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 “Interesting,” you say,
"that we tend to be emotion-driven thinkers rather than follow science and
reason and evidence when taking action, “but why should I really care?”
So what if we are emotional. So what if people believe that little green men
grab them every night and perform science experiments. So what if stranger
abductions aren’t as likely as I thought. Why should I really care? 
What’s In
It
For Me to pursue better Truth-Driven ThinkingSM
habits?
Answering a question with a question - What if we are wrong?
While none of us is ever wrong about a dearly held view, particularly on
social, health, dietary, foreign policy, or economic issues, there is a question
we have to ask. What if we are wrong about things? What is the
cost of not having the correct information?
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What if a low-carb diet is
harmful to our health? (last year's example, as Atkins' popularity has
plummeted)
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What if our company’s
assumptions about why customers buy our product are wrong?
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What if a certain alternative
medical treatment could kill you?
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What if DDT was really safe
but we allowed one million people per year to die of Malaria?
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If we think the planet has a
long history of radical temperature swings, yet global warming is due to the
activity of humans, what is the cost of being wrong?
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If we believe lower taxes
tend to actually increase government revenue, by increasing economic
activity, and we act accordingly, what if we’re wrong?
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Or if we believe in “the one
true religion” and someone else believes in the other “one true religion,”
what does their misguided belief mean to them? Or heaven forbid we are
wrong?
Our special guests poignantly chime in on this
topic. The Amazing Randy says it weakens us and makes us prone to financial and
health consequences; Dr. Barry Glassner says as a sociologist he’s convinced
that acting on false fears costs us dearly because we aren’t focused and
spending time and energy on the real ones; which is similar to the views of our
economist, Stephen Moore, who also says that making macroeconomic assumptions
and policy decisions not supported by data causes us to misallocate scarce and
limited resources.
Clearly there are real world and real life ramifications, from poor purchases
and investment decisions, to fall for con games and medical miracles that can
harm us! There truly are personal costs of taking action as the result of belief
in untrue facts, and there are broader social costs of flawed conventional
wisdom as well.
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