Are We All Dumb?
The Connection Between Irrationality & Certainty
It is very likely that we are wrong about everything.
Humans are famously bad at being rational, objective, and careful thinkers.
People readily still believe that God is punishing thousands for not believing in his son by sending them to hell, that the constellations can predict our temperament & personalities, that ghosts are real, that our respective political views are the correct ones, and that climate change is a hoax.
We function more as personal lawyers, as Jonathan Haidt put it than as unbiased rational thinkers.
Behavioral economists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers have long been pointing out the flaws of our natural intuition passed down from hunter-gatherers. Daniel Kahneman elaborates on this in his International Bestseller, “Thinking Fast and Slow.”
We tend not to make distinctions between a good memory of an experience and a good experience in general. If you go on a hike and most of the 6-hour climb is pleasurable but towards the end, you get into an argument that overwhelms your experience. In conversing about the experience, people quickly say that their “hike was ruined” because of the end. But actually, the only thing that was ruined was the…
