Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I would say certainly not. Also, what we perceive and what we think about is not necessarily what happens. I doubt many people imagined a pandemic was going to show up and shut down the whole world as it did. I do think it’s valuable to think about things, not in any hypochondriacal way, if that is an exact word, but more about people asking, why is it that I focus on subject A rather than subject B? Maybe even one more degree of that is, what do I want to think about and what is important to me? If I think about the experts in the immediate post-World War II period, there’s John von Neumann, there’s Herman Kahn. It seems they got most things wrong, so maybe they thought there’d be another world war or nuclear war quite soon, or they might have favored a first strike on the Soviet Union. We almost did a first strike against China. Isn’t that an example of how expertise can just lead us to go badly wrong? And this more common-sense approach — maybe we had it with Ronald Reagan, and we actually do better with that. Oh boy. It depends how you define expert, I suppose. I think of wisdom more than I think of “expertise.” I’ve met a lot of experts in my day, and I’ve met many people whose wisdom outperforms — and again, just in my opinion — their expertise. Which doesn’t mean you throw out the opinions of the so-called experts, but no one has a crystal ball and can predict anything. Boy, we could have such an interesting discussion about all of these Cold War thinkers, from Herman Kahn on down. You yourself were, if I’m not mistaken, a student of the fascinating Thomas Schelling.…

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