Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [182]
Switzerland has long been a world leader. Based on these factors and others, in 2005 the Economist magazine ranked Switzerland the second-best country in which to live (after Ireland). According to the World Bank, Switzerland has the sixth-highest per capita income in the world (http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GNIPC.pdf).
Carrie Chapman Catt. Banaszak, 3.
the cantons determine who can vote. There is a further division of power as well: the cantons decide who can vote for members of the upper house of parliament, while the federal government decides who can elect members of the lower house.
one of the very few large-scale national protests. It is a measure of the difference between the Swiss suffrage movement and its counterparts in Great Britain and the United States that such public protests were rare. Disinclined to chain themselves to the doors of courtrooms, picket the homes of antisuffrage politicians, or go to jail, Swiss suffragists focused primarily on public education and polite persuasion, and eschewed anything resembling radical activism. As the national Swiss Association for Women’s Right to Vote admonished its members in a policy paper on tactics, women who were contemplating public demonstrations “must remain conscious that action going overboard in extent, material contents or even in tone could hurt the cause.” (Banaszak, 169)
offendicula. Jastrow, 16.
the four idols. Jastrow, 16–17; also, Juergen Klein, “Francis Bacon,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/francis-bacon); and Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays, Edwin A. Abbott, ed. (Longmans, Green and Co., 1886), lxxii–lxxiii.
Thomas Gilovich. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (The Free Press, 1991), 112.
Cass Sunstein. Cass Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Harvard University Press, 2005), v.
James Surowiecki. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor Books, 2005), 43.
John Locke and David Hume. This rejection of secondhand information as insufficient grounds for knowledge is part of the same epistemological tradition articulated by, among others, Descartes (who cautioned against believing anything based on scanty evidence) and William Clifford (James’s foil in “The Will To Believe”).
“I began to realize that I believed countless things.” Augustine, Confessions (Penguin Classics, 1931), 9.
Leonard Susskind. Brockman, ed., 89–90.
“a network of witnesses.” Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002), 180–181.
people “are swept [into a belief].” Michel de Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Donald M. Frame, trans. (Stanford University Press, 1958), 373.
“Nearly half of all Americans live in ‘landslide counties.’” Shankar Vedantam, “Why the Ideological Melting Pot Is Getting So Lumpy,” the Washington Post, Jan. 19, 2009. I suspect that this discrepancy between our professed desire for diversity and our actual homogeneity stems in part from the fact that our idea of diversity does not particularly extend to diversity of belief. We like the idea of sharing a community with people who come from different religious, racial, and economic backgrounds—but only if their current beliefs (about, say, that shared community’s school system, building codes, tax rates, noise regulations, and marriage laws) dovetail with our own. But of course, different backgrounds often produce different belief systems. If we really want a diverse community, we have to be prepared to accommodate beliefs that differ from and challenge our own.
Solomon Asch. Solomon Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgment,” in H. Guetzkow