Our experience with error is vital to our humanity.

I finally finished this after starting way back in October. A few other books managed to jump the line, but this was such an interesting read it was almost meditative and I never wanted to rush through it.

There’s so much cultural pressure to avoid or contain errors that it was refreshing to explore how natural and fundamental they are to being a thoughtful, conscientious person.

Art and science are explorations of error, and a person recognizing their wrongs is one that’s growing and changing.

Schulz explores this from many fascinating angles: philosophical arguments, accounts of wrongly-convicted assailants, famous historic blunders, commercial error-correction efforts, humor, and curious psychological cases to name a few.

We already saw that “seeing the world as it is not” is pretty much the definition of erring—but it is also the essence of imagination, invention, and hope.

We have a tendency to believe our own stories and be suspicious of those who disagree, and we’re entirely unaware of our wrongs until some abrupt moment when they become apparent.

I feel like a broken record writing about my discomfort with zealotry and my affinity for doubt, so passages about the nature of certainty and doubt were cathartic to read. The end even got into the fundamental importance of error in comedy, which was convenient for where my head’s at right now.

I’m overwhelmed by my mountain of highlights because there were just so many interesting quotes and points and stories to consider.

In the optimistic model of wrongness, error is not a sign that our past selves were failures and falsehoods. Instead, it is one of those forces, like sap and sunlight, that imperceptibly helps another organic entity—us human beings—to grow up.

Highly recommended for anyone actively being a person.