David Deutsch: belief

Transcript context

…It does seem to me that, compared to you, the libertarians are a kind of metaphysical totalitarian, though not political totalitarian — that there’s just more freedom in all aspects of your worldview, right? Well, I think I agree with you, if I understand correctly what you’re saying. I think the libertarian movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda. Even if it’s not revolutionary, even if they say, “We want to implement it over a period of 100 years,” they know what they want to implement; they know what the endpoint is going to be in 100 years’ time. They don’t take into account, first of all, that there are going to be errors in whatever they set up. That the correction of those errors is more important than getting it right in the first place — much more important. Secondly, they don’t take into account that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions, an inexplicit knowledge that people share. By institutions, I don’t mean buildings like the Supreme Court building or something. I mean the manner of thinking: in the case of the Supreme Court, the manner of thinking that’s shared by hundreds of millions of Americans, that makes them not just behave in a certain way but expect society, the government, the legal system, the state — they expect certain things of those things. It’s those expectations that make up 90 percent of the institution of the Supreme Court. Libertarians think that’s unimportant and basically want to throw it away, by and large. No doubt there are libertarians who agree with me on this. You’ve invoked two concepts about human beings. One is creativity, the other is being explanatory. Are they the same, or how are they related?…

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