Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [69]
The last and most significant problem with the idea that we should always think for ourselves is that, bluntly put, we can’t. Every one of us is profoundly dependent on other people’s minds—so profoundly that if we took seriously the charge to think for ourselves, we would have to relinquish our faith in the vast majority of the things we think we know. In his Confessions, Augustine wrote that,
I began to realize that I believed countless things which I had never seen or which had taken place when I was not there to see—so many events in the history of the world, so many facts about places and towns which I had never seen, and so much that I believed on the word of friends or doctors or various other people. Unless we took these things on trust, we should accomplish absolutely nothing in this life.
And that, mind you, was 1,600 years ago, before the mad proliferation of data and ideas that began in the Age of Exploration, sped up during the Industrial Revolution, and hit warp speed with the advent of modern information technology. Today, each of us takes vast quantities of information on faith, in ways both ancient and new. That’s what we’re doing every time we read a newspaper, board an airplane, look something up on Wikipedia, vaccinate our children (or don’t), and assume that our parents really are our parents (which, as Augustine went on to note, is the consummate example of a fact that most of us take for granted yet none of us know firsthand).
Even specialists and experts rely on other people’s knowledge constantly—far more than you might imagine, and possibly enough to make you nervous. My sister-in-law, for instance, recently had the experience of watching her doctor Google the correct dosage of a medicine she was about to prescribe. Or take the example of Leonard Susskind, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and one of the founders of string theory. All of that makes him about as expert as you can get in the domain of science, yet here he is on one of its fundamental principles: “If I were to flip a coin a million times, I’d be damn sure I wasn’t going to get all heads,” he once wrote. “I’m not a betting man, but I’d be so sure that I’d bet my life or my soul on it…. I’m absolutely certain that the laws of large numbers—probability theory—will work and protect me. All of science is based on it.” And yet, he concluded, “I can’t prove it, and I don’t really know why it works.”
In other words, one of the world’s leading scientists is obliged to take on faith one of the most basic precepts of his own field. Presumably, Susskind is even more at sea when it comes to matters outside his domain—whether salty foods really increase your blood pressure, say, or whether turnips really grow best in loamy soil. And what’s true for him is true for all of us. The vast majority of our beliefs are really beliefs once removed. Our faith that we are right is faith that someone else is right.
This reliance on other people’s knowledge—those around us as well as those who came before us—is, on balance, a very good thing. Life is short, and most of us don’t want to spend any more of it than absolutely necessary trying to independently verify the facts about turnips. Relying on other people to do that work buys us all a lot of time. It also buys us, in essence, many billions of prosthetic brains. Thanks to other people’s knowledge, I know a bit about what Thomas Jefferson was like in person, how it feels to climb Mount Everest, and what kind of creatures live in the depths of the Mariana Trench. Depending on secondhand information makes our lives both much more efficient and much more interesting than they would otherwise be.
That said, this dependence raises an important question about the nature of belief. The world around us positively bristles with