• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 987 0

to social ones: to the riot of wrongness that can ensue when a whole bunch of minds get together. This assessment of why we make mistakes was echoed, three hundred-odd years later, by Francis Bacon (something of a spiritual heir to Roger, but otherwise no relation). For Francis Bacon, too, there were four major sources of human error, which he called the four idols. The idol of the Tribe roughly corresponds to the terrain I covered in the last three chapters: universal, species-wide cognitive habits that can lead us into error. The idol of the Cave refers to chauvinism—the tendency to distrust or dismiss all peoples and beliefs foreign to our own clan. The idol of the Marketplace is analogous to what the earlier Bacon called the influence of public opinion, and includes the potentially misleading effects of language and rhetoric. The last idol, that of the Theater, concerns false doctrine that are propagated by religious, scientific, or philosophical authorities, and that are so basic to a society’s worldview that they are no longer questioned.

Like the earlier Bacon, then, the later one saw most errors as stemming from collective social forces rather than individual cognitive ones. This is a recurring theme in the history of wrongness. Or, more precisely, it is a recurring question in the history of wrongness: whether we are more error-prone when we follow the masses or strike out on our own. I think of this as the Fifty Million Frenchmen question, after the expression “fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” The saying comes from a 1927 hit song that poked fun at American prudery:

All of our fashions come from gay Par-ee

And if they come above the knee

Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong….

If they prefer to see their women dressed

With more or less of less and less,

Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong….

And when we brag about our liberty

And they laugh at you and me

Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

In short, if everybody’s doing it, it must be a good idea. This is a notion that has received considerable support well outside the domain of pop songs. The Cornell psychologist and behavioral economist Thomas Gilovich has observed that, “Other things being equal, the greater the number of people who believe something, the more likely it is to be true.” And the legal scholar Cass Sunstein has pointed out that, “Conformity of this kind is not stupid or senseless,” since “the decisions of other people convey information about what really should be done.” The financial writer James Surowiecki calls this notion “social proof”—the idea that “if lots of people are doing something or believe something, there must be a good reason why.”*

The other side of the Fifty Million Frenchmen coin is the one your mother loves: if all your friends were jumping off the roof, would you jump, too? This injunction not to be a lemming—to think for oneself instead of following the masses—was the point Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon were trying to make as well. (Two esteemed Englishmen and your mother can’t be wrong.) Some philosophers, including John Locke and David Hume, have formalized this idea, arguing that secondhand information, no matter how compelling or pervasive, never constitutes sufficient grounds for knowledge. According to these thinkers, we can only claim to know something if we ourselves have directly observed or experienced it.

Thinking for oneself is, beyond a doubt, a laudable goal. But there are three problems with the idea that it is a good way to ward off error. The first is that the glorification of independent thought can easily become a refuge for holders of utterly oddball beliefs. You can dismiss any quantity of informed and intelligent adversaries if you choose to regard them as victims of a collective, crowd-driven madness, while casting yourself as the lone voice of truth. The second problem is that (as we have seen), our own direct observations and experiences are not necessarily more trustworthy than secondhand knowledge. If Captain Robert Bartlett, the man who spotted the glaciers