Annie Jacobsen: belief

Transcript context

…When I was a kid, people thought about nuclear weapons much more. It seemed more dangerous. It actually seemed more thinkable then. If we’re just obsessed with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, can’t that raise the risks by making it psychologically more salient? 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.…

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