Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Thanks so much for having me. I’m interested in issues surrounding the progress of science. If we think of the notion of disease being transmitted through the air, it seems that comes to our attention really quite late in time — late 19th century. It’s not truly accepted until later in the 20th century. The idea doesn’t seem that crazy. Why did it take so long? It’s a great question and one that I was thinking about a lot while working on this book. I think maybe part of the issue is that when we look back at history, especially the history of science, we tend to rewrite it. We tend to pretend that things were simpler than they really were. We ignore all the debates and the way that ideas pop up and flourish for a while and then disappear and then come back again. The idea that something alive could come through the air and make you sick or kill you was, in a way, in the words of one journalist in France in the 1860s, “just too fantastic to imagine.” It really strained the imagination. Even if today, we’re starting to get used to it, it’s a frightening idea because it makes us feel particularly helpless. We can wash our hands all day long and keep ourselves safe that way, but you have to breathe. I think that there were a lot of reasons, many different reasons for the scientific community to look away and to say, “No, this isn’t happening,” or, “It isn’t important.”…

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