A Thought About Intellectual Authorities
If I think that someone is smarter than I am, and has studied questions about a particular topic more thoroughly than I have, wouldn't it be more rational to accept whatever decision he/she has come to than to make a decision based on my own studies of the topic?
My answer: we'd rather be wrong than be stupid.
posted by luke_d at 3:37 AM
4 Comments:
my first response to this posting was "yes, absolutely." but on reflection i'm not sure this is quite right.
we don't necessarily actually BELIEVE that we know more than someone else (though sometimes we do), and yet we have some idea that we know SOMETHING the other person does not. i think of a venn diagram with one circle displaying what i know, and another displaying what luke knows. luke may know more than i do (his circle is larger), but i am certain that my circle is not completely contained in luke's (i know a lot about statistics that luke does not).
so when luke makes a statement about the world, i may have reason to believe his statement because of his worldly knowlege, but i may have knowlege HE IS UNAWARE OF, that contradicts his statement.
this is why i believe my statement is better than his, and not because i prefer wrongness to stupidity.
caveat: if my circle is in face completely contained within luke's, then my view is likely wrong.
6:25 AM
Haha .. well, some folks are wise and some folks are otherwise!!! Haha .. Miles of smiles, Astrid.
12:18 PM
i posted above already, but a conversation i had with a friend the other day shed further light on a related topic.
arguments: when are they over? how is one won? should we even think of them as won or lost?
my friend anne is extraordinarily stubborn. she will argue for 10 minutes or so on a topic and then conclude by saying "you're wrong!" i asked her about this practice and she asked if i knew a better way to close a debate without giving the impression that you have given in. i have to say that i don't.
5:31 AM
Thanks for all the comments. I think I'm gonna make a whole new post and talk more.
fg- I like the venn diagram idea. Lets say, though, that our circles are completely seperate and we think the others is simply bigger. Wouldn't it be rational then to accept their position. I understand your comments about us knowing some key thing that they don't then it might be different, however, it seems that there would be many cases in which we didn't really think we had a key piece of info that they didn't have.
jeff- yeah, I think egos are a huge part of the issue. It seems, in this type of situation, that we'd have to subvert our egos in order to be rational.
astrid- thanks for being the first total stranger to post--your site is awesome. Nice to meet someone from the Netherlands too, which I hear is close to Holland.
5:09 AM
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