You Can't Trust Yourself

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A chunk of the book is about people's, ah, i would call them facts. A pilot knows that even though i've got a thousand hours in the scoe, obviously morean i've got so much time in the sky. They still have a check list that they go through because they don't trust the fact that we are biological. On the other side, of course, in terms of economic policy, they're just wrong. They don't know. It takes a massive amount of factual a, a cornicopia facts, to get peopl to think maybe i'm not right about this.

To the Founding Fathers it was free libraries. To the 19th century rationalist philosophers it was a system of public schools. Today it's access to the internet. Since its beginnings, Americans have believed that if facts and information were available to all, a democratic utopia would prevail. But missing from these well-intentioned efforts, says author and journalist David McRaney, is the awareness that people's opinions are unrelated to their knowledge and intelligence. In fact, he explains, the better educated we become, the better we are at rationalizing what we already believe. Listen as the author of How Minds Change speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why it's so hard to change someone's mind, the best way to make it happen (if you absolutely must), and why teens are hard-wired not to take good advice from older people even if they are actually wiser.