DarkHorse Podcast: Episode 14 - Virus Derangement Syndrome
- Veröffentlicht am: 12.05.2020
- Beteiligte: Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying
- Themen: Fehlerkultur; Lügen; Humor; Sozial-Bindung; Befähigung zum rationalen, klaren Denken; Umgang mit Unsicherheit;
Transkript
[As a professor being asked by students for "live advice":] Don't even consider marrying anybody who doesn't have a sense of humor about themselves. They're just not marriage material - which [...] is a upsetting problem because there are a lot of people in that category and it's sad to think that they may not be appropiate for a relationship.
[...]
One thing you can tell very frequently what kind of person someone is, based on how they deal with the discovery that they have been incorrect.
One thing you can do is: you can rationalize and sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn't happen - now you're wrong twice! Not only were you wrong the first time but your claim to have always been in the position you now hold is also wrong.
That is not a indication of character.
[...]
I would very much like to be right. I don't like dicovering that I'm wrong and doing it in front of a large audience is very difficult, but the point is: Wow, is it a better deal than sticking with some wrong position, so it's not to admit that you made an error - which is of course human.
It's hard [...]. When do you say: [a)] I'm putting my internal estimation at 95% on this thing and I'm go ahead and say it without the „errorbars built in“ and then maybe it's that one in 20 times that I was wrong, you do have to come back and fix it.
Or [b)] you speak in terms of uncertainties and probabilities and more often then not not numbers explicitly but implicit numerical thinking, quantitative thinking: that drives a lot of people crazy!
Not just because our educational system is so bad, that most people who should completely be able to understand some quantitative thinking actually can't - through no fault of their own (often).
But it also doesn't fit with a landscape of „buy-it-now! get your answer! be on your way, have the thing in your back pocket, that you have to say when someone asks you a question and don't think about it ever again.“
There is no „set and forget“ over in scientific discovery space. You can't do it that way.