Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

February 2, 2011
Kathryn Schulz

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything. No surprise, then, that we are often frustrated or humiliated when we discover that we were wrong. This way of thinking about error is, itself, completely wrong. Error is both a given and a gift – one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and, most profoundly, ourselves. At a moment when economic, political, and religious dogmatism increasingly divide us, Being Wrong explores the seduction of certainty and the crisis occasioned by error.

Speaker Details

Kathryn Schulz is an award-winning journalist, author and public speaker. She is behind the Slate series “The Wrong Stuff,” featuring interviews with high-profile people about how they think and feel about being wrong. Schulz’s freelance work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, and the “Freakonomics” blog of the New York Times, among other publications. She is the former editor of the online environmental magazine Grist, and a former reporter and editor for The Santiago Times, of Santiago, Chile, where she covered environmental, labor, and human rights issues.