Chris Blattman: belief

Transcript context

…But there are clearly cases it applies to. Hitler more or less said what he wanted to do. In fact, he did it — or tried to do it. That would be a case where, if you pay attention to his ideas and speeches, you would do very well, but just in the abstract, you might think it’s crazy. What guy would ever do this? But he did it. If we just took all the leaders and all the things they said, and then whether or not they did the things they said they were going to do, I guess my prediction is the correlation goes in the other direction, particularly with military exercises, but that might be wrong. I’ve never seen someone run that. I think of political speech as more informative. China is insisting that, within the hundred-year anniversary of the revolution, which would be 2049, it will bring Taiwan back into the fold. Now, they may not succeed in doing that, but I strongly believe that as a result of their words, that’s what they intend to do, and they will try very hard to do it. Why is that a mistake in inference? Why would they say it? What’s wrong with the simple, they say it because they’re selling the idea to their public, and they believe it, and a lot of their public believes it, and they want to do it?…

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