"It's imaginable that every foreign policy decision was correct. Unlikely, but imaginable," he says. "We have such a tremendous capacity as human beings for self-deception" In medicine, it is especially hard to experiment on people the way we experiment on mice or dogs because they are so complicated and difficult to isolate one part of. The search can correct us - I'm sure they will.
When physician Walter Freeman died in 1972, he still believed that lobotomies were the best treatment for mental illness. A pioneer in the method, he was a deeply confident and charismatic man who eagerly spread the technique in America, long after the rise of alternative treatments that were less destructive. Listen as journalist Megan McArdle and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss what McArdle calls the "Oedipus Trap": mistakes that no one can live with, even if they were innocently made, and how admitting such mistakes to ourselves is nearly impossible. They also discuss the complexity of the credo, "follow the science."