Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to the scholars, researchers, and practitioners who dared to be wrong about being wrong — and to the institutions that, however imperfectly, sometimes let them.

The intellectual foundations here rest on the work of Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and the generations of philosophers of science who argued about how knowledge actually works (as opposed to how we wish it worked). Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky provided the individual-level account of cognitive error; this book attempts to extend their insights to the institutional level.

Special gratitude is owed to the outsiders whose stories anchor this book: Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who staked their careers on a bacterium; Alfred Wegener, who was right about continents and dead before anyone admitted it; Ignaz Semmelweis, who saved lives and was destroyed for it; Barbara McClintock, who waited decades; Dan Shechtman, who was told to leave; and the hundreds of exonerees whose cases the Innocence Project brought to light. Their courage — and their suffering — is the evidence.

The open-source community deserves recognition for making this work freely available. This textbook is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license because knowledge about knowledge failure should be accessible to everyone who needs it — which is everyone.

Finally, this book is for anyone who has sat in a meeting, a classroom, a lab, or a courtroom and felt the wrongness of something everyone else seemed to accept — and wondered whether they were the one who was wrong. Sometimes you are. But sometimes the room is. This book is about telling the difference.