By Dwight Garner
Published: New York Times June 10, 2010
BEING WRONGAdventures in the Margin of Error
By Kathryn Schulz (pic left)
405 pages. Ecco. $26.99.
WRONG
Why Experts Keep Failing Us — And How to Know When Not to Trust Them
By David H. Freedman
295 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.
Despite their titles, the two books in front of us today — “Being Wrong,” by Kathryn Schulz, and “Wrong,” by David H. Freedman — are not biographies of Alan Greenspan. They’re not accounts of the search for Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D. They’re not psychological profiles of Nickelback fans or the imbibers of chocolate martinis, either.
Here’s what they are instead: investigations into why, as Ms. Schulz writes, with a Cole Porterish lilt in her voice, “As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.”
Bookstores will shelve these two volumes side by side, and critics like me will think, bingo!, and set them up for a blind date too. But they could not be more unalike. Ms. Schulz’s book is a funny and philosophical meditation on why error is mostly a humane, courageous and extremely desirable human trait. She flies high in the intellectual skies, leaving beautiful sunlit contrails. God isn’t her co-pilot; Iris Murdoch seems to be.
Mr. Freedman’s book is a somewhat cruder vehicle. It’s a John Stossel-like exposé of the multiple ways that society’s so-called experts (scientists, economists, doctors) let us down, if not outright betray us. It’s a chunk of spicy populist outrage, and it can be a hoot to watch Mr. Freedman’s reading glasses steam up as he, like Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” sniffs mendacity around the plantation. But Ms. Schulz’s book is the real find here; forgive me if I spend more time with it.
Read the full piece at NYT.
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