Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…A follow-up question from the same source, “Which mistaken shared beliefs would he like to see adopted?” [laughs] Hmm. Let’s see. Probably the idea that there would be some kind of eternal, horrible punishment for holding power and not having a very high degree of epistemic rationality, especially if there were a view that God hates a politician who takes any action without calmly and studiously studying the facts, and that God will punish you in a way that voters never could. God would punish you in a way that’s far worse than the simple loss of power. If that were widely believed by people of power, I think there would be a lot more effort to actually double-check that what they’re doing really makes sense. The Spiderman Principle — with great power comes great responsibility. If there were false beliefs in some enormous concrete sanctions for people that violated the Superman Principle, I think that would be a big gain. Our mutual colleague, Daniel Klein, writes to me a question: “Do direct and overall liberty ever disagree? What are the most likely or important areas of disagreement?”…

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