incidence or prevalence, because they're essentially voluntary. Even if you say "You must report," people will only report when they feel like it's in their interest to do so.

Do you punish people for failing to report serious medical issues?

No. In theory, punishment sounds like a good idea, but in practice, it's a terrible one. All it does is create a system where it's not in people's interest to report a problem.

What about public reporting? If the primary purpose of reporting is to identify vulnerabilities, is there any value to making such reports public? There certainly seems to be some movement in that direction within healthcare.

It depends what you're reporting. If you look at our Web site and publications, you'll see that we post risks and advisories, we're open about the problems we have and the steps we need to take. And we don't mince words; it's not like we're afraid to talk about these things.

But the reports that come in raw from the field — I don't think it makes sense to make those public. They're too misleading. People don't understand what they mean, they don't have the knowledge and sophistication and opportunity to get the full facts, and the way something looks at first blush is often not how it looks after an investigation.

What about these scorecards and similar public metrics that some states and institutions are now using? Are you in favor of those?

I don't think they're always bad, but I do think they often kid people about what's going on. When people think they're going to be graded, they're very likely to take action to make themselves look good, to give themselves a business advantage. And that can be dangerous.

Let me give you an analogy. In the United States, airlines are legally prohibited from advertising based on their safety record. The feeling was, if you let airlines compete for customers based on safety, there will be an incentive not to report problems. Suppose I work for an airlines where the ad campaign is "We're the safest company, we've never had a flight canceled for maintenance problems." And I'm a mechanic and I see a maintenance issue and I think: "We should hold this flight." But someone above me is saying, "This is going to destroy our advertising campaign, this is an investor-owned airline" and so forth. So I say, "Well, maybe it's not that big of a deal, we'll catch it at the next scheduled maintenance instead of dealing with it now." Do we really want to create that kind of perverse incentive?

On the subject of public awareness of medical safety, I want to ask you about some recent incidents at VA facilities, such as the non-sterile equipment that might have exposed patients to HIV and hepatitis.

Other places have had the same thing happen or worse and done nothing about it. At the Senate hearings, people from other medical systems showed up and said, "Oh, this stuff happens all the time, it's just that the VA told you about it." The joint commissioner said, "The VA's done more than anybody in terms of looking at this and making it better." You have to have a thick enough hide to tolerate some of the unsophisticated responses to the fact that you're publicizing a problem. All those responses do is make some managers who don't have as much courage say "Let's not talk about this in the future." And that means the problems don't get fixed.

What about the VA facility in Philadelphia with the so-called "rogue cancer unit ," where almost a hundred patients received inappropriate radiation treatment?

The fact is, there was not a robust quality-control system in place for that kind of treatment — not in Philly and not anywhere. The profession didn't even have standards about how to decide what amount of radioactive seed to give and how to follow up. Penn, which was providing the service, said, "There's no standard, so we didn't violate it." And we said, "Well, there should be a standard, and we should've been enforcing it. We should have stepped into the gap in healthcare, as we've done in many other situations." We hadn't. Now we have. We went and changed it all, and along the way we took our lumps in the press.

But here again, the important fact is that we didn't say, "Let's not talk about it." The easiest thing would have been to fix this one problem and not make a big deal of it and let everybody else fend for themselves. We didn't take that approach. I think that's a good thing. Does it hurt the organization in some ways when people read about it and say, "Oh, look at what's happening in the VA?" A little. But what they don't know is that the same thing or worse is happening in their own hospital.

As a government institution, is the VA legally required to behave differently in terms of reporting and investigating problems than private hospitals and healthcare systems?

No. Nobody told us we had to look at close calls or tell people they can sue us or any of that. It's just what we decided to do. In the VA system, we ask, "What's the right thing for the patient?" That's what guides us. Whereas people in the private sector sometimes say, "We could lose market share if we talk about this publically, let's not do it."

It's got to be traumatic to be a healthcare provider who is involved in a major medical error. How do you support practitioners in that situation?

We don't deal with that on the safety side. In my opinion, it's a nice thing to do, but it's not the major issue. Quite honestly, I think: "Get over it and grow up." I come from aviation, and we don't have pilot support groups. Would it be helpful to have them? Maybe a little. But I think the far more important thing is: Don't blame people where they shouldn't be blamed. Don't humiliate them publically. Don't disclose who they are if it wasn't an intentional act. And show them that the problem they reported was fixed — that it was worth taking that risk, because it made things better for other patients.

Let's talk about the patients. What do you do for victims of medical error?

If a patient is harmed by something we've done, we tell them. We explain what happened, we tell them that they're eligible for monetary compensation, and we tell them they can sue us. I don't know any other place that says, "Here's how to bring a tort claim against us." We do. We figure that if we hurt you, whether through malfeasance or not, we should make restitution.

Do you get sued a lot?

There's a ton of information in the malpractice literature about what are called closed claims — the ones that are resolved in court — and what you see is that when the patient feels like they've been dealt with less than candidly, that's when they really go in for the kill. It's like, "Okay, if that's the way you treated me, let's see who pays in the end." It becomes about getting even, which I can understand.

So we make it easy. We just tell them. And we end up getting more torts filed, but the aggregate payment is less, because people aren't trying to get revenge. Most people just want us to pay for something specific, to take care of the problem we created. And a lot of people say, "Thanks for telling me, I'm not glad it happened, but I understand that it wasn't intentional." And that's that.

Let me shift gears for a bit and ask you a couple of questions about your career as an astronaut. Given that, as you've said, aviation is historically far better about safety issues than medicine, what kinds of things still go wrong up there?

You can never make the probability of failure zero. You can make it really low, but you can never make it vanish. In a high-stakes, high-value system like a space shuttle, we go to great lengths to understand, say, the failure probability for a valve or a fitting or bolt. And then we do what's called a probabilistic risk assessment: we put all of those probabilities together and say, "What level of confidence do we want to have that we won't have a catastrophe?" And management has to decide what that level is. It really comes down to risk — to how much of it we're willing to accept.

It seems that NASA's been willing to accept a fair amount of it, given the tragedies that have bedeviled our space program.

NASA has been terrible on this. Not because of how much risk they're willing to accept, and not because they don't do the work to understand it. They always know what the probability of failure is. But, historically at least, they haven't been honest and forthright in taking to the public about it. In the early '80s, before the Challenger accident, they would say — and this is where I think they actually lied, I don't think that's too strong a word — they would say, "Flying the shuttle is like flying a 727 to Disney World."

That's absurd. Not only are you more likely to get killed in the shuttle than in an airplane; you're more likely to get killed going up once in the shuttle than if you had flown combat missions for two years in Vietnam. That's a statistical fact, but NASA doesn't make it clear. They might tell the House [of Representatives] that there's a 1.5 percent failure rate, but most Americans don't understand what that means. I mean, 1.5, what is that? Is that a lot? You have to relate it to something that means something to somebody. Otherwise, people have the perception that space flight is safe, and when there's an accident, they're shocked. It's like, "We gotta stop flying." If we want to add additional safeguards because now we're feeling emotional about it, okay, we can do that. But if we're still meeting our design specs for loss, why would we stop flying?

Pretty much everyone who lived in the U.S. at the time can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out about the Challenger disaster. You were supposed to be on the Challenger — and then a few months before the fatal mission, your crew was switched out. Where were you instead?

I was there. I helped get everything ready. I babysat the vehicle during tanking. I was at the pad in case there was a pad emergency. When it happened, I was looking at my watch, because every time the shuttle launched, I would think, "I wonder if we're going to lose it during launch this time." That wasn't a fleeting thought, like a low-probability thing that just crossed my mind. It was something I thought seriously about every single time. The riskiest time is between throttle down and throttle up, approximately between 30 seconds and 75 seconds into the mission. So I'm looking at my watch and I'm like, "Okay, we're back to full throttle and it didn't blow. We're over the hump." And then a second later, it went off.

How did you feel?

Was I sad that it happened? Of course. Was I surprised? Not really. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later — and not that much later. At the time, the loss rate was about 4 percent, or one in 25 missions. Challenger was the 25 ^th mission. That's not how statistics works, of course — it's not like you're guaranteed to have 24 good flights and then one bad one, it just happened that way in this case — but still, you think we're going to fly a bunch of missions with a 4 percent failure rate and not have any failures? You gotta be kidding. Anybody who's a realist knows you're going to have losses. Even at 1.8 percent, which is the estimated failure rate these days — how many missions did we go? We went another 70-some missions and had another loss. Well, we were looking at a one in 80 loss rate. That's right on schedule.

That's a really high risk level. Handling it institutionally and politically is one thing, but how do you handle it emotionally?

Everybody's different. People who hadn't been around the high risk stuff themselves, it changed their whole appetite for it. Others looked at it much as I did: It's a shame but it happens, let's go on. I had worked at a test pilot school and some of my best friends were killed while I was there, so it was not an abstract concept to me that people I worked with would be killed doing the job I do.

You were part of the team that investigated the Challenger accident. Were you satisfied with how that investigation was handled?

Overall I didn't have big problems with it. But one thing that was deliberately buried was what happened to the crew. I did that part of the investigation, and there was tremendous political pressure not to tell anyone what happened — not even the other people in the crew office. They didn't learn for months, which was totally inappropriate. They wouldn't even let us put in checklists about what to do in the case of a breakup similar to Challenger . There's ways you could probably survive it, but politically we weren't allowed to discuss that for years, which to me is total hogwash. There are still many people that don't understand that the crew of the Challenger didn't die until they hit the water. They were all strapped into their seats in a basically intact crew module; their hearts were still beating when they hit the water. People think they were blown to smithereens, but that's not what happened. And the problem with that is the same one we were talking about with regard to medicine: if you don't learn what you can from a tragedy, you can't mitigate that risk in the future.

If you could hear someone else interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?

I've been thinking about these issues one way or another for my entire adult life and I've talked to most of the major hitters, so I'm guessing I'm not going to hear much that strikes me as new. But I would be interested to hear what the president [Obama] thinks when outcomes are less than what would be desired.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with hedge fund manager Victor Niederhoffer , mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Hoodoos, Hedge Funds, and Alibis: Victor Niederhoffer on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:09:00 GMT

"When you first contacted me about an interview on errors, I made the error of excessive self-esteem. I thought for a second that you thought I was a sagacious personage who had led a not uneventful life that might have something useful to say to your readers. But then when you mentioned [Alan] Dershowitz , it came to me in a flash."

Thus began one of 26 e-mails (not counting those dedicated to the logistics of our interview) that I received from Victor Niederhoffer after inviting him to participate in this series. Niederhoffer is a hedge fund manager, a former partner of George Soros, a five-time U.S. Nationals squash champion, and the best-selling author of The Education of a Speculator and Practical Speculation . Those successes notwithstanding, Niederhoffer is best known for two spectacular financial blow-ups. In 1997, a risky investment in Thai bank stocks combined with a dramatic one-day drop in the Dow Jones to permanently close the doors of Niederhoffer Investments. Ten years later, having recouped his losses, Niederhoffer saw his Matador Fund, buffeted by the 2007 credit crunch, self-destruct.

Niederhoffer's e-mails suggested a man already obsessed with wrongness. In them, he referenced the statistical concept of path dependence; shared a series of proverbs about the game of checkers (of 5,000 such proverbs, he hazarded, about 250 concerned error); meditated on the difference between Type One mistakes (excessive credulity) and Type Two mistakes (excessive skepticism) (he himself is much more prone to Type One, he says: "I'm tremendously gullible"); observed that "one should be careful of multitasking or multiromancing"; sent me the citations for hoodoo in the Oxford English Dictionary (a hoodoo is something or someone that brings bad luck); and noted that the harpooner in Moby Dick would have made a great interview subject for this series. Finally, he pointed out that the word error has no antonym. "In retrospect," he wrote, "I know much too much about errors and much too little about the opposite, whatever it is."

***

I've enjoyed getting your e-mails. It sounds like you've thought a lot about being wrong.

Well, the reason you contacted me, to call a spade a spade, is that I'm sort of infamous for having made a big, notorious, terrible error not once but twice in my market career.

Let's talk about those errors. The first was your investment in the Thai baht, which pretty much wiped you out when the Thai stock market crashed in 1997.

I made so many errors there it's pathetic. I made one of my favorite errors: "The mouse with one hole is quickly cornered." That is key. There are certain decisions you make in life that are irreversible, that lead you into a path you can't get out of, and unless you have more than one escape clause, the adversary can gang up on you and destroy you. What else? I didn't have a proper foundation. I was not sufficiently private in my activities. I was playing poker with men named Doc. I must've made a hundred errors on that one, but those are five or six that come to mind.

And then there's the greatest error of all, which is that I had delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately I was so successful for so many years in that particular field that I began to believe in my own success. I thought that because my method worked in markets that I knew about and had quantified, I could apply the same methods to something I didn't know about. And I had as an example [George] Soros, who would always say, "I made the most money in things I don't know about."

Did you have a sense that the crisis was coming—a period of dread before the shoe dropped—or did it hit you out of nowhere?

You know sometimes people describe a situation where they see the grim reaper behind them, reaching out with his scythe? I was ice skating the weekend before this horrible crash and all of sudden I started shivering, knowing that if all the forces were aligned against me for one more day, it could lead to an avalanche. I wasn't in that terrible of shape in the previous weeks and days, but I knew I was vulnerable. I knew that if my enemy came in with one terrible final swoop, he could cause me disaster.

Who do you see as your enemy in this situation?

The brokers who had the opposite side of the trades and the people on the floor who had the opposite side of my position in the related markets. They all knew that if I was hurting in one market, I'd have to liquidate in the other markets. Whenever someone's in trouble, it circulates around Wall Street; you'd be amazed how just one small fish is enough to stop the wheels of commerce for long enough to relieve that person of his funds. And then the market goes back to doing exactly what it was going to do beforehand. I still think that the crash of Oct. 27, 1997, was basically due to brokers running my position against me, knowing that I was on the ropes. The market had its greatest drop in the previous 10 years that day. And then the next day, once they were able to force me out, it went up more than it dropped.

I've heard that Soros, among others, cautioned you against the Thai investment. Why didn't you listen to the naysayers?

Well, Soros would be the first to tell you that his predictions are completely random. He never says anything that doesn't jibe with his current position or his hoped-for outcome. And he's chronically bearish. He's chronically thinking that the world needs a central planner to put it to rights and that the market itself is too prone to disaster.

I think a much better view is that the stock market never rises unless there's a wall of fear it has to climb. When the public is most frightened, only the strong are left, and that's when the market is in the best possible hands. I call it taking out the canes. Whenever disaster strikes, the very sagacious wealthy people take their canes, and they hobble down from their stately mansions on Fifth Avenue, and they buy stocks to the extent of their bank balances, and then a week or two later, the market rises, they deposit the overplus in their accounts, invest it in blue-chip real estate, and retire back to their stately mansions. That's probably the best way of making money, to be a specialist in panics. Whenever there's panic hanging in the air, that's a great time to invest.

But I assume that's what you were thinking when you ignored the risk in Thailand, and that didn't work out so well.

There's no magic bullet that will make you money all the time, but what I said can be quantified and has been quantified and certainly works for the U.S. market. My basic methodology, which I developed 30 or 40 years ago and which has been widely copied and stolen and which about the half the industry uses—i.e., that the interrelations between markets are predictive and can be quantified—I happen to believe that this methodology is quite valid and I still use it today. And every now and then I can keep my head above water.

How did it feel to be so wrong in such a high-stakes situation?

It was my first real taste of total disaster. I had pretty much lived a charmed life until that time. I had won some awards as the best-performing fund the previous year, and I had never had a customer lose money with me. I had an unprecedented, too-good-to-be-true kind of record.

When it happened, I went through all the stages of grief: anger, denial, sadness, everything. My sister happens to be a practicing psychiatrist, and she said that of the 11 symptoms of suicide, I had 10 of them. I was destroyed. I had lost money for my customers and that was very terrible. And I had lost my feeling of competence in my chosen field. And I had I lost all my own money, a lot of people were depending on me who would now have to fend for themselves, so it caused a great spillover of grief, too.

That suggests that your mistake affected your social relations, too.

Oh, absolutely. A lot of people were rightfully distressed and displeased, and my social position was definitely much reduced. I lost almost all my friends, and instead of being the head of the family, I became the subject of skepticism. And of course my customers were very upset with me—"How could I have been so stupid?" Fortunately, in most of my disasters, I'm the one who's been the biggest loser. I made what some people would consider the idiotic mistake of believing in my own ideas and putting all my money in the same funds I ran for my customers. So not only did I lose my business, but I lost my personal fortune also. I was once quite a wealthy man and I'm not quite so wealthy anymore, as is appropriate.

On the other hand, I have a number of people who have stood by me through thick and thin. But anyway, the main problem isn't other people. The main problem is when you yourself begin to doubt whether you have what it takes, whether your raison d'être is valid, whether you have a rightful place in the firmament.

Ten years after that first crisis, you were disastrously wrong again, when your Matador Fund folded after losing more than 75 percent of its worth. What happened? Did you make the same mistakes or new ones?

In both cases I was in over my head. I didn't have the capital to be strong enough to provide a backup in the case of unforeseen events. I didn't have a proper foundation. I was playing with adversaries who were stronger than me and who actually made the rules. My base of operations was not diversified enough, and I was vulnerable to forces I couldn't withstand. I was too vainglorious. In my opinion, those are recurring errors behind most disasters.

But also, most people have, in one way or another, a stop loss. If they go to Vegas with $10,000, they say I'm not going to spend more than $5,000. But they never say, "Hey, when I win a certain amount, that's when I'm going to quit." I'd had this incredible string of successes where I made 50, 100 percent, year after year. And in 2006 I'd won the award again as the best-performing fund—you can imagine how reluctant they were to give me the award a second time after my first disaster—but I didn't take account of this. I didn't have a stop-gain, if you will.

Is it reasonable to assume that you're going to make one of these massive mistakes a third time?

Well, fortunately I'm not in Thailand anymore, and I'm not in options anymore. And I'm at an age—especially with my seven kids and my 4-year-old son—where it would be extraordinarily reprehensible to have one more excursion into the River Styx. I'm much more prudent now. I'm more aware of my own liability to err. I've always been a humble person, but I wasn't humble enough. I'm not the great exemplar of unrivaled success that I used to be, and my wife always reminds me of my liability to err in case I'm not beating up on it enough myself.

What do you feel like you've learned?

It's crucial to have good models, to learn from people who are successful and productive and honorable and happy. I was fortunate, I've had some fantastic mentors. My father was my greatest and most continuing example. I always wish I could be as little prone to error as he was. He was the happiest man alive, and he never had to resort to duplicity because everything that came out of him was exactly from his inner self; there was no difference between the input and the output for him. But regrettably, duplicity is very, very important in life. The direct approach always creates tremendous obstruction and friction from the adversary, so often the indirect approach is necessary.

I agree that it's lovely to have good mentors, but can't successful, productive, honorable, happy people get things wrong sometimes as well?

Let's turn it on its head for a second with one of my favorite topics, the hoodoo. There are certain people you meet in life who are like the locomotives that always used to blow up—people who, wherever they go, disaster always ensues. One of my main pieces of advice is: Stay away from hoodoos. Sometimes hoodoos are very affectionate and they like to hug you, and I always burn my shirt right after being touched by a hoodoo.

How do you know a hoodoo when you see one?

First of all, a lot of them frequent areas that are rather ephemeral. Many waterfront communities are peopled with hoodoos. And they generally have a string of failures behind them, they generally are in need of capital, they generally talk a much better game than they play. And they often flatter you and pretend to be your very amiable friend before they really know you. Hoodoos are very good at what they do. A lot of times they command the center of attention and they try to dazzle you with the trappings of success—which when you look into it you find is a will o' the wisp.

Speaking of those who are around when disaster ensues, do you think the people at our major financial institutions are at all chastened by getting it so wrong?

I don't know what the financial institutions feel because they don't talk to me. I'm not in their firmament anymore. They can't get any business out of me, so they don't have any reason to devolve their inner feelings on me. But I know that it's very helpful to have a wealthy fairy godmother who can bail you out when you're in trouble, as certain banks and brokerage houses do. And I imagine that after being bailed out by their former—by their fairy godmother (we won't mention the word "cronies"), they feel that they've been given the breath of life again. And now they have to genuflect before the fairy godmother and be spanked in public and humiliated and their reputations are hopefully ruined, as they should be. But on the other hand, they don't have to face the actual disaster of financial ruination. They don't have to bite the bullet and pay for their own mistakes like me and 99.99 percent of other people who have had great failures.

I'm interested in something you said in one of your e-mails, that it was a mistake to play a flawless squash game.

As a squash player, I was gifted. I had all the right things going for me. I practiced. I was very good with the racket, and I had tremendous anticipation. But I tended to play an errorless game by hitting a slice on my backhand, which took a lot of power off the ball. That wasn't a disaster, but it was definitely a weakness in my game. My opponents always used to say that on a good day they could beat me, because they could hit more spectacular shots than me. But they never did. I went for about 10 years without losing a game, except to [the great Pakistani squash player] Sharif Kahn. He made about six, seven errors a game—but he also made eight or nine winners. I would make about zero errors per game but only one or two winners. He had the edge on me about 10-4, and I regret that I was never willing to accept the risky shots and confrontations, never willing to play a more error-full game.

It sounds like you wish you'd taken more risks as a squash player.

In my market career, I took too many risks. In my squash career, I didn't take enough.

I'm surprised. I would have expected risk to be an-across-the-board characteristic—that an aggressive, risk-taking investor would be an aggressive, risk-taking squash player.

I wish I had applied my squash methods to my speculating. I'd be a very wealthy man if I had.

One last thing from your e-mails: I love this checkers saying, "The popular player loses without an alibi." I think most people are pretty bad at that. It's like, "Well, if it hadn't been for X, I would've won."

I hope you don't feel like I've alibi-ed too much. But a person likes to have a certain amount of self-respect even after disasters. Still, it's terrible to be a bad loser. I like Soros's proverb that you should never marry a woman you wouldn't want to divorce.

Having been down there in the pit of terrible wrongness twice, do you have any advice for people who are struggling with their own catastrophic mistakes?

I think there are causes that led to their disaster and that rather than thinking about the actual minutiae of the downfall, and rather than creating alibis, they should think about the principles that led to their mistakes. And then I think they should let bygones be bygones. Once you've experienced disasters, there's no sense wallowing in misery. You gotta get back in the qualifying tournaments again.

Would you say that anything good came out of those difficult times for you?

Out of these great disasters came my 4-year-old son, who is the joy of my life. What happened was that I got a call one day from the head of Bloomberg, who wanted to give me a job as a writer. I explained that I really don't know how to write and that it's very hard for me, but I was so grateful to him that I said, "You know, you have the worst stock market column in history, it misses the key aspects, and you write it with a formula. I'd like to at least help you in return for your kind efforts to bail me out of trouble." Through that, I met one of their ace reporters, Laurel Kenner, and together we had a son. He's downstairs doing experiments with explosions right now.

If you could hear anyone else being interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

I'd like to go back and sit at the knee of Charles Darwin or Francis Galton. And I'd sit with Jack Barnaby, who was the greatest squash coach and had something like 200 victories in a row but also a lot of losses.

And I'd sit with my father. Whenever I was in error, my father was like the fairy godmother that I spoke about, but instead of taking trillions from the common man, he would take his $400, which was his entire net worth, and he'd say, "Here, Vicky, this is the last $400 I have, take it and pay off your debts." He'd say "Don't worry, you'll regroup, it's only money. You'll rise again, I know you can do it."

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with mountaineer Ed Viesturs , This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Into Thin Error: Mountaineer Ed Viesturs on Making Mistakes

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:11:00 GMT

There's a select number of places on earth where you really, really don't want to make a mistake. High on the list, in every sense, are the planet's tallest mountains: the 14 peaks in the world that are more than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet).

Widely acknowledged as one of the world's greatest mountaineers, Ed Viesturs is one of fewer than 20 people and the only American to have climbed all of those peaks — and one of only five to have climbed them without supplemental oxygen. Nonclimbers probably know him best as the star of the 1996 IMAX movie about Mount Everest, which he has climbed seven times.

I sought Viesturs out because I was curious about the kind of attitude you develop toward error when a single mistake can easily cost you your life. I also wanted to test a hypothesis that I call "the paradox of error": If your goal is to avoid making mistakes, then you must constantly assume that you are about to make one. That's why fields like aviation and medicine have, at their best, a productive obsession with error. It turns out the same goes for mountaineering — or, at least, mountaineering as practiced by Viesturs. He's totally comfortable with being wrong, he says; the important thing is that, "if you goof up, it's in the right direction."

***

You've written that the worst mistake of your climbing career occurred on K2 — which is a bad place for a mistake, given its reputation as the deadliest mountain in the world. Can you describe what happened?

I was with two other climbers trying to make the summit, and we'd had to sit at our high camp for three nights waiting for the weather to clear. Finally we had what we thought was a window of opportunity, so we started climbing. About halfway into the day, the clouds below us slowly engulfed us, and it started to snow pretty heavily. I always contemplate going down even as I'm going up, and I was thinking, "You know what? Six, seven, eight, nine hours from now, when we're going down, there's going to be a tremendous amount of new snow, and the avalanche conditions could be huge."

I talked to my partners, and either I was overreacting or they were underreacting, because they were like, "What do you mean? This is fine." So I was kind of alone in my quandary. I knew I was making a mistake; I knew I should just simply go down, that I should unrope and leave my partners and let them go, but I kept putting off that decision, until eventually we got to the top. When we got down to camp that night, I was not pleased with what I had done. I'd have to say that was the biggest mistake I've ever made in my climbing career.

Really? Given the many fatal mistakes made on mountains every year, this doesn't sound so bad. You made it down safely, after all.

Yeah, but a mistake is a mistake even if you get away with it. Even though we succeeded, I don't ever want to do that again. I felt on the way down that the conditions were pretty desperate. We could've gone down in an avalanche at any minute. We just got really, really lucky. There were moments I was convinced we weren't going to make it down, when I said [to myself], "Ed, you've made the last and most stupid mistake of your life."

I think a lot of people, when they survive a situation like that, they're willing to do it again. They're like, "Well, you know I got away with it one time, I can probably get away with it again." You do that too many times and sooner or later, it's not going to work out.

What kept you from acting on your knowledge that it was a mistake?

You know, I was so torn. Part of me was thinking, "Is this really as bad as I think it is?" Here you've spent two and a half months of your life trying to achieve a goal, and you're within 1,000 feet of getting to the top, and it's one of the worst times to have to make these choices. You think, "Arrrrghhhhh, you know, if I turn around right now, we'll have to go home, we've spent all this time and energy, and we won't have made it to the summit." So that's pulling me in one way, and then the other way is going, "Jeez, Ed, it's going to be terrible, just turn around, just go down."

But you didn't.

No. I kept saying, "Well, let me go on for another 15 minutes and then I'll decide." And then after 15 minutes I'd say, "Let me go on another 15 minutes and then I'll decide." And I just couldn't make a decision, and I put it off so long that I got to the top.

Economists call that sunk costs — when you've poured so much money or effort into something that it's hard to extricate yourself, even when you should.

Right! I can see that. In fact, I've seen it many times. And I'd always thought, it doesn't matter how long you've been there, how much money you've spent, how much energy you've expended. If the situation isn't good, go down. The mountain's always going to be there. You can always go back.

It takes a long time to climb down a mountain. I'm guessing it feels even longer when you think you've just made the worst — maybe the last — mistake of your life.

Yeah, my God. I mean, from the summit it took us probably four hours to get to the high camp again, and we were going down some really steep slopes that were fully loaded with snow, and visibility was zero. We were in the midst of a snowstorm, we could barely find our way down, we're wading through snow that's almost crotch deep, and with every step I was just like — arrrrrrrhhh! I'm thinking, "Ed, you're gonna die." When we got to camp, I was just so angry with myself. We got to the top, but the price was way too high.

That feeling of being angry with ourselves over a mistake we made — that can be really tough to let go of.

Yeah, but that can be a good thing. Afterward, every time I got into another situation in the mountains where I had similar feelings, I would just say, "Hey, don't do that, don't screw up like you did on K2." I would say, "You know what, I'm going down," and I would just be totally content with that decision.

Did you make more mistakes early on in your climbing career? There's that old saw about how experience is just another name for having made a lot of mistakes.

I don't really look back and say, "Oh my God, that thing I did was really idiotic, how could I have done that?" I think I always wanted to be careful. I didn't want to die in the mountains. I do think, though, that as I climbed more, I became more conservative, just because of all the things I'd learned. When you're less experienced, you don't even know about the mistakes you're making.

Let's talk about guiding. When you're leading a climb, instead of just acting as a member of a team, the stakes of making a mistake must feel exponentially higher.

Well, they are. The consequences are bigger and the responsibility is huge. But you should take that same level of responsibility when you're on your own. Even when I don't have clients, I don't want to die.

I assume mistakes actually occur a lot more often when you're guiding, because not everyone — in fact, not anyone — is as experienced as you.

You can't make a mistake if you aren't the one making the decision. When I meet a group of clients before a climb, I say, "Here's the deal: It doesn't matter how much money you've paid to climb this mountain. I will make all the decisions. I'll let you know how I'm making them and why I'm making them, but in the end, you are hiring me to make the decisions, because I have the experience to do so." If there's any indication that things may not go well, we turn around in a heartbeat, and people understand that. They might complain in the moment, but if it all works out and they see that you made the right choice, they thank you later.

Are there certain predictable mistakes that less experienced climbers tend to make?

There's what I call groupthink, what some people call summit fever. You know, there's five or six people and they're climbing along and the weather starts to get funky and the majority of the group wants to go on, and the person with the least experience is like, "Weeellll, they're going on, it's probably OK." It's almost a lemming-type effect. People get swept up in it, it's that psychological feeling of safety.

Funny that it makes people feel safe, when really it's putting them in danger.

Yeah, I know. But I think we see that a lot in everyday life, too, where there's a group of people doing something and you go, "Well, they're doing it, it's probably OK."

When you're climbing not as a guide but as part of team, do you tend to distribute decisions and responsibilities, or do you check everything for yourself?

You've got to trust your partner. I mean, think about it: You're connected to that guy with a rope. So there has to be an implicit trust in each other's skills. But still, when my partner puts his harness on and ties in, I check his harness, I check his knots, and he does the same to me. It's not that we think, "Hey my partner doesn't have it figured out." We're just double-checking each other. That should never be taken in the wrong way: you could have the most experience in the world and accidentally forget to back your buckle on your harness. [ That is, double the strap back through the buckle. If you fail to do so, the strap will simply through the buckle during a fall, instead of tightening and catching you. ]

How do you choose your climbing partners?

I want to be with people that have what I call the same level of acceptable risk. If anything I want to be with climbers who are more conservative than me, because when you get into these dicey situations, you don't want to feel like you're trying to convince the other guy, "Hey, I think this is a mistake."

So what exactly is your acceptable level of risk?

It's hard to define exactly. For me it's more of a feeling—like, Hey, I just think this situation could get bad, and I think we should at least have a discussion about it .

I've been on climbs where other people have higher levels of acceptable risk and they're willing to push harder and further in certain situations. And if they go on and I go down, I always say, nobody was right, nobody was wrong. We have to live with our decisions and what we're willing to accept, so it's not really black or white. I can't say, "Jeez, they're making a dumb mistake and I was the smart one."

But on a mountain, sometimes it is black and white, right? I mean, you can be as rah-rah relativism as you want, but sometimes the world makes it very clear that you've made a mistake. All else being equal, if you survive and the other guy doesn't, your decision was right and his was wrong.

Yeah. But I make a point of not judging people. You can't go up to them and say, "Nyah, nyah, I was right and you were wrong."

Also, I've had these weird scary feelings sometimes and in the end the weather was great and the sun came out and it's like, well, maybe I made the more conservative decision, but at the end of the day, how wrong was it? Did I really lose anything except some time or energy? No. I mean, the biggest price you can pay up there is your life, so I'm willing to err on the side of being conservative. Hopefully you make the right decision, sure. But also hopefully if you goof up, it's in the right direction.

Speaking of conservative decisions, I heard you once turned around when you were 300 feet from the summit of Mount Everest. Three hundred feet out of, what, 29,029?

Yeah. That was my first trip to Everest, and I was like — daaaaaaahhh ! You know, there's the top, I could see the top, 300 feet away. But it was the obvious decision; all the indications were that we needed to turn around, and I just realized that I was going to have to go home and come back another year. And even though it was slightly frustrating, I wasn't disappointed. If I have to turn around because of conditions beyond my control, as long as I haven't given up physically or mentally, I don't call those failures. I can live with those.

I didn't realize this happened on your first Everest attempt. I'm amazed to hear you describe it as only "slightly frustrating." What was going on up there that made it so clear that you had to turn back?

The weather was deteriorating, we'd used all of the rope we'd brought with us, the conditions were getting worse and worse by the minute. That umbilical cord of safety was stretched and maybe almost broken, and we figured we might be able to get to the top, but no way were we going to get down. And climbing a mountain has to be a round trip. So many people get to the summit but never make it back down.

A lot of times we learn from close calls. What's the worst mistake you've almost made?

I can tell you about an incident that happened to a partner on Everest. If you go to Camp III on Everest, it's on this steep, steep face and when you're up there, you've got to make sure you have on your boots, your crampons, your ice axe, because if you climb out of your tent and slip, you're gone.

I got up there one year with my partner, and I noticed that he took his crampons off, probably thinking, "Ah, we're in camp, we're in fine." It had snowed, and we had to dig the tents out, so I'm shoveling near the front door and he's shoveling near the back, and all of a sudden I look up and he's not there. He's vanished. I thought, "Oh my God, he slipped and fell down the face." Then I hear a voice 20 feet below me yelling my name. He had slipped and thankfully fell into a crevasse; if it wasn't for the crevasse, he would've gone down 3,000 feet.

It was a simple, little mistake, where just for a minute you let down your guard, but that's how quickly the bad stuff can happen up there.

Yeah, when the stakes are big, the small stuff matters.

Climbing is the small stuff. The higher you climb, the less and less chance you have of being rescued. And that's when minor mistakes have huge, huge consequences. These high-altitude mountains are one of the few places on the planet where there is literally no help. If you screw up and break a leg, it's up to your partner to get you down. If he can't, you're dead. It's one of the few places in the world where your decisions have real consequences. I think a lot of people don't ever experience that—"Man, every decision I make has a consequence right now." That's a very interesting feeling.

The majority of accidents and deaths in the mountains are what I call self-inflicted. You make bad decisions, you choose to climb in bad weather, you make a dumb mistake like not clipping into a rope or not putting on your crampons, and then in a heartbeat, it falls apart. It's those little things that you have to constantly remind yourself about. It doesn't matter if I've been doing this for 30 years; I still have to be just as careful. But I think as you do something more and more, you have the tendency to become complacent.

So how do you ward off that tendency?

You've just got to keep reminding yourself: I need to be careful every day, every second of the day, and just be humble about what you're doing. My wife always reminds me: Just when you think you've got it figured out, you don't. That goes through my head all the time.

OK, but I've heard that you've climbed Mount Rainier more than 200 times. Must be hard not to get complacent around, I don't know, No. 148.

[Laughs.] Well, it's still a mountain. And it's a big mountain, and just because I've climbed it 200 times doesn't mean that one of these days something might not happen. Lou Whittaker, one of the head guys at Rainier Mountaineering, used to say: Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean they love you.

You're not doing a very good job of bolstering the stereotype of the macho reckless risk-craving adventure type.

I hope not. I'm not like that stereotype. People have the misconception that climbers are reckless and suicidal—like, "Why would you want to do a sport where you could die?" There are risks in climbing, but there are also ways to manage the risks. If you eliminate the mistakes and the errors in judgment, you can make it relatively safe.

For me, the challenge and maybe the art of mountaineering was to try to do it safely and successfully, to show people that you don't have to be on death's doorstep when you get to the summit. You can come home with all your fingers and toes. If you go on an expedition with eight partners, you can come home with eight partners. I didn't want to have those daredevilish close calls. There's a safer, more conservative way to do it that's just as exciting, just as rewarding.

If you could hear someone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

I think it would be airline or fighter pilots, because they have to make very rapid decisions about what to do and what not to do, decisions that have huge consequences. I think surgeons do the same, they get into these situations where there's a ton of pressure, "Do we do this, do we not do this," there's a life hanging by the line. Those are the two that come to mind.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with This American Life host Ira Glass , celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

On Air and On Error: This American Life's Ira Glass on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Every episode of the radio show This American Life has, host Ira Glass suggests, "a crypto-theme." There's whatever the story appears to be about — the financial crisis , evangelical Christianity , cryogenics — and then there's what it's actually about. And what it's actually about is, as often as not, wrongness. Most people shun or ignore error; storytellers exploit it. They understand that virtually all good narratives contain some element of hoodwinking — that however much we might dislike being wrong in daily life, we relish red herrings and plot twists and surprise endings in our stories. Accordingly, in This American Life (as in life more generally), things seldom turn out the way you expect.

I thought interviewing the acknowledged master of the form might be daunting — I interviewed celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain in this space last week, but I didn't try to cook for him — but, as on his radio show, Glass is adept at making you feel like you're hanging out with an old friend. He uses "um" and "like" and "I mean" in a way that manages to come across as thoughtful rather than faltering and that brings to mind Don Delillo's line: "He speaks your language, American." He's also more willing than anyone I've ever interviewed to think for a long time before answering. That might be part of why he was able to say so many interesting things on so many diverse, wrongness-related subjects — from David Sedaris, Roland Barthes, and Freud to what happens when journalists get it wrong, why it took him 10 years to stop being incompetent at his job, and why you shouldn't feel up girls in front of their parents.

Do you consciously think about wrongness as a narrative device?

I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong. In fact, we've talked as a staff about how the crypto-theme of every one of our shows is: "I thought it would work out this way, but then it worked out that way."

Sometimes that wrongness exists in really small ways. We did a story this week about a man who saves people on a bridge in China. It was kind of a radio cover version of a magazine piece by a guy named Mike Paterniti, who started out thinking the man was going to be this inspirational Gandhi-like figure. And then Mike gets there and the guy turns out to be totally gruff and barely talks to him. That's a small wrongness, but it's the pleasure of the story. If you just showed up at the bridge without the setup of thinking he's going to be a great guy — if he just starts off as a grump — it's less pleasurable. It's less fun. The collision of reality against expectation is what makes it work.

Why is there such a big payoff for the listener in stories about wrongness? What makes it so pleasurable?

Well, if the story works, you become the character, right? You agree with their early point of view, and then when it gets shattered, you are shattered with it. So in the storytelling, you want to manipulate the evidence and the feelings so that the audience is right there agreeing with the person who's about to be proven wrong. When that happens, if it's done right, you as the audience get flipped upside down.

Did you always intuitively recognize these elements of storytelling, or did you have to figure them out?

I had to figure it out. I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller. That meant I had to really take apart the machinery of how a story works. When I think about a story today, I think about it in a very mechanical way; I'm very aware of the structural parts of it and what I need for it to work.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory. But there were a few pieces of writing in the field that were not about how language is a conspiracy theory to hold us in our place — which I did believe then, but don't believe anymore — but were about: How does a story give pleasure? And the radio stories I make, the way I think about them is the way I thought about stories when I was in college reading Roland Barthes's S/Z . He talks about the five codes of how a narrative gives pleasure — about how a narrative will keep you from knowing something and make you think the opposite and then reveal it. Which is totally about wrongness, come to think of it.

The experience of being wrong can be so emotional — it can involve feeling humiliated or confused or losing an organizing principle of our life in a way that can sometimes be devastating. What's it like as an interviewer to bring people through that kind of experience all over again?

[He thinks a long time.] I'm not sure what to say. If any story is going to be good, whichever one of us is working on it, we have to go through the feelings of the story ourselves. Nobody's going to feel it if we don't feel. It's honestly not worth making a story if you're not going to have strong feelings about it, if it's not going to create empathy. I walk the person through "What did you feel at each stage of this?" and if somebody's telling you about some moment of incredible vulnerability and emotion, if you're normal, your heart goes out to them. So if it's going well, that's what happens. But it doesn't go well every time. We kill half of the stories we try, because not everything can live up to that.

What about when you're interviewing people who can't admit that they're wrong? I'm thinking of a story you just did about would-be California Gov. Steve Poizner, who wrote a book about teaching for a year at a school he characterized as basically this violent urban wasteland, when in fact it's a perfectly lovely suburban school with great resources and great kids. He never admits his error, even though you make the facts of the matter so obvious.

It's harder than dealing with somebody who has the same perspective you have as the narrator. I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can. And the thing that makes me a good interviewer in that kind of situation — which is that I'm trying to see it from the other person's point of view — makes me a bad interviewer when the person is deceiving himself. In that situation, I shouldn't be trying to see it from his point of view; I should be trying to get him to answer the questions and acknowledge the facts, which he doesn't want to do.

Do you find that people automatically narrate their stories in a way that pivots around these moments of wrongness and surprise?

No, of course not. People don't naturally tell their stories in a way that makes for great radio. Why would they? That'd be really weird.

I don't know about that. I'm always amazed by how many people are great raconteurs. We're such a storytelling species.

Right, no, we are. Most people aren't great storytellers in general, but if you stumble on the thing that really means something to them, you'll get a great story out of them. This is one of the insights of therapy, actually. If you read all the early Freud stuff — you know how when he stumbles onto the central issue with his patients, suddenly stories flood out of them in pure narrative, with these incredible poetic images? That's what happens when you're working out in your head something that isn't totally resolved and then you speak about it. It comes out as narrative.

But that said, we very much think about how to shape the interviews so that the story will work on the radio. By the time we do the interview on tape, we know the rough idea: He starts here, he goes here, he ends up here. We really plan ahead of time to make sure the reveals work.

Is it tough to find stories that work? In my experience, a fundamental part of being a journalist is that you find a story that seems like it's going to be perfect and then you get there and start talking to the subject and as often as not, it falls apart in any one of a million ways.

Totally. One of the reasons I was interested in doing this interview is because I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it's usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere. It's not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four. In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can't tell if it's going to be good until you're really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.

Have you gotten faster at recognizing what's not going to work?

Well, I register the danger that it might not work. But honestly sometimes you have to just do it. There are definitely interviews that we all go into knowing, " Ehhhhh , here's all the things that can go wrong and here's the one or two things that it can go right." And you just gotta do it.

I had this experience a couple of years ago where I got to sit in on the editorial meeting at the Onion . Every Monday they have to come up with like 17 or 18 headlines, and to do that, they generate 600 headlines per week. I feel like that's why it's good: because they are willing to be wrong 583 times to be right 17.

That's amazing. I'm trying to work out the fraction in my head — like, how wrong do you have to be to finally be right?

It kind of gives you hope. If you do creative work, there's a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired.

It reminds me of your own career trajectory. In the past, you've told a story about one of your producers listening to a piece you did early on, and afterward saying to you, "There's nothing in here that indicates that you were ever going to get it."

I know. I mean, that's my big drama. Everybody has a drama, a struggle that they went through, and for me it was turning myself from somebody who wasn't any good at this thing into somebody who's really, really good at it. I was a great intuitive story editor from the start, but writing, interviewing, performing on the radio — I was just terrible at all of that. All through my 20s, my parents were like, "Why are you doing this?" I wasn't making any money, and I was so bad at it. I was 19 when I started at NPR and I was 27 or 28 before I could competently put together a story that I had written. All that time, I just stubbornly pushed toward this thing because I thought it would work out in some form. I was right about that, but I was wrong about pretty much everything along the way.

Plenty of people in your field got to competent a lot faster but then stayed there. Do you think there was a relationship between the length of your struggle and the spectacular outcome — that being so bad at it for so long forced you to come up with a different way to do it?

[Thinks.] Not necessarily the length of the struggle. The engine of what I was going through was that I wanted to make something that would be really special. I wanted it to seem special to me, I wanted it to stand out, and that kept me from learning a lot of the ways that people make boring stories. I had contempt for those stories. I didn't know what I was making that was better — in fact, what I was making was a lot worse — but it kept me from going down a lot of paths that would have been boring.

I want to ask you about getting people wrong. We all have such specific narratives about ourselves, and one of the real risks of telling other people's stories is that those people will end up feeling misrepresented or betrayed by your version. Has that happened to you?

Not very often, partly because we work in a format where we don't need to fit the story into some crazy journalistic news scheme — you know, where one character is going to be the symbolic homeowner to represent all the homeowners and anything they say that's contrary to the thesis has to get cut. We're almost never in that situation. Usually we hear about something really amazing and we go and sit down with the person and we try to capture it as accurately as we can. When that's your gig, if you're halfway competent, people aren't going to get mad because they can see that we're just trying to tell it the way they saw it.

But there's a really fascinating instance of what you're talking about in Chuck Klosterman's new book [ Eating the Dinosaur ]. I feel like this is a really weird example to bring up, but he interviews me and Errol Morris about interviewing. It's a really funny chapter because I give all of these totally Pollyanna answers — I mean, things I really believe, but I'm like [here he goes into an earnest falsetto, like a very sincere Chipmunk] " I just think that people open up because they sense that somebody's really interested. It's just a natural human thing." And Errol is like "I DOUBT WHETHER WE KNOW OURSELVES, AND THE ACT OF BEING INTERVIEWED IS AN ACT OF ASSERTING A SELF WHICH WE HOPE IS TRUE." Seriously, every answer is like this. I'm like, " I just think it's really swell being interviewed !" And he's like "THERE IS NO SELF."

But anyway, afterward, they contacted Errol and me to ask if we would say our quotes into a microphone for the book on tape. Errol said "Sure," and then when he saw one of the quotes, he said, "No, I meant the opposite of this. I may have said these words, but I actually meant the opposite." This happened at the very last minute and it was really hard to figure out what to do, because it was a really beautiful quote, and then there's Errol saying that it's wrong, that he doesn't stand by. And then Klosterman has to write around that, and it's all in the chapter and it's fascinating. But I don't know why I'm wasting your time on this.

You're not wasting my time. I think this struggle to get other people right is fascinating, and I'm interested in the ethics and practices we as journalists have developed to try to do so.

Like a lot of people who do reporting, I take it as a given that what we learn is such an approximate view of what really happened. I think the stuff that we're putting on the air is true, I think it's as good as we can possibly make it, but I also understand the limits of the work we do. I understand that in some emotional way, or even in some factual way, we could be getting something wrong that could only be revealed through a much deeper kind of investigation than we do.

What about being wrong on the show in other ways? Do you deal with wrongness much in your professional life?

Last year or the year before, two stories of ours won awards at the Third Coast International Audio Festival, and both of them were stories that I thought we shouldn't do. I was adamant about it. My senior producer was totally for these stories and totally saw the potential in them, and I was like, "Look, sure, go ahead, but there's no way. These aren't even interesting to me." And they turned out to be really great stories. I was totally wrong. That happens a lot.

How do you handle that kind of disagreement on the show?

For me personally, if everybody's for it and I'm against it, we do it. That's one standing rule in my head. Sometimes someone will be like, "I don't see it, but if you do, go for it." But 85 to 90 percent of the time, we persuade each other. Which is what we'd hope for, because eventually we have to persuade our listeners.

What about in your personal life? What kinds of things have been wrong about?

Oh my God, so many things. I'm somebody who — I'm very aware of the times I'm wrong, and I feel like I'm wrong a lot. And, ah ... [Long pause, during which he laughs quietly.] This example is so — I feel like I don't even know where to begin, there are so many horrible examples. What kind of wrongness do you want to hear about?

Well, for starters, I want to hear about whatever it is that's making you laugh.

Just last night, I remembered this incident that honestly I have never, ever talked about. I'm not even sure I'm going to be able to talk about it much here. But I remember in high school — not even high school, in junior high school; I was really, really young — I tried to feel a girl up in front of her family . I thought I could get away with it. I don't know why this came to mind last night, but I was walking down the street with the dog and I literally said out loud, "Oh God, no. No, no, no." And even now, I think about it and it's just such a horrifying thought. I just hope that she and no one who was there remembers it.

Are you kidding? She's telling the whole world that Ira Glass tried to feel her up in junior high.

I don't think she's a public radio listener. That's my hope. But the point is, I feel like that indicates a kind of social cluelessness that I had up until an inappropriately old age. I think I was really immature for a really long time, especially with women. I didn't get married until I was 47 or 48, and then I was like, "Why didn't I do this 10 years ago?" I was still with the person I'd been with 10 years before.

Are there any wrongness-related episodes from the show that you especially love?

Pretty much the whole Fiasco show is about being wrong. The Squirrel Cop story is a wrongness story in spades, and it's one of the most popular things we've ever done. It was so popular that not only did we do the radio story, we put out a little iron-on patch, we did a little paint by numbers — it had a whole merchandise department.

Alex Blumberg's show with Adam Davidson explaining how the mortgage crisis happened is entirely a story about wrongness. The entire plot of it — and what's pleasurable about it — is that you get to hear from these people who were just totally, totally wrong, and you finally understand what in the world they were thinking that led them to accidentally bring down the world economy.

Interestingly, Michael Lewis tells a similar story, but from the point of view of the people who are right, and the drama of that — did you read that?

The Big Short ? Yeah. I've been on a Michael Lewis kick, actually, because I feel like all he writes about is wrongness. Plus, he's so insanely good.

Oh my God. Doesn't it make you want to simultaneously A) quit journalism — there's no point, right? — and B) go out and do something great? I finished it and I just thought , I will never be as good as that. I will never do anything that well.

Yeah, and you're Ira Glass. Imagine how the rest of us feel.

Did you read The Blind Side ? I wrote to him after I finished it, because at that point it was maybe my favorite book ever. He's been on the show, so occasionally I'll send him an e-mail or he'll send me an e-mail, and after I finished that book, I was like: "Dude, if you're ever in a situation where a charity or something is like, 'We want to do an event, can someone interview you on stage?' — please let me be that person." I feel like he's peerless. There's not anybody doing it at the level he's at. It's just — it's embarrassing.

But to get back to your thesis, he's telling the story of the same events [of the financial crisis], but with the people who are right, and what makes the story work is that they're so worried that they're wrong. That's the entire drama. That's why the story sort of climaxes in Vegas, where they all finally figure out: Wow, I am right. I'm so right. And it's so satisfying.

Totally. It's funny, we've been talking about the narrative pleasure of being wrong, but he makes so much hay out of the narrative pleasure of being right — the resolution of that tension in favor of the protagonists. That kind of pleasure makes a more obvious sense, I think, since we all love to be right.

Do you talk at all in your book about people who can never be wrong? I feel like I've known people who in an argument can never ever, ever admit they're wrong. And I find that such a fascinating and horrible thing. Those people are so embattled.

I do talk about it, yeah. Defensiveness and denial come up a lot; they really fascinate me. Part of the challenge for me in writing about it was almost like the interviewing challenge you described earlier — trying to approach this really problematic position with empathy, to understand where these people were coming from and what's so frightening or intolerable to them about the possibility of being wrong.

That's really interesting. There are definitely lots of things that I don't want to be wrong about and will fight to the death over, and I'm totally obnoxious about it all the time. But I also feel like there's a kind of discovery that you're wrong that, in a safe situation, can be a real pleasure. Do you know what I mean? Like when you're arguing with someone you love and you realize, "I'm wrong, you're right," and you come together in that moment. It's such a relief. To me it's so obvious that some kinds of being wrong are OK.

Or better than OK, right? I think some kinds of wrongness can be intensely pleasurable or useful or revelatory or transformative.

That makes me think of something I've noticed in this writer we used to have on the show all the time, David Sedaris. He would tell stories about his family, and in those stories he was always the one who was the butt of the joke. He was the one who was wrong and everybody else in the family was right.

After he went through the most dramatic stories of his childhood he had to figure out what his next book was going to be about. So what did he do? He moved to France, where he would always be wrong again. I don't know if he thought it through this way or if it simply happened — I think it's the latter — but he couldn't have written that book [ Me Talk Pretty One Day ] in New York, where he knows his way around and speaks the language and feels at home. Whereas living in France was just constant wrongness. He was always going to be the butt of the joke again. I guess what I'm saying is that that being wrong turns out to be a very natural place for a lot of people to write from.

That's so fascinating about Sedaris. I would never have made the connection. It makes me want to talk to him about his relationship to wrongness. Which leads me to ask you: If you could hear someone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?

The first person that comes to mind — although I don't know if he would give an honest interview — is Eliot Spitzer.

Funny you should say that. He was one of the first people I invited to participate, but he turned me down.

Well, what's in it for him, right? Hmm. Who else? I don't know who the person would be, but there was a Radio Lab episode on stochasticity, which is the science of random chance, and they talked to someone who measures randomness. I feel like there must be somebody out there who's, like, measuring the amount of wrongness around us.

I love that idea. Quantum wrongness. Is that possible?

Nah, I guess it isn't possible.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error , published this week by Ecco/HarperCollins . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain , Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

Eat Your Words: Anthony Bourdain on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:32:00 GMT

Anthony Bourdain's first nonfiction book, Kitchen Confidential , introduced the world to a kind of one-man alt-FDA: a 6-foot-4-inch executive chef and former heroin addict who wrote like Kerouac by way of Blackbeard and would happily fillet your sorry ass with his own kitchen knife if you showed up late to work. More books and the hugely successful Travel Channel show No Reservations soon followed. His latest book, Medium Raw , will be published by Ecco on June 8.

I got interested in talking to Bourdain about wrongness because of a disagreement over strawberry-rhubarb pie. I hate it; my girlfriend loves it. It wasn't that I wanted him to adjudicate the dispute (I had a sinking feeling he would side with her); it's that I was curious to hear his thoughts on why people tend to act as if they are objectively right even with respect to matters of taste — in this case, literally. This impulse is, of course, not limited to food. Even though we know better, it's remarkably easy to feel as if our own aesthetic judgments reflect reality and that, therefore, anyone of sufficient intelligence and sensitivity should share our view.

In addition to talking about wrongness and taste, Bourdain and I talked about wrongness and travel. Thanks to No Reservations , he spends most of his time on the road these days, and he was thoughtful on the subject of how leaving home upends a lot of your beliefs — and how travel forces you to think hard about people and practices you disagree with. He also had interesting things to say about how cooks think about mistakes, what it's like to skewer celebrity chefs and then become one, and why heroin keeps you humble.

A couple of years ago, a hedge-fund manager whom I interviewed about wrongness pointed out that in the circles he moved in, being right was essentially synonymous with making money. During my conversation with Bourdain, he suggested that, in the cook's universe, a very different stand-in for rightness prevails: "Is it good? Does it give pleasure?"

OK, let me start with the basics. Should the categories "right" and "wrong" apply to food?

Personally, I think right and wrong are maybe a little too apocalyptic as terms. But you know, food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go. Even before we get into food professionals or food bloggers or food nerds, you're already talking about something that people identify very closely with their identities.

Are professional chefs more or less likely to use right and wrong as a yardstick? It's easy to imagine that with your training, some food preparations just do seem right or wrong.

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole I think they probably have a more open mind than most people. Chefs are more likely to understand the mechanics of taste, and they know, as a simple matter of fact, that some people perceive flavors differently than the next person.

On the other hand, you can run into some seriously hidebound attitudes. I mean, do not tell a Roman how to make cacio e pepe, for instance. And, certainly, most chefs have very strong opinions on the right way to do most classic dishes and strong opinions about departures from that.

So is there a dish no one should tell you how to make?

I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That's God talking.

I'm interested in this relationship between doing things right and doing things the way they've always been done. It's almost like being right is synonymous with conforming to tradition.

Yeah, or with authenticity. There's enormous respect and a romanticized reverence for what's considered the "right" way — meaning, the classic way — and I think most chefs feel powerfully that one should know that before moving on. Like, "I've researched this, this is the way they were making it in 1700, goddamn it, and that's the way it should be made." Or: "This is the way they make laksa in Kuching and Borneo; that stuff I just had on Ninth Avenue is definitely not the same; ergo it's wrong." But, you know, what does "real" or "authentic" mean? The history of food is the history of migrating ingredients and occupation and foreign influences and accommodation.

Somebody who'd be very interesting to speak to on this is Grant Achatz [one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy]. Here's a guy who's been trained in the classics, who knows the quote-unquote "right" away to do everything, but made a very deliberate decision to subvert it all. I think that's admirable. We need people like that. We would never have had Jimi Hendrix if he'd stuck to the right way to play guitar.

Is there a part of the culinary universe that finds that kind of subversion upsetting?

It's getting smaller and smaller. Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: Is it good? Does it give pleasure? The right way to do things, the wrong way to do things — I think chefs have always in some ways sought to undermine that. Creativity means going against what you've learned. So however much you might hear people say there's a right way and a wrong way, that will always be accompanied by, "Except when I do it."

How would you characterize the overall attitude toward wrongness within cooking culture?

I think when you've lived your life under similar pressure to an air traffic controller, when you come out of a very rigid, semi-militaristic system, chances are you were either praised or punished depending on your adherence to certain rules. The real god of professional cooking is consistency, so making a mistake basically means being inconsistent. It's all fine and good to be a genius in the kitchen, but if you cannot execute consistently, you're doing it wrong.

That's interesting. The equation between wrongness and deviance comes up a lot in areas like business and manufacturing, too. A fellow reporter once told me that there are signs on GE's factory floors that say "Variation is Evil."

Right. That's something a lot of home cooks don't understand. They read cookbooks, they assume that professionals just see the recipe and cook it, right? No. Professional cooks learn through trial and error. You make an omelet 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 times under pressure. Eventually you get good at it. It's all about repetition. You'll never understand how to make certain complex sauces without screwing them up. Particularly emulsions, you know, hollandaise — there's a case where there is clearly a wrong way to do it. A butter sauce either stays together the way you expect it to or it breaks into something that I think just about everybody in the world would find disgusting, and everybody who was familiar with the sauce would recognize as having gone terribly wrong.

If cooking is all about repetition, I assume that when you first started out, you spent a lot of time getting things wrong. What was that like?

Some kitchens are more tolerant than others. I grew up in a fairly tolerant kitchen, meaning if you screwed up, it wasn't a good thing, but it was understood and even considered funny: You fall on your face, you're gonna get laughed at. If you came up 20 years ago in a three star bistro in Paris, doing something wrong was an altogether different matter. You had your entire six hours' worth of mise en place thrown on the floor by the chef. Back then, they still hit cooks. It was a truly terrifying to be wrong in the eyes of the great chef. It made grown professionals cry.

You've been out of the kitchen for a while now, but back in the day, how did you handle it when your employees made mistakes?

It depends. You know, if it's just a stupid mistake — accidents happen, mistakes are made, so it could be that I'd just tease them. If it's a stupid mistake they've made again and again, then it would be a decidedly more acid-tinged mockery. But if you treat me like an idiot, if you're insulting me and betraying your coworkers, then, yeah, I'm gonna get right up in your face and question your lineage.

After a whole lot of years in New York kitchens, you're suddenly traveling almost all the time, largely overseas. In my experience, that's an incredibly good way to be wrong pretty much hourly.

It's the most exciting thing about travel to me. You're constantly wrong. You're constantly challenged by your own preconceptions. You're forced to relearn such basic, basic things. Words you thought you knew the definition for become completely changed: the word work , the word hunger , the word generosity . Or you think an entire country's going to be one way and then it's another way. I like being wrong in that respect.

Can you give me an example?

I've experienced that kind of wrongness a lot in the Muslim world. The idea of otherness kind of evaporated for me there. You know, sitting down in a Saudi home, observing Saudi Arabians, seeing that they, too, watch Friends , that they're funny — you know, sense of humor often surprises me most. That, and random acts of kindness. I used to believe, deeply, that people were basically bad — that given a slight change in the our situation, we would all revert to packs of wild dogs who would devour each other and sell each other out. I took a very dim view of human nature. Travel has made me more optimistic. I believe now that for the most part, the world is filled with people doing the best they can under the circumstances.

Do you think that travel has made you kinder?

Yeah, I do. It's made me more tolerant, for sure. Anything that introduces doubt is a good thing. I doubt everything. Certainty to me is rarely a good thing, so anything that makes anybody more willing to question their own beliefs is almost always good in my view.

Yeah, I love that about travel. It makes us deal with uncertainty and doubt all the time, and how we deal with those are central to how we think about being wrong.

Definitely. Something else fundamental I learned, which really changed me, came from sitting down to dinner with very nice people who have done very bad things. I spent a lovely afternoon mushrooming and eating lunch with the former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, a guy who'd sent his former friends and colleagues back to Russia to be executed when he found out they were working for us. I sat down with head hunters under a bunch of human heads, they had little tattooed rings on their fingers, proud reminders of the heads they'd taken — nicest folks in the world. That's confusing.

That's for sure. I should have said, uncertainty and doubt and confusion and moral ambiguity.

Right. One place where I'm struggling with it, though, is — I'm a relativist, mostly. But racism is just wrong, right? I believe that absolutely. And yet many of the places that I love most in the world — Southeast Asia, Japan — are deeply racist in ways so engrained in their culture as to put the Jim Crow era to shame. There's a loathing of dark skin, an aversion, a phobia, that's extraordinary. Why is that acceptable to me? Why don't I have a problem with that, or not much of a problem?

And yet in Africa — I was just in Liberia recently, and although I find certain tribal practices personally deeply repellant, I'd always felt uncomfortable with the idea of these "enlightened humanitarians" going to Africa and lecturing people who don't have clean water and have been living with these systems for centuries about how to behave. And yet I gotta tell you, Liberia made me ask myself: Are some things just wrong? Genital mutilation would be one. Some of the practices of some of the traditional tribal elders — witch doctors, basically — are another. I really wonder whether there are absolutes in some cases. It's something I'm wrestling with, clearly.

You wrote in Kitchen Confidential that "good eating is all about risk," and risk to me means taking the chance that something could go disastrously wrong.

Well, sure. But, I figure, what's the worst thing that can happen?

You tell me.

[Laughs.] Well, good food is a willingness to step out of your comfort zone a little, take a shot at the unfamiliar, try something that, OK, might give you diarrhea. There were times that I was pretty damn sure I was going to be really, really ill if I ate this. But if you're lucky enough to have a passport and find yourself on the other side of the world, and somebody without a lot of money is being generous to you, then I think the onus is on you to help bring honor to your hosts.

You're famously opinionated, or maybe it's more apt to say that you're famous for expressing your opinions unsparingly. You've described vegans as "the hezbollah-like splinter group" of vegetarians, and Alice Waters as "Pol Pot in a muumuu." Yet you also seem able to change your mind. In my experience, that's a pretty rare combination.

I think it's in my nature to be a provocateur. A child psychologist would probably say it's an attention-getting device: I want to provoke, I want to get a reaction, even if the reaction is someone saying, "You're full of shit and dead wrong and here's why." I like talking. I like learning. I like conflict. Maybe it's one of the reasons I don't really feel any connection to clean, orderly countries with few social problems. You know, I'm not a big Scandinavia fan. I tend to like messy dysfunctional countries where people are passionate about things. I think that's perhaps why I enjoyed the restaurant business for so long. You've got plenty of conflict all the time.

But I also think I know a lot about my own flaws. You learn a lot about yourself as a heroin addict. You learn how low you're willing to go. You learn what kind of terrible things you're capable of. It's difficult to get up on a high horse when you can physically remember betraying people and whining and cringing and lying to get money. That's helpful in the long run, I like to think.

Are there things you wrote in Kitchen Confidential that you no longer believe?

Oh, sure, a lot. I have a more tempered view of celebrity chefs, for starters. I mean, I had no understanding at all of Emeril [Lagasse, the Food Network celebrity chef] back then. He was just this alien beast to me — strange, way too cheerful, totally false. Now, having met the man and hung out with him and understanding the responsibilities of being the head of an empire, I think I understand what makes him tick a lot more. I've told him, "I still hate your shows, but I like you." He deserves a lot more respect than I gave him.

You've been merciless in the past with Rachael Ray. Hilarious, but merciless. Do you have a more tempered view of her now, too?

Maybe I'm just less angry than I was before. Kitchen Confidential was written by a guy who'd never had health insurance in his life. I'd never owned an apartment, never owned a car, never paid my rent on time, I was five years in arrears on my taxes, I went to sleep every night filled with terror and the certainty that I would never have anything resembling a normal life. So to some extent, I was bitter and resentful, and I didn't have the time or the inclination to look for nuance when watching the Food Network.

Well, it might not be the best place to go looking for nuance. But what about people who do have more nuanced views on food? What do you think about all these inquiries into the ethics of eating — Michael Pollan's work, for instance, or Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals ? You've been rather vicious toward vegetarians in the past.

Pollan is hunting big game, in the sense that he's wrestling with big issues. I think he's discussing them in a way that allows for honest disagreement. He's not an absolutist. I think he's a very valuable addition to the discussion. Safran Foer, while I liked the book, I disagree completely with it. I don't understand how we can acknowledge the importance of the human dimension of turkey dinner yet forgo it anyway. I guess it's just a question of priorities.

Let me ask you about a kind of wrongness that almost everyone over the age of 30 has faced, which is realizing that you were just utterly wrong about what your life was going to be like. From the outside, at least, it looks like you've experienced a particularly extreme version of that kind of wrongness.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, for a long time I lived with the assumption that I'd be dead by 30, so it came as a rude surprise when I found myself still around. And then of course I was just hugely wrong about Kitchen Confidential . I was certain before it came out that it was not going to change my life significantly. In reality, it changed my life over night.

What about fatherhood? In an interview in 2006, you said that you'd never regretted the decision not to have children, that you "would have been a shit parent." Your daughter, Ariane, was born in 2007.

Yeah, I changed my mind really, really quickly on that one. At the age of 50, shortly after meeting my second wife, I realized, Oh my God . To my credit, I think, I'd always been aware of how big a responsibility being a parent is and that I was not up to the job. Let me remind you again, I'd been in a very serious relationship with some very serious drugs, and long after I'd given them up, I was still living in complete financial insecurity. I thought I didn't have much of a future, if any. I just understood that I was not the guy to be having a kid. And then at 50, I suddenly woke up one day and looked my then-girlfriend in the eyes and realized, not only do I want a child with this woman, but finally, at 50 years old, I am old enough to be a good father.

Was it literally an epiphany like that? In one minute, you suddenly knew?

Yeah. In one second . It was a moment of rare certainty. I knew. There was no doubt. From that second I realized, I'm old enough now, I can be good father. And since that time I've never had a second thought. I never had a moment of, "Oh my God, what am I getting into?" Never. It's been a joy from that second on, every day, every dirty diaper.

Did your friends give you flak? One of the things that can be tough about being wrong about ourselves is that we make these really strong claims about our identity and organize our lives and our communities around them — I'm never gonna have kids, or I'll always be a bachelor, or I only date women or whatever — and then: oops, never mind. And sometimes even if we ourselves are totally comfortable with that, it flusters or angers the people around us.

Oh, I've been teased, for sure. And I certainly deserve it. It went against my reputation, and I understand that. But the thing is, I never took that reputation seriously. I never looked in a mirror and saw the Bad Boy Chef. If people wanted to call me that, fine, I understand, and I was certainly complicit in that process. But I know who I see when I look in the mirror.

Also, I've always been a moving target. If anything, I take a perverse pleasure in undermining expectations. Particularly on the show: I know that most of my fans want to see me chain smoking and getting drunk in a leather jacket and being snarky and cynical, so I did the most perverse thing I could do and made a warm fuzzy family episode with my baby and my new in-laws. I realize that was a real "fuck you" to a significant part of my fan base, but I just don't care. I'm not going to lie about who I am. I'm not going to appear in an off-Broadway production of King Lear just to prove I can stretch, but on the other hand, if I suddenly get the urge to do something off-brand, I'm going to do it.

As someone who's been very outspoken about the role of immigrants and especially Latino immigrants in your own kitchens and in the American workforce, what do you think about the Arizona immigration law?

You know, I'm a little — I mean, obviously I think it is wrong. I think it's embarrassing and shameful. But I'm sympathetic to the blind rage, fear, and confusion of people who live close to the problem. I think they're wrong, I disagree strongly, and I'm nauseated by the idea of demanding people's papers in the streets. But I resist the urge to demonize the people from Arizona who feel that way. I believe that however you feel on whatever issue, we should always be able to sit down at a table together and have a few drinks — or a lot of drinks — and share a meal together. If the level of discourse has moved beyond our ability to do that, then everybody loses. I mean, I disagree with everything Ted Nugent says, but I like the guy a lot.

Did you start feeling this way after sitting down to dinner with that the likes of that nice former KGB operative?

No question about it. I mean, if I'm hanging out with ex-KGB guys and former hit men and headshrinkers and murderers, and I find them charming and I allow for cultural differences and end up having a great time and finding common ground, why the hell can't I be friendly with Ted Nugent?

If you could hear someone else being interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?

Dick Cheney. And I'd like him to be water-boarded during the interview.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of the forthcoming Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. You can read past interviews with Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski , education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch , and criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz .

"Finally, Something I Know About": Sports Illustrated Writer Joe Posnanski on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Sun, 23 May 2010 23:35:00 GMT

When I e-mailed sportswriter Joe Posnanski to ask him whether I could interview him about being wrong, I got a response right away: "Finally," he wrote, "something I know something about."

That wisecrack doesn't square with Posnanski's reputation; he's better known as one of the country's best and smartest sports journalists. A senior writer at Sports Illustrated and longtime sports columnist for the Kansas City Star, Posnanski has twice been voted Best Sports Columnist in America by the Associated Press Sports Editors and has garnered a passel of other honors and awards. He is also the author of three books — most recently The Machine , about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds.

None of that expertise has interfered with Posnanski's self-described "awe-inspiring track record of being wrong." Perhaps thanks to that record, he is extremely thoughtful — and extremely funny — on the subject of screwing up. His reflections about wrongness touched on Babe Ruth, Tiger Woods, the myth of clutch hitting, the misery of the mistaken umpire, the dilemma of instant replay, and the enduring heartache of the Indians fan. In Posnanski's view, being wrong is an inevitable, illuminating, and sometimes uproarious part of life. (Indeed, on his blog , you can read about three of his own most memorable mistakes , including a hilarious one involving Magic Johnson.)

I should start by warning you that I'm painfully ignorant about sports.

So am I, so this should work out well.

Ha. Well, at least you're not ignorant about wrongness, or so I gather from your e-mail.

In this profession, you're constantly trying to predict what's going to happen. Every day I make predictions that don't come anywhere close to the mark.

All sports fans make predictions. Does the fact that you do it professionally mean that you're supposed to be right at least slightly more often than the rest of us?

Maybe [sportswriters] have a little more insight from talking to the players, the coaches — people who are on the inside. But in reality, I don't know that we're wrong any less often.

I do think, though, that a big part of the job is how you handle being wrong. Are you upfront about it? Do you play it off? Do you try to defend yourself? Every time you write anything, at least half your readers are going to disagree with you. A big part of sports writing is how you respond to that tension.

What's your own ethic around that? What do you see as your responsibility to your readers when you get something wrong ?

There's being wrong and there's being wrong. Being wrong on facts, that's something you have a real responsibility to correct. But being wrong in the fun sports way is part of the interplay. For me it's pretty easy to say, "Look at that, I blew that one again, I couldn't have been more wrong."

What puts the fun in the "fun sports way of being wrong"?

Part of it is the gambler's thrill: Who's going to win the NCAA tournament? Who's going to be No. 1 in the country? But it's also about narrative. The fun of the Super Bowl is the week leading into it; once it's actually played, the story dies down very, very quickly. But heading into it, all these stories and all these angles and all these different version of what could happen — 95 percent of those are wrong, yet they constitute 95 percent of the thrill. In sports — and I suppose this is true in life in general — most of the time, things aren't going to turn out the way you think they are. And it'd be boring if they did.

The way you describe sports, it sounds like one big futures market. But, as we've all just seen in spades, people in finance are usually terrible at admitting their mistakes. Do you think people in sports are better at it?

It depends on what you mean. I'd be surprised if futures traders get as many nasty e-mails as sportswriters. You get plenty of people who are very, very happy to tell you on a daily basis how wrong you are. But for the most part, there is still a sense that at the end of the day, it's only a game.

About those nasty e-mails — why do you think it makes people so happy to tell you that you're wrong?

The nastiest e-mails I get tend to be when I've picked a team to lose and then it wins. For the fans, winning is great, but proving somebody wrong is even better.

In sports, there's an extreme culture of playing off of the media. Coaches will go into their team meetings and say, "These guys think you can't do it, they picked you to lose," and fire them up that way. Same thing from the fan's perspective. You wake up in the morning and you read the paper and it's saying you're going to lose and then your team goes out and wins. Well they didn't just win, they proved somebody wrong. That's what's at the heart of the joy.

Is that part of what drives our deep love of underdogs — the fact that we have a shot not just at winning but at proving other people wrong?

Absolutely. In 1980, when the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets, there had been this narrative created, and the narrative was, you have absolutely no chance of winning . So that win was all about proving the narrative wrong. I think the love of the underdog is very much about hoping for the unexpected. And the unexpected gets to the heart of being wrong.

Totally. But for fans of real underdogs, the unexpected almost never happens, right? One of the things I write about in the book is a phenomenon I call "wrongness as optimism" — you know, that thing where you're like, "OK, I'm going to write this whole column by noon, and then return those calls and pay the bills and do the grocery shopping." And then in reality, noon rolls around and you've checked your e-mail and eaten a bagel. I bring this up because I feel like sports fandom is the highest form of wrongness as optimism. Although maybe I just feel that way because I grew up in Cleveland.

Me, too.

Oh, really? So you grew up a fellow Indians fan?

Oh, yeah, Indians, Browns, Cavaliers, I grew up rooting for them all.

No wonder you have so much experience with being wrong.

What I have found about Cleveland fans — and certainly it's been true of me — is that at some point you know you're going be wrong, so you try to play tricks with yourself. You say, "Well, I know they're going to lose today," in an effort to be wrong in the other direction. The expectation level of a Cleveland fan is so filled with heartbreak that at some point you just try to turn the thing in your favor. But in Cleveland, it never works, because if you say "I know they're going to lose today," you are going to be right, and there's no joy at all in that kind of rightness.

I love the phrase wrongness as optimism, by the way.

Other than Cleveland, do you think there are particular fans that suffer from it the most?

Cleveland is an extreme case. It's been so long since we've won. Kansas City is now beginning to be like that as well; it follows me wherever I go. For years and years and years, the Red Sox were the unsurpassed example of wrongness as optimism. Red Sox nation is soaked in wrongness as optimism.

What do you think about the way sportswriters handled the Tiger Woods scandal? It's one thing to have missed his philandering side before the scandal broke, but I was struck by the way Phil Mickelson, after winning the Masters, was cast as the contrast case, the nicest guy on earth. Maybe that's true, but wasn't this exactly the same mistake we made with Tiger: confusing athletic prowess for human goodness?

It's so interesting with Tiger, because we knew nothing about him, and we thought we knew everything. He'd been in the public eye since he was 3 years old, he was in front of the camera more than anybody, and there's something in human nature that makes us think that if we see someone a lot, we can see through them.

And then, like you said, there's this sense that being good at a sport makes you a good person. That's been true of athletes going back probably to ancient times, and certainly here in the U.S. going back to Babe Ruth. People wanted to believe certain things about Babe Ruth, which meant not believing other things. You know, he wasn't drunk; he'd just had too many hot dogs the day before. And all those naked women chasing him in a car with knives didn't really reflect his true character. When that bubble gets burst, like it did with Tiger — for a lot of people, it's just a real, real shock: "I can't believe this, this is not the guy I thought he was." There's a real refusal to admit that we don't really know these guys.

In the course of working on the book, I read about a couple of psychologists who studied the so-called "hot hand" in basketball — the idea that players who are hot keep hitting baskets and players who are cold keep missing them. No matter how they crunched the stats, it turned out that the phenomenon didn't exist, but they couldn't get anyone to believe them. As I recall, they took it to Red Auerbach and Bobby Knight and both of them were like, "Who the hell are you and what do you know about sports?"

That's a big, big issue in sports, that attitude. There's an interesting fight going on in baseball about whether clutch hitting exists: whether a player can hit better in the ninth inning when there are two runs on, whether he can be a better player when the game is on the line. And once again, there have been countless studies done on it, and not one of them can find any statistical evidence that any person is capable of lifting his game in such moments.

Yet people continue to believe, and they continue to get angry that anyone would suggest that such a thing doesn't exist. It's like, "I know it exists because I've seen it." That's such a big part of sports. And that's one of the great things about Bill [James, the inventor of sabermetrics, a statistical method of analyzing baseball] who basically found out that just about everything anybody believes about baseball isn't true. And because of that a whole lot of people are very, very angry at him.

There's something pretty touching about people's desire to believe in clutch hitting. I think part of why people can't bear to imagine that it doesn't exist is because it says something to us about the human spirit: that we can be better than our everyday selves, we can rise to the occasion.

Right. You know, there are certain things that just make life more fun. They might be totally wrong, they might be totally untrue, but they make baseball more interesting, they make football more interesting, they make everything more interesting. It's more fun to believe that the guy got the hit in the ninth inning not because statistically it was his turn but because there was something about him in that moment, some kind of sports courage, that helped him do it. That makes sports a whole lot more fun to watch.

So I really do understand where this kind of superstition and stubbornness comes from. I also think that at a certain point when you're looking at plain facts and refusing to see them, that's not very good for you or for the world.

I'm curious about how the people who have to make the calls — referees and line judges and so forth — deal with being wrong.

Well, being wrong is not part of the fun of sports if you're an umpire. One of the most famous examples is Don Denkinger, who made the wrong call at first base during the 1985 World Series, which led indirectly to Kansas City beating St. Louis. It's been 25 years and Denkinger is still loathed in St. Louis. When he first made the bad call, he received death threats, his telephone number was given out on the radio, he had to deal with all sorts of horrible things. Over time that has mellowed, but it is definitely still there. All these years later, people still blame him for the team losing.

I've talked with him about how he deals with it, and his initial, reflexive response is, "You're an umpire and that's your job. You don't ever want to be wrong, but you know that sometimes you will be, and you just have live with the consequences." But I think another part of him is angry about it. Here's a guy who's probably been right 12 million times, and yet he'll always be remembered for the one moment when he was wrong. When you say Don Denkinger, people think "wrong." That's literally the first word that comes to their mind. And yet here's a guy who was an umpire for 30 years and was right much, much more often than he was wrong. It's really interesting, but it's also a little bit sad.

That reminds me that I wanted to ask you about instant replays and wrongness. These days the official makes the call and there's this technology that can tell you whether it was right or wrong.

There's a lot of famous stories about umpires from the old days who would make the wrong call and the batter would complain and the umpire would say, "It's a strike because I said it's a strike." Back then, the umpire did the best he could and he had the final say. Then instant replay came along and entirely changed the game. Especially professional football, because they use it during the game. It's changed everything about football — how you watch it, how you coach it, how you play it, how you officiate it. In baseball, it's more of an outside influence, but it clearly shows. Last year during the World Series, the umpires blew several calls and that was one of the big stories of the world series: "Umpires can't get it right."

Do you think baseball and other sports are going to go the same direction as football?

The big question in baseball right now is: How much longer are we willing to put up with umpires being wrong? I think there's a constant struggle for fans to know whether or not instant replay has gotten too involved. It speaks so directly to what you're writing about, really. There's a big question of whether human error is and should remain a part of sports.

Where do you come down on it? Is instant replay good for the game or bad?

In some ways it's made the game better, and in some ways it's taken some of the humanity out of it. I was against replay in football because I think it changes the entire complexion of the game. But I also understand that when you know the right answer, it's probably not a legitimate stance to say, "Well, we're going to continue to go with the mistakes made on the field anyway." Sports are all about legitimacy — the whole steroid issue was "Are we seeing legitimate or illegitimate results?" — and as long as people can look at their televisions and say, "Hey, the umpire missed that call," I don't think it's viable to ignore that.

If you had one tip for getting better at predicting sports outcomes, what would it be?

Boy, I wish I knew the answer to that. The one thing I can say is that you have to try to not lose the forest for the trees. I remember going to the Super Bowl in 1995, when the San Diego Chargers were playing the San Francisco 49ers, and it was clear from the start that the 49ers were going to destroy the Chargers. They were a much, much, much better team. But I'm there all week, and as the days go by, you talk to more and more people, and everybody's telling you, "This game's going to be a lot closer than you think," and you're looking at the Chargers players and they seem very confident, and you're hearing behind closed doors that they have a little secret something they might use. And it just builds and builds to the point where Sunday comes and suddenly you're like, "You know what? I think there's a surprise in store here."

And then on the very first play the 49ers hit like a 79-yard touchdown pass and they end up winning 173 to nothing or whatever. You were right the whole time, but you allowed all this information in and you started losing sight of what's important and what isn't. I think the more you can stick to the big picture, the better your odds of making a decent prediction.

What have you been most wrong about?

I could give you a long, long list, but here's one. During the 1996 Masters golf tournament, Greg Norman went into the last day leading by five shots, which is basically an insurmountable lead. So I wrote this whole column about how they shouldn't even play on Sunday, just roll it up, it's all over, let's go home. Then I go out the next day and watch him tee off and his first shot is just terrible, and about three or four holes in I realize that Greg Norman is completely falling apart. By the 11th hole he was out of the lead, there was no chance he was going to win.

I remember thinking, "Boy, what I wrote yesterday is really, really, really wrong." Everybody said he was going to win. But to write it as glibly as I did — to basically tell everybody, "Don't even watch, just go home" — I was a little bit off on that, huh?

You talk about being wrong with such good humor, but when you print the column and the next day it turns out you were totally wrong, do you cringe?

Well, yeah, sure. I mean, I'm not trying to be wrong. Coaches always talk about how winning is never as good as losing is bad, and I think the same is true about being right and wrong. But the thing about making predictions is that you have no control over them at all. Once you make the prediction, it's over; I'm not out there on the field, I'm not coaching, I'm not playing. So part of me was looking at Greg Norman and thinking "Greg, can you just show up? I mean, you're up by five shots, for crying out loud, you're making me look really bad here."

Do you ever get any grief from your bosses for being wrong?

Well, ha, there is one story, yes. My very first sports columnist job was in Augusta, Ga., and my bosses there came up with this idea that I would pick football games over the weekend and [readers] would write in their own predictions, and if they beat me they would get a T-shirt. They were called the "I Pounded Pos" T-shirts, and they had a picture of me getting booted through a goal post. I said, "I'll be happy to do this, but you should know, I'm not very good at picking games." They said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you'll be fine."

Well, the first week, I think we got, I don't know, maybe 1,300 or 1,400 people writing in. I had a terrible week, and literally a thousand of them won. So of course the next week we got 5,000 in, because people were realizing it was really easy to get free T-shirts. The publisher of the newspaper, Billy Morris, who I'd never talked to — he ran not just our paper but the whole chain — I ran into him and he says, "You're the guy who's picking those game, right?" I said, "Yeah." He goes, "You might want to start picking better." That was the most direct response I've ever gotten to being wrong.

This was 18, 19 years ago, and to this day I still get letters from people about how they have five "I Pounded Pos" T-shirts in their house. I remember I got a photo from a guy who had clothed his entire family in these shirts. So, you see, you have good luck. You couldn't have found someone who's wrong more often than me.

Well, that's made it very fun to talk to you. One last question: Whom do you want to hear interviewed about wrongness?

Let's see, who has really consistently been wrong? You know, Dick Cheney would be a good interview. I'm sure he'd be wide open to talking to you.

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. To read an interview with education scholar and activist Diane Ravitch, click here . To read an interview with criminal defense lawyer and pundit Alan Dershowitz, click here .

Diane Ravitch on Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:53:00 GMT

"We are in the grips of a kind of national madness," Diane Ravitch told me, "closing schools, firing teachers, shutting down public education." What makes this statement interesting is that, for many years, Ravitch was a powerful voice within the national education reform movement she now rejects as faddish, empirically unfounded, and bad for America's kids.

As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, Ravitch became an outspoken supporter of educational testing, school choice, charter schools, and No Child Left Behind . Later, she championed those positions as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board (the entity that oversees education testing in the United States) and through her involvement with two prominent conservative think tanks, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force.

Today, Ravitch refers to the reforms she once championed as "deforms." Her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System , documents her own reversal and the impact of current education policy on communities, schools, families, teachers, and students. When I spoke with her, she was frank and thoughtful about the experience of coming to reject what were once some of her most deeply held beliefs. "For years," she told me, "people would say to me, 'Well, I don't agree with everything you write,' and I would think, ' Thanks a lot, that's some compliment.' But now I say, 'Well, I don't agree with everything I write, so why should you?' "

Thanks for agreeing to meet with me. Not everyone relishes talking about their mistakes.

This is something that I haven't really put into words, so I don't know if I'm going to get it right. But when you're engaged in the political realm, you say, "This set of ideas is right and that set of ideas is wrong" — right, wrong, right, wrong. And I sometimes wonder whether you might be attracted to the things that you say are wrong — if you're kind of guarding yourself against something that secretly appeals to you. It's like people who are vehement, militant atheists; I think they could easily become religious crusaders, because they're almost religious in their atheism. You have to be careful what you choose to engage yourself with, because the thing you're fighting could be the very thing you want.

Fascinating. That's what the psychologist Carl Jung thought, but I've never heard anyone suggest that they've actually undergone that experience.

Oh, Jung thought that? I didn't know that.

Yeah. He argued that when we passionately defend a conviction, it's mainly against our own subconscious doubts, and that if we keep squelching them, they'll eventually surge into consciousness and completely shift our perspective. Which I guess is kind of what happened to you. Were you aware at the time of any kind of subterranean uncertainty?

No, I don't think so. But occasionally something will get dredged up in my memory and I'll think, "Yeah, that's something else that really annoyed me."

Can you describe the process by which you changed your mind about education reform? Was it more of a sudden epiphany — the canonic conversion experience, like Paul being blinded by the light on the road to Damascus — or just a gradual change of heart?

It was gradual. I think what happens is that over time you get to know all the arguments — all the arguments on your side, all the arguments on the other side — and you just say "Nah, they're wrong." And then at some point you think, Well, are they really wrong? What about this? Or Well , they're right about that . Or Maybe this thing I've been advocating for is wrong in this one situation . You start feeling the certainty begin to dissipate. I guess I started to see things that created a lot of chinks in my own intellectual defenses. I tend to be skeptical of things, and I found my skepticism turning toward the people that I was a part of and turning toward myself.

Was there a moment where you first thought: "Uh-oh"?

There were a number of moments, really, scenes of doubt. But one of them came about because of research I'd been asked to do about higher-education standards in Pakistan. What I discovered was that higher education wasn't the issue. The issue was that they have virtually no public-education system. So that gave me pause, because here I was running with people that were saying that public education is the problem.

Do you think there was something about looking at familiar issues in a foreign context that freed you up to see things differently?

Maybe. You know, here is a country that has a completely inadequate public-school system: So many of the kids that do go to school are in madrasas, and girls are not going to school at all. It made me think about the origins of American public education. I'd written about the history of the New York public schools and read lots of other histories of schooling, and it used to be that there was this hodgepodge of options — private tutors and church schools and so forth. Those who had some resources could take care of their kids, and those who had none—well, their kids didn't get an education. So there was something that resonated for me. The more we turn kids over to the private sector and erode public education, the more we're going back to pre-public-school times, and those were not good times for education in this nation.

What other experiences nudged you along in your transformation?

Seeing the results of testing, for one. There was a long period of time where I thought, what's wrong with testing? We test people all the time; you go to the doctor, you have tests. But as I saw the consequences begin to kick in, I realized, this isn't just testing. People are being punished because of test scores. We've created a system where Mrs. Smith is going to teach nothing but what's tested. The arts aren't tested and the sciences aren't tested, and the conservative response to that is, "Well, test everything." But the problem is — and this is another thing I found myself recoiling from — then you'll do nothing but test. People tend to scoff at anything that's subjective, but it's the essays and the projects that make it fun for kids and give them an opportunity to show comprehension.

So that made me stop and think. And then, too, I became very outspoken in my criticism of Bloomberg, which created this tremendous tension between me and almost everyone else on the conservative side of the spectrum.

What was the hardest part of changing your mind on these issues?

I think the hardest thing is just to say you've made a mistake. If you can reach that juncture, which is very hard, then you can begin to understand how you got there. I'm not sure that I myself understand how I got there. I attribute it to having been in the [first] Bush administration. I didn't really have a strong position on choice and accountability when I started there, and I can see now how I was really shaped just by interchange with people. It's the social consensus; you're surrounded by people with the same ideas. You develop over the years a whole set of relationships with people who agree with you and you read the things on your side that say you're right, and you look at the things written on the other side and you say, "Oh, gosh, it's too bad they haven't seen the light."

Nowadays you don't seem to have any trouble saying you made a mistake.

Well, I have to; I wrote a book about it! Maybe I should feel ashamed that I was wrong, but if you're ashamed it's stigmatizing, and then you can't say it. It's like people with a mental illness who can't bring themselves to say they have a problem.

I agree, but it's rare for public officials or even former public officials to openly acknowledge that they were wrong.

I know. I've occasionally done talk shows where people call in and say "I'm sick and tired of Bush officials saying they made a mistake, and now they're cashing in on it!" And I say, "Really? I can't think of anyone else who's said that."

So what do you think it was about your personality or life experiences that made you able to change your mind? Plenty of other people who were exposed to the same body of evidence remained unmoved.

In some sense I'm a contrarian, so that was part of it. Another part was realizing how much money was arrayed against something as simple as public education. There's this notion that because these people are so wealthy, they can make decisions that change other people's lives, without thinking of those lives. It's kind of an anti-human approach that says, I'm rich, I'm smart, and you're just an ordinary person, therefore I have power over you. And I guess I have a kind of bedrock populism in me that just rejects that.

We have a stereotype that older people can become very set in their ways, but I wonder whether being older made it easier to change your mind?

Oh, yes. Absolutely. Because I didn't want anything. I wasn't thinking about getting a foundation grant or getting a job. I have no ambitions. I'm too old to be secretary of education, I'm too old to be chancellor of the New York City schools. All I want is to try to die with a clear conscience. I want to feel that I've set the record straight in terms of what I believe and where I erred.

How do you feel about your former colleagues now that they've become your ideological adversaries?

If you read the book, you know I don't criticize them. I never ever say anything ad hominem against them. I think they're brilliant. We disagree, and I'm trying to maintain a kind of respect for disagreement. And I try to credit their motives and intentions. I suppose most of us think that what we're doing is morally right. We hardly ever do something knowing that it's morally wrong.

Are they returning the favor?

[Laughs.] I suppose that some are and some aren't. I don't really know. Periodically someone will say, "Have you read all the attacks on you?" and I say no. I don't do attacks, and I don't read people attacking me. I made a very conscious decision about this. There were others time in my life when I said, "I don't let an attack go unanswered." Now I'm like: forget the attack. I have only so much energy to spend, and if I spend it on the guys back there shooting at me, I have less energy for moving forward.

What about the people you used to disagree with? Have they welcomed your change of mind?

There are probably people on the left who've said, "We don't want you, go back where you came from," but they're very few. Mostly people have said, "We're glad you see things differently, we're glad to welcome you to our side."

Have you gotten a lot of "I told you so"s?

Some. Recently I spoke at Harvard, and the great testing expert Dan Koretz said, "I've been saying this for years, why didn't you listen?" I said, "Because I'm not as smart as you."

It sounds like many of these people would have been strange bedfellows for you not terribly long ago. Do you find that part odd?

[Laughs.] It makes me laugh. The people who get what I'm saying tend to be way on the left. People who previously would not have even shaken my hand are saying, "You're telling it like it is!" Pacifica [radio station], which is about as far left as you can get, loved the book. After I gave a talk in Chicago, this very handsome young black man came up to me and said, "I'm Jonathan Jackson." I said, "Very nice to meet you, Jonathan." He said, "I wonder if you'd be willing to have dinner with my father." I said, "Well, who's your father?" He said, "Jesse Jackson." So the next day after I finished my lecture, I had dinner with Jesse Jackson. I said to my sons, "I can't believe this!"

Have your children been supportive?

Oh, yes. My youngest son said to me, "You know, your book is really a conservative critique of capitalism."

One of the strange things about being a convert to a cause is that you are often perceived as more credible than people who've been saying the same things all along. Has that been your experience?

Oh, definitely. I'm not sure if I should be [seen that way], but I am. People say to me, "You have more credibility because you were on the other side," when others who have been saying the same thing for many years just get discounted. Union people in particular get dismissed with, "Well, you're speaking for your self-interest" — whereas I have no perceived self-interest in this.

You mentioned the social consensus earlier, and although you've described your change of mind as an intellectual crisis, it must have produced a massive social crisis for you, too. You spent decades of your life moving in largely conservative circles.

There are people I was friendly with both socially and ideologically with whom I have a strained relationship now. So that was not easy. I was on a lot of boards at one point, I was associated with a lot of think tanks, and I maintain only a couple of those connections now. I broke ties with several places.

But, you know, by the time you get to be my age, you have friends who are still your friends no matter what you do. The people who were real friends are still real friends. And I've been too busy to think about not getting invited to parties.

It must have been painful in the moment, though.

What was painful was to feel like I'd reached a point of being so out of sorts with everybody. It just got to be so unrewarding to come to meetings and to say no to everything, and know that everybody else was going to be on the other side. I'd go to meetings at the Fordham Foundation and block project after project. At the Koret task force, which has I think the most brilliant people on this issue on the conservative side of the spectrum, I began to be in the minority. The last big discussion we had was about the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, which I had become really disenchanted with. My recommendation was "Let's just kill it, it's not working." And everyone said, "Well, you know, you can't throw out accountability, accountability is really important. We can improve it, we can tinker with it." I said, "No, you can't tinker with something that's this defective." So we had a vote and it was nine to one and I said, "Well, can we print my dissent?" And they said no.

I offered my resignation at both organizations and they both said "No, stay, stay," and for a while I did, because I liked the people. I still like the people.

It does sound difficult to be the lone voice of dissent for so many years.

You know, I've always had a concern for the one person with the dissenting voice, so it was OK with me to discover that I was that one person. I've written and thought a lot about civic education, and many years ago I went to Eastern Europe — this was right after the fall of the wall — and in a presentation there I talked about the importance of dissent, about being wary of crowds and open to the possibility that the loner is right. I've always been intrigued by books like Brave New World and 1984 and [Eugene Zamiatin's] We — that whole genre of books about the lonely individual in a totalitarian society, about what happens to you when everyone agrees and you're the one who says the whole thing is a facade.

One thing that's hard about such situations is that the crowd consensus effectively becomes reality. So if you're voicing a dissenting opinion, people don't just think you're wrong. They think you're crazy.

That's why the Soviet Union dissenters got sent to psychiatric institutions: because everybody else was so strongly part of the consensus. When I go out lecturing now, I talk about how there is this dominant consensus that's funded by big foundations with tons of money, and they fund the think tanks, and the think tanks churn out advocacy materials that go to editorial boards, and then the corporate people say we're onboard with this, the Bush administration was onboard, the Obama administration is onboard. To me it's almost self-evident that No Child Left Behind is a failure, but people will say, "Well, Congress doesn't think so." It's like everybody agrees except for the teachers, who are the ones who have to do it.

Have you gone back and looked at the initial criticisms of No Child Left Behind from 2001, the year that it passed?

No. I'm sure there were people who predicted everything that would happen. But — you know, as I often say, I was wrong, but I was in good company. Almost 90 of Congress voted for it, including more Democrats than Republicans. Ted Kennedy never, ever backed off from his strong support. He said it was underfunded, but that wasn't the problem. It wasn't underfunded. It was the wrong idea.

Now I think, "Well, if Teddy Kennedy didn't know, why should I have known?" Everybody thought it was a good idea. The difference between me and its supporters at the time is that I've decided it's wrong and they're still defending it. I'm trying to repair the damage and they're trying to keep it alive.

Do you remember how you felt about those criticisms at the time?

Yeah, I thought, you know, "These are just a lot of people who are afraid of tests."

Has the experience of changing your mind on this one belief caused you to question any other beliefs?

I'm trying to think. I can't say that I have deep passionate beliefs about other things where I would need to reconsider. I don't have any strong religious commitments. Politically I've been independent for years. Being a skeptic to start with, I don't have a whole lot that I have to re-examine. I'm always re-examining.

What do you think about the role of wrongness in education? It seems to me that making mistakes is crucial to learning, yet by and large mistakes are discouraged and punished in our schools.

We have reshaped the education system — largely through federal legislation — to an approach of "right answers, right answers, right answers." But life's not like that. We're putting a tremendous amount of value on being able to pick the right one out of four little bubbles. But this turns out not to be a very valuable skill. You can't take this skill out into the workplace and get paid for it.

My research assistant did a blog for the Washington Post about this mantra of "Failure Is Not an Option." Her point was, you can't learn anything unless you fail. Failure has to be an option. What does success mean if there's no failure? It just means that you've dropped the bar so low that everyone can walk over it.

If you could hear someone else interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?

That's a hard one. Donald Rumsfeld said he was wrong, but I don't even want to hear from him. [Former Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs Co-Chair, and former Citigroup Chair] Bob Rubin would be interesting, but he'll never admit he was wrong. Right now what's coming to mind are people who have never admitted that they're wrong about anything.

Like who?

Like basically everybody I've been associated with for the last 20 years.

___________

Kathryn Schulz is the author of the forthcoming Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com . You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

This interview is part of a series of Q and As in which notable people discuss their relationship to being wrong. To read the previous interview, with Alan Dershowitz, click here .

Alan Dershowitz and the Bias Blind Spot

Kathryn Schulz — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:46:00 GMT

In one of the more fascinating moments of my interview with Alan Dershowitz , he claims that his own beliefs about the Israel-Palestine conflict are grounded in the evidence while his adversaries' beliefs arise from (and attest to) their underlying psychological issues. Distilled down to its essence, the claim is: I'm reasonable, my opponents are crazy.

In making this claim, Dershowitz provides a textbook example of a phenomenon called the bias blind spot: the tendency to spot (or allege) bias in others while denying it in ourselves. In a sense, the bias blind spot is just an epiphenomenon of the Lake Wobegon Effect , that endlessly entertaining statistical debacle whereby we all think of ourselves as above average in every respect — including impartiality.

Virtually everyone who has ever studied the bias blind spot agrees that it is a consequence of another psychological phenomenon: naive realism, or the tendency to assume that the world is exactly as we perceive it. Nobody seriously subscribes to naive realism, mind you (at least, no sane adults, and certainly no high-powered legal minds). But that doesn't stop us from defaulting to the sense that our own beliefs perfectly reflect reality. From that often-unconscious assumption follows another: People who disagree with us must have a distorted view of the world. As the Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues put it in a paper entitled "Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder: Divergent Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Other":

"We cannot attribute [our adversaries'] responses to the nature of the events or issues that elicited them because we deem our own different responses to be the ones dictated by the objective nature of those events or issues. Instead .... we infer that the source of their responses must be something about them ."

In other words, we have to think that our own beliefs reflect the facts —t hat's what it means to believe them, after all. As a result, when people disagree with us, we go looking for the source of that disagreement not in the substance of the issues, but in the depths of their psyches.

But what about our own psyches? When I asked Dershowitz why he wasn't just as susceptible to psychological biases as his adversaries, he replied that, "I've thought hard about my psychological connections and I think I've managed to separate out the psychological from the legal, moral, and political."

Here, too, he provides an eerily perfect example of a widespread psychological phenomenon: the tendency to verify our own freedom from bias by ... well, by searching our souls. The trouble is that soul-searching is a sure-fire way not to turn up any evidence of bias, not least because most biasing processes leave no traces in the conscious mind. At most, we might acknowledge the existence of factors that could have prejudiced us, while determining that, in the end, they did not. (After all, if we were convinced that a belief of ours reflected a personal bias rather than objective reality, we would — presumably — change our mind.)

Unsurprisingly, this introspective method of assessing bias is singularly unconvincing to anyone but ourselves. As Pronin and her colleagues put it, "We are not particularly comforted when others assure us that they have looked into their own hearts and minds and concluded that they have been fair and objective."

The bias blind spot is a shockingly robust effect. Researchers have found that even when you explicitly explain the bias to subjects before eliciting it from them, they still claim that they are less susceptible to it than others. If Alan Dershowitz reads this, I suspect he will feel the same way.

So is there any way to counteract this bias? Only by remaining constantly alive to the very real possibility that we are in its grips, even if we cannot sense it. Alternatively, you could try consulting a few people with whom you disagree. They, no doubt, can spot your biases with perfect clarity.

Read the interview with Alan Dershowitz .

Kathryn Schulz is the author of the forthcoming Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error . She can be reached at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com. You can follow her on Facebook here , and on Twitter here .

Whom Should I Interview About Being Wrong? You Tell Me.

Kathryn Schulz — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:15:00 GMT

There's only one question I've asked of every person I've interviewed for this Slate series: If you could hear someone else being interviewed about wrongness, who would it be? Now I'd like you to answer the same question. Who's got the most interesting relationship to error? Whose job requires them to think obsessively about being wrong? Who has made the biggest mistakes? Whose personality, background, or line of work impels them to deny it-or encourages them to admit it? Submit your ideas for potential Wrong Stuff interviewees in the comments section below. If you're the first person to suggest someone I wind up interviewing, I'll send you a free copy of the book.

Alan Dershowitz on Being Wrong, Part I: Lawyers, Pundits, Error, and Evil

Kathryn Schulz — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:41:00 GMT

As a criminal appellate attorney, Alan Dershowitz has represented, largely successfully, some of the most notorious defendants of the 20th century: O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Claus von Bulow, Leona Helmsley, Patty Hearst, Jim Bakker, and Michael Milken, to name a few. As a political commentator, he is an outspoken backer of Israel who has fiercely questioned the left's support for Palestine. More recently, he has attracted controversy for advocating the use of a "torture warrant" to regulate (or license, depending on your perspective) the use of torture.

Talking to Dershowitz about wrongness reminded me of a counterintuitive claim about the nature of certainty. Certainty, this claim holds, is merely a product of social interaction. In the privacy of our own minds, we treat every proposition probabilistically: Hypothesis X has Y odds of being true. It is only when we must communicate with others that we abandon this state of chronic doubt and generate absolutes. Put differently, it is only in writing a book, teaching a class, arguing a lawsuit, or appearing on Larry King that we commit to a cause.

If true, this theory helps explain the paradox of Alan Dershowitz. In the public sphere, he is widely regarded as an unyielding defender of inflammatory beliefs. Yet he is also a connoisseur of error: He believes all of common law emerged from mistakes and has written two books on the relationship between wrongness and rights. (You can read Part II of this interview, a conversation about the role of error in the origins and structure of the American legal system, here .) Unsurprisingly, he had a lot to say about wrongness: his own, his students', his political adversaries', even mine.

Do you think lawyers have an unusually hard time admitting that they're wrong?

Oh, yeah. I think that lawyers are terrible at admitting that they're wrong. And not just admitting it; also realizing it. Most lawyers are very successful, and they think that because they're making money and people think well of them, they must be doing everything right.

I have the same experience with criminals. People ask me all the time, how could X, who's so rich and so successful, how could he — or in [the late real estate and hotel billionaire Leona] Helmsley's case, how could she — have been willing to expose herself to prison for a mere million dollars [in tax evasion] when she had three billion in the bank? And the answer is always the same. They didn't just slip this time. They've been doing this since they were kids, and this is the time they got caught. People who have been successful criminals or successful lawyers just do the same thing over and over again, without understanding that at least some of the things they're doing are mistakes.

Well, you're a successful lawyer, to put it mildly. Are you failing to recognize and learn from your mistakes?

I worry about it. That's why I always have young people around me; I insist on my students and the people who work with me telling me about my mistakes. And I think I learn from them.

Isn't your students' ability to confront you on mistakes rather compromised? You're the professor, the hot-shot lawyer, the one with all the experience and all the power, not to mention the one who gives out the grades.

That's not true at Harvard, for a couple of reasons. Number one, all grading is blind grading. Number two, students are taught to be assertive, and correcting the teacher is seen as a good thing, at least these days.

Also, I'm out there publicly and I'm very controversial; my e-mail is filled with people calling me terrible things and correcting all of my errors, including ones I haven't committed. So I'm getting negative feedback all the time.

Can you give me some examples of instances where you've been wrong?

I had an experience early in my career where I was working with a young woman who insisted on putting an argument in the brief. I thought the argument sucked and I didn't want to put it in the brief, and she said, "Well, you're the boss." I said, "No, that's not the way we do things. You're going to persuade me to do or it you going to persuade me not to do it." She ultimately didn't persuade me, but she came so close and she was so committed to the argument that I actually put it into the brief — very reluctantly. I really thought I was making a mistake. And we ended up winning the case on that argument. I was just dead wrong and she was completely right.

That's an example from your life as a trial lawyer. What about your life as a political commentator? It's one thing to admit that you were wrong about a tactical issue — which argument to use in which case, say. But what about your overarching political positions? Do you think about being wrong about those?

Of course. And I've changed my mind on a few issues. I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.

On torture, people misunderstand my views. I'm against torture, but I'm in favor of a torture warrant, which means I believe it [torture] will happen even though I'm against it, so I favor accountability. I've been having that debate now for, what, two or three years, and I have not changed my mind up until now, although I understand the other side of the position very, very well, and for me it's a close question. But all my life has been about accountability and not making decisions beneath the surface, and that's why it so important for me to recognize that we do terrible things, and that when we do them, we have to do them openly and we have to have accountability rather than deniability.

What made you change your mind on affirmative action?

I've seen it work. I've seen students who would not be admitted on just a colorblind basis who have done so extraordinarily well and have contributed so much to the life of the university and the law school that I realized that the principle was being overwhelmed by the reality. And, you know, I'm a pragmatist. I learn from experience.

That's interesting, because many people regard you as extraordinarily entrenched and inflexible in your political positions — in other words, as someone who's convinced that he's right. How do you feel about that characterization?

First of all, there's some basis for it, because when I'm acting as a lawyer, I can't change my mind. I have a client. Nothing that the prosecution says will cause me to change my mind, because I have an obligation to defend my client whether he's wrong or right. But as a public intellectual, I have an obligation to keep an open mind, and I think I do. I understand that it's good tactics to categorize me as a close-minded, unobjective extremist, but nobody that respects me has those views.

The lawyerly obligation to not change your mind, to defend a position right or wrong — do you find that it seeps over into the rest of your life?

No, it doesn't because I'm a professor first, and as a professor I'm always changing my mind. I mean, my students go crazy in my class because I'm the most orthodox Bayesian in the world. [Bayesian probability theory is a way of modeling how the human mind reasons about the world. It assumes that people have prior beliefs about the probability of a given hypothesis and also beliefs about the probability that the hypothesis, if true, would generate the evidence they see. Taken together, these beliefs determine how people update their faith in a hypothesis in light of new evidence.] I do everything based on Bayes analysis, and Bayes analysis is always based on shifting probabilities and constantly changing and being adaptive and fluid.

So can you imagine changing your mind on the issues you're currently most closely associated with? On torture? On the Middle East? What would it take for that to happen?

Sure. I mean, on torture I could easily change my mind, because that argument is largely an empirical one. If my approach produced more torture rather than less torture, I would change my mind.

I would find it very hard to change my views on the Middle East in general. I've been very critical of some Israeli actions: At the end of the Lebanon War where they used cluster bombs. I criticized that, and I criticized the use of phosphorus in Gaza. But about the two-state solution, about Israel's right to exist as a Jewish democracy — I think that's too deeply part of me. This is a view I've had since I was 10 years old. I don't see myself changing it. I'm against the settlements, I'm in favor of a divided Jerusalem, I support a two-state solution, so I think of myself as moderate. I'm considered an extremist because people like Noam Chomsky are considered moderates. I'm not becoming a Chomsky.

So what do you make of Chomsky and the many other people who disagree with you on Israel? Obviously they think they're just as right as you do.

I think many of their reasons are more psychological than political. I think being Jewish is very, very complicated, and there are a lot of Jews who have to prove their self-worth by being willing to be critical of something very Jewish, namely the state of Israel. Obviously I look first for reasonable bases, but I often can't find them. So I look for psychological explanations. Because some of these positions, I cannot believe they could be based on any kind of rationality. When I look at the double standard by which Israel is judged in the world — for instance, regarded by some as the worst human rights violator when it's clearly not — you have to ask yourself what the psychological roots are.

So you're saying that your opponents' grounds for belief are psychological but yours are rational? What makes you think yours aren't psychological, too?

It's always possible. But I've studied the situation very closely, and I think I'm prepared psychologically to be critical. I'm prepared psychologically to do what I think is the right thing on Israel. I've thought hard about my psychological connections and I think I've managed to separate out the psychological from the legal, moral, and political. I don't think I'm hung up about my Jewishness. I'm not a religious person, my son is married to a person who's not Jewish, my grandchildren are half-Jewish, I'm not a synagogue attender, I'm not somebody who lives a particularly Jewish life, it's not a hang-up with me. I think I've thought through all the issues, I've written five books on the subject, moderate books. I think I've sorted through the issues and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Speaking of reasonableness, what do you think about the inflammatory rhetoric that tends to accompany these hot-button issues? One of the things I write about in my book is the ease with which we slide from believing that people who disagree with us are wrong to believing they're ignorant, idiotic, or evil.

I think it's a terrible approach. Certainly as a lawyer, I teach my students to respect their adversaries: They're sitting in class with you today, and tomorrow they're sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom. They're as smart as you are, they're as well-motivated as you are, they're as decent as you are, they're as open to new ideas as you are. The worst mistake you can make is underrating your enemy. Assuming that they're evil — I think it's a terrible thing to do.

That's in the law. What about as a pundit? You've done it yourself, in that context.

Not idiotic. I don't characterize people who disagree with me as idiotic. Evil — I use the word evil a lot. I like it. I think Richard Goldstone is evil. I think Norman Finkelstein is evil. I don't shy away from those terms. There are evil people in the world.

Define it.

Evil people are people who knowingly engage in conduct that is done for selfish reasons that don't reflect reality. I think there are really, really evil people on both sides in the Middle East conflict. Those Jewish extremists who would engage in violence to preserve the settlements are evil.

[In a subsequent e-mail in which he asked me to clarify his remarks on evil, Derswhowitz wrote: "I just want to re-emphasize that I never call those who disagree with me about Israel "evil." Indeed I admire and learn from Palestinians like Sari Nuseiba and others. I reserve that term for those who compare Israel to Nazi Germany or accuse it of having the worst human rights record in the world. There is no rational basis for making such comparisons. They can be motivated only by an evil intent. And I call it as I see it without mincing words." ]

Are you saying that you think these people consciously work toward immoral ends? It's my experience that most people think they're on the side of the angels, just as you do.

I think some are motivated by entirely selfish reasons. Goldstone wants to be loved and adored by the international human rights community, he wants to be promoted, he wants to get teaching jobs. I think he's purely, purely selfishly motivated. He knows what he's doing, he's making a calculated decision. People like Chomsky I think are motivated by an ideological hated for anything centrist or liberal or moderate or American or Western. And then he's prepared to lie to support his views.

But is this a debate about Israel or are we talking about mistakes here?

We're talking about wrongness, but part of what interests me is how we treat people when we think we're right and they're wrong. For instance, you've accused some people you disagree with of "hating America," which seems awfully Sarah Palin-ish for such a smart guy.

I don't ever accuse anybody who disagree with me of hating America because they disagree with me. I accuse Noam Chomsky of hating America, because he says so. I disagree with Pat Buchanan, but I don't accuse him of hating America. I have a different view of him.

Ha. OK. Well, tell me this, on a different topic. You've written, in Letters to a Young Lawyer , about being wrong about people, including some of your legal heroes, and about the intense disappointment that caused you. What about your clients? Have you believed in a client and then realized that you were wrong?

Well, first of all, I start out assuming all my clients are guilty and all my clients are lying to me. That's my operating assumption as a good lawyer, just like any good doctor would start out believing that the chest pain is not indigestion but a coronary, or the patient who says he never smoked or used cocaine may be lying. So I have rarely been disappointed by my clients because I have rarely expected much of them.

On occasion, though, I have fallen for the charm of a client, and believed that maybe they were telling the truth only to learn that they weren't.

What was that like?

Oh, it was pretty awful. Unfortunately, I can't tell you who it is, but she was a kind of prominent woman client who clearly misled me, and it was very difficult. But in the end I should have seen it coming, and I faulted myself.

What would you say you've been most wrong about in your life?

I think it's about people. Being wrong about people, misjudging people, expecting too much of people — that's the one that has the most devastating impact, because how you interact with people is very personal. Ideas don't desert you, ideas aren't treasonous to you, but people can be.

Is there a specific experience you can share?

No, I don't think so. But the other thing I could say has disappointed me is the left, and particularly the hard left. I'm thinking of writing a book called Why I Left the Left but Couldn't Join the Right . In that respect, I feel sometimes without a home, because I was a person of the left all the way through college, law school, my first years of teaching. Remember, I came of age during the Vietnam War, so the hard left and the civil liberties left didn't have anything to disagree about. But after Vietnam, when the issue moved from Asia to the Middle East, a sharp division arose between liberals who supported Israel and the hard left that vehemently hated Israel. That to me was a big disappointment that I should have anticipated and didn't.

Last question: If you could hear someone else interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?

Bill Clinton. I think he's made some of the most interesting mistakes.

Like what?

His most interesting mistake was who he picked to be his lawyer when he was about to be impeached. You know, he made a terrible, terrible choice and his lawyer got him into terrible, terrible trouble by putting him through a deposition about his sex life, which no reasonable lawyer would ever do.

To read Part II of the interview, click here .