Ask A Genius 113 – Human Error and Views of Themselves
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/10
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Human errors in understanding the world will lead us and have led us, pretty much forever, in repeating the same mistakes. I mean on one superficial level: if we don’t understand history, we will repeat it. But another one, I think, is not accepting fundamental and well-substantiated theories in science.
Rick Rosner: Well, hold on, because, the majority of people—the vast majority of people—can hold wrong ideas about the world and the world can still make progress. Let’s just assume, for the sake of this discussion, that science is right. Well, people have only understood the world scientifically for a few hundred years. If you really want to get down to big picture things like the shape of the universe and the large-scale of the universe, that is less than 100 years old.
Before that, you had everybody believing in a variety of mythological and some religious pictures of the world that are pretty much inconsistent with science and what we understand to be scientific reality. Yet the world still made progress, and the progress is often made at not the big picture level, but at the little—people figuring out things to sell things, how to make things, small-scale ideas that through trial-and-error and growing understanding are consistent with the world.
Generally, throughout history, you have a people who know a bunch of small-scale things that are consistent with actual experience and they also know a bunch of mega-scale world-scale, universe-scale, things that have nothing to do with experience and are wrong. So you have to distinguish between beliefs that can be wrong—in that, they reflect a lack of, well, they reflect a lack of actual experience of the big picture of the world, but don’t impinge on everyday life.
I guess there are other ideas that a majority of people can be wrong and can impinge on everyday life. And to the horse I keep beating, that idea that Republican ideas as reflected by what
Republican government is doing is protecting the middle class, everyday people, is an idea that 10s of millions of Americans have and that idea has proven to be fairly wrong over the past few decades.
The Republican Party isn’t functioning for everyday people, even though it claims to be. And people who keep voting for Republicans keep voting against their interests. Things I thought were economic truths, like when you go into a recession or a depression, you spend your way out of it via the idea of Keynesian economics. That if economic systems—if people are going broke and the whole country is going broke, and people are freaking out in a financial crisis, then create liquidity, which is what they did during the Depression and what Obama did with some degree of success during the Great Recession.
I thought that was settled economic policy. Republicans keep arguing against it. But now that there’s a Republican for president, they might remove the purse strings a bit and spend more on infrastructure. Spending that was denied Obama because he wasn’t their party of their race.
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