Paul Bloom: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s say I took two economists, and I flew them to a poor nation that they didn’t really know anything about, and I asked them to make some guesses about what might be wrong with the economy. They would do better than equivalently smart people who are not economists. What’s the feature of psychological research that stops it from translating into higher understanding? How do you model what you all produce? I think we understand certain subdomains. I think I have a better understanding of memory and the fallibility of memory than a lot of people. I think I have more of a grasp of mental disorders. I know maybe a bit more about child development in the sense of what ages things will come about. I can say, I think, some reasonably intelligent, maybe surprising things about social movements and how people behave in groups. It’s not like we don’t know anything about the world. It just doesn’t translate, for whatever reason, into day-to-day contact. Talking with you now, I’m no better at figuring out what you want from this conversation than anyone else would be. Let’s say we took a batch of you and trained you for two years to do that translation. The people who are the most insightful, who, let’s say, are not psychologists, but they’re astute observers of human nature, and they train you all for two years. Would you then be better than others? Are you trainable?…

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