But What If We’re Wrong?

Essayist Chuck Klosterman starts from the premise that most of what we believe today is likely to prove wrong, and asks how the present will look once it has become the distant past. Through a series of thought experiments he tests confidence about gravity and time, literary greatness, multiverses, dreams, democracy, television and sports, asking what rock music will be remembered for in five hundred years. His guide is what he calls Klosterman's Razor: the best hypothesis accepts from the outset that it may be mistaken. The 2016 book draws on interviews with George Saunders, Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Byrne, Brian Greene, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin and others.

Marc Andreessen described it as a wide-ranging meditation on the likelihood that we are wrong about most of what we believe, and said few readers will finish it without feeling humbled. Ryan Holiday named it among the very best books he read in 2016.