Is it right to be wrong?

Riding the bus home from work Friday, I was skimming a local alternative weekly when I ran across an interview with an author I'd never heard of and whose book subject sounded like a stretch. As in, can you really come up with enough material on that topic to write a manuscript?

Evidently so.

Kathryn Schulz, described as a former Portland journalist, has just written a book called "Being Wrong." In it, according to the blurb in Willamette Week, she "delves into philosophical and scientific ideas that address 'wrongness' ... such as when our senses trick us into seeing an optical illusion to our own memories of events."

For the most part, the short Q&A followed didn't grab me, certainly not enough to think of buying her book or attending a reading she's doing next Tuesday at Powell's. I have to say, though, that Schulz's answers to the last two questions did strike me as pretty thoughtful. In particular, her response to the final question struck me as a pretty good framing of the tensions we feel around things we value: work and ambition versus friendship and recreation.

Here, see what you think:

What is the best part of being wrong?

The possibility to come up with a new idea. The experience of being wrong forces us to explore further, and to me that experience of surprise and confusion, which can be disorienting, it makes you see the world in a new way, and suddenly everything is new.

You discuss how ideas about rightness and wrongness shape our beliefs and bind us to our communities. Did any of your beliefs change when you were living in Portland?

I lived in Portland for not quite four years, and I go back often. I think all the time about how different some of the values are from New York. It’s a little less about explicit beliefs like politics and religion, and more about what is cherished or ignored, or looked down on. I feel like it’s a culture that really values community, time with friends, and the outdoors. It’s totally acceptable to work a little less and spend more time in beautiful places and with the people you love, which I really miss.

I think the flip side of this is that I’m struck by how there’s not a lot of value placed on ambition, at least in the circles I moved in. I think ambition even has a sort of negative connotation there, which I don’t think it necessarily should. The thing I find about New York is a community of people who are extremely driven to do whatever they have committed their life to, and consequently they produce amazing results. On the other hand, they’re crazy....

It relates to the concept of “wrongness” in that every time we move from one culture to another we find that our beliefs are being challenged a little bit. Every time I go back and forth between the two cities I have to ask myself: “What’s the life I want to live? Do I want to write a book that I love that killed me to write, or do I want to spend time with my family and leave work early on a Friday and go to the Cascades?”

Photograph by Michael Polito