Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…What did you mean by that? What I meant by that is that if you look at any individual piece, in social science specifically, it’s very hard to see that a reasonable person would fundamentally change their mind based upon any one of them. People often have an idea of, there’s the really good papers where you should have a mind quake, and you never see the world again in the same way after that. For me, all of them fail to measure up to that standard. I think the way that you really learn something is by reading a vast empirical literature. The direct cause of this was . . . I think Noah Smith had a challenge: “Name the two or three papers on each topic that are really convincing. ” I was thinking about that and said, “Honestly, I can’t think of any papers like that unless you’re going to cheat and count a literature view as being that kind of a paper.” Just realizing that the way that you actually achieve social science knowledge isn’t by finding the one crucial — might be a natural experiment that shows exactly how the world works — but by assembling a wide variety of evidence and then muddling through. So, say you write an interdisciplinary chapter for one of your books. Tell us a little more of how you do this and how you calibrate what you’re reading against actual reality.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.