Why did you choose The Confessions? 

For several reasons, actually. One is that it really established a form. Augustine gave us the genre of the conversion narrative, and the idea of conversion is central to the idea of wrongness. It’s one thing to realise your hotel is over there when you thought it over here, but it’s another thing entirely to realise: ‘The whole foundation of my life has been ripped away.’ Augustine gave us a model for telling that kind of story – stories about the complete shattering and replacement of a world view. And then there’s the fact that he’s just such an amazing writer and thinker. He’s like Freud meets Chomsky meets Gerard Manley Hopkins meets the Pope. He’s such a patient archaeologist of his own mind, and he’s so deeply engaged with trying to understand how we can be so opaque even to ourselves – how we can be wrong about our own inner universe. 

In what way?

He’s incredibly eloquent on the subject of mystifying himself. There’s a beautiful passage that gets at the impossibility of recognising our wrongness in advance, of knowing in the present what we will know and believe – and feel – in the future. Augustine starts out as a zealous adherent of Manichaeism, which was this Iranian Gnostic religion that at the time was one of the most widespread religions in the world. And then he undergoes this massive conversion and rejects it utterly for Catholicism. I should say that, like many converts, he then spends as much energy rejecting Gnosticism as he does embracing Catholicism, which is interesting in itself. It’s fascinating to listen to him describing himself before his conversion. He says something like: ‘I had placed myself behind my own back.’ That’s a physical impossibility, of course, and I love how it gets at an emotional impossibility as well – the impossibility of knowing in the moment which of our beliefs will come to seem like errors in the future. 

Now James Sully, on Illusions.

James Sully was a 19th-century psychologist, a contemporary of William James who was very influenced by Darwin, and I chose his book for two reasons. The first is that there’s a vast literature about wrongness, but very little of it is really categorised as such. If you dig around in philosophy and theology and the history of science and so forth, you find plenty of sidelong reflections on error. But Illusions is that rare book that’s explicitly about wrongness. He uses the term ‘illusions’ very broadly, to cover most things that we would call error – not logical fallacies, but errors of memory and perception and belief. And he’s quite smart about these things, so in part, it’s a wonderful catalogue of all the ways we get things wrong. At the same time, it’s also a wonderful entry in the intellectual history of error, because his way of thinking about wrongness so patently reflects the values and beliefs of his era. That’s why I mentioned Darwin: Sully is powerfully influenced by The Origin of Species and he believes, somewhat touchingly, that we are going to evolve ourselves out of being wrong! And then, too, he has this very 19th-century British colonial view that sees error as largely the province of the heathen – you know, like the more we spread the light of Western culture and knowledge, the more we’ll eradicate error. 

What made you grasp at the idea of human error?

My interest didn’t come from one massive personal experience of wrongness, although of course I’m wrong all the time. In a way, it was almost the opposite: it came from the fact that the idea of wrongness bubbled up so constantly and in such disparate domains. It simultaneously became clear to me that our attitude toward wrongness influences almost every imaginable human relationship – whether between family members or co-workers or neighbours or nations – and yet we talk about it almost not at all. So I came to think of it as it this hugely important but largely unarticulated category of experience, and I wanted to explore it, to see what happens when we bring it into the light. 

Well, Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents pretty much wraps it up.

Yeah, pretty much. I thought about choosing that as one of my books, actually. Wrongness is not a new subject. Philosophy, at least in its earliest years, was all about the quest for truth, and if you want to find truth, you have to be obsessed with error. So there’s plenty of dialogue about wrongness in the philosophical literature, but very little in contemporary public life. 

Tell us about Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment.

Tetlock is a professor of political science, psychology and business, and his book is terrific – funny, sharp, delightfully written. Essentially, what he did was run a series of longitudinal studies of predictions made by so-called political experts – pundits and the like. He looked at forecasts like: Would Gorbachev turn out to be a reformer or a hardliner? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would war break out in the Horn of Africa? What he finds, as will not surprise you, is that these so-called ‘experts’ are, at least for their intended purpose, seldom more accurate than monkeys throwing darts. But what’s interesting here is that Tetlock tries to figure out what makes people better or worse at making predictions. So for instance, one thing that’s highly correlated with accuracy of forecasting is fame.