Kathryn Schulz
Kathryn Schulz
Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author, and the former book critic for New York magazine. She joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. Schulz won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature reporting for her New Yorker article on a potential large earthquake in the Pacific Northwest...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
way wander situation
I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.
mistake data errors
Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.
skills doubt instinct
doubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct
religious memories thinking
A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.
motivation regret inspiration
The inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.
motivation regret inspiration
I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.
sweet deny savory
If it is sweet to be right, then - let's not deny it - it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.
hard-work intelligent mind
Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.
our-love understood being-wrong
Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong
thinking errors intellectual
Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?
regret past creating
We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.
space needs looks
And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, “Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.
thinking can-not
without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses
regret motivation inspiration
If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.