this video is sponsored by the book summary app blinkist use the link in the description to receive one free week and 25 off a premium membership so much of what we believe we know is based on what we have been told you believe you know how time works how other people think and feel what the events of human history were what's inside your body and how it works where the earth is and how it moves what the universe is and what particles comprise it and so on unless you are an expert in any of these
areas and likely even still your knowledge of these sorts of things is based not on direct observation but on what you have been told by other people what has been explained to you through reason when ideas and beliefs are not readily testable within the purview of our expertise or individual abilities we reasonably turn to authority figures as a means of forming understanding and defending them but how trustworthy is what we've been told how trustworthy are we in properly selecting who and what we listen to and how trustworthy is reason in general throughout human history primarily
in the realm of ideas and beliefs but still often in the realm of tangible and practical issues one of the few rare truths that seems to have endured is the fact that we are consistently very wrong the authority figures and experts who line human history individuals who had the credibility and respect of their time are now mostly seen and described as smart for their time what else is this notion smart for their time if not a premonition of the ignorance of our own in an effort to choose good authority figures and experts we likely consider
and listen to individuals with good track records after all the more often someone has been correct and validated by culture about a particular subject matter the more likely they will continue to be but if we consider their track record as a member of humanity not limited to the course of their individual lifetime but considered against the course of humanity's lifetime their track record like everyone else's is almost certainly destined to be a losing one in peru in the middle of the 1400s there was what is believed to be the largest known child sacrifice in the
world with about 140 children and more than 200 animals killed the reason attempting to appease the gods in response to unusually bad weather in europe in the 17th century just a few hundred years ago it was widely believed that the earth was the center of the universe and everything else revolved around it when the now famous astronomer galileo galilei published work that showed that instead the sun was the center of the universe and the earth revolved around the sun which we of course now know the latter to be true the roman inquisition banned his work
and the arguments he put forth and eventually tried and found galileo vehemently suspect of heresy others who came before and around his time with similar now believed to be true ideas were even put to death in the late 19th century little more than a hundred years ago doctors used what are now schedule 1 narcotics to treat cold symptoms in children also around this time doctors believed it was foolish to wash their hands before delivering babies or during other medical procedures only 80 years ago it was believed that cigarettes posed no health dangers still to this
day and thousands of years back across the globe humans have believed and still believe that the trade of other humans for the non-consensual exploitation of their labor is morally permissible and the list goes on forward and back this earth is not merely a cemetery of people that once were but also a cemetery of ideas and beliefs once held to be true but are no longer to perhaps help illuminate how problems within human reasoning and argumentation can arise consider the following syllogism one flowers are beautiful two a lilac is a flower three therefore lilacs are beautiful
the reasoning in this example is valid and so the conclusion also appears to be valid but it is not the premise begs the question it postulates a conclusion that is not sufficiently argued for and cannot be sufficiently argued for in objective terms although it is very common to think that flowers are beautiful whether or not all flowers are beautiful is subjective it is a belief that cannot be proven or disproven and so this syllogism is fallacious and it always will be and yet it sounds very reasonable arguably the realm of philosophy politics morality sociology spirituality
and meaning in general areas in which we cannot fully prove or disprove things because they cannot be tested at sufficient scale we cannot reach inaccessible information needed and we cannot know of all the possible consequences or alternatives these realms are seemingly fields filled with these sorts of problems most if not all ideas and arguments in these realms are and must be based on some sort of subjective presumptions based off personal experience and vantage points of the world not rigid objective knowledge and thus notions of what is right and wrong good and bad best and worst
like flowers being beautiful or styles and dialects being in fashion these things can change as the zeitgeist of culture changes through time and space in their book the enigma of reason cognitive scientists hugo mercier and dan sperber hypothesized that the ability to reason evolved in humans not to make better decisions or be more accurate about facts but to socialize better to better provide explanations to others about who we are what we do and why we do what we do in order to improve social standing and social cohesion and so reason in this framework works as
a way of making intuitions and ideas the most shareable and defendable not necessarily the best or most objective mercier and are right reason improves our social standing rather than leading us to intrinsically better decisions and even when it leads us to better decisions it's mostly because we happen to be in a community that favors the right type of decisions on the issue but there is a potential for tension between the lazy justification provided by socially recognized good reasons and an individual effort to better understand and evaluate these reasons to acquire some expertise oneself upon birth
we were all given a body a mind a genetic makeup a pair of parents present or not and a collection of circumstances we did not choose any of these things but fairly soon these factors fan out and develop into our world view this worldview influences us to choose and believe things which we then associate with our identity from here however we often wield reason not as a method of moving toward truth and out of the default beliefs disposed onto us but rather a method of defending and proving these beliefs we attempt to prove that what
we have come to find ourselves believing was arrived at fairly intellectually and rationally that the flowers must be beautiful objectively the world is far more complicated unclear and unknown than most of us admit let alone know there are perceptual tricks psychological motivators and logical fallacies that drench our minds and spew out of our mouths it is unclear if we are ever right in any real sense at all let alone as often as we think no one knows the unforeseeable consequences of things and no one knows the unknowable the untestable or the unprovable and so a
blaringly obvious question that emerges is why do so many people act as if they do moreover why are so many people who act as if they do in important positions in the world why do we simultaneously act like and trust others that act like we are not a species who has historically always been wrong about nearly everything still wielding the same dull weapons of mind and reason of course this is not to say that nothing can be true in physical terms that nothing can be improved or made more accurate through the scientific method and that
we can arrive at mutually useful subjective truths that have immense social value ultimately there's nothing wrong with having opinions and beliefs and there's nothing wrong with arguing for and defending those opinions and beliefs but if there is not some large base of skepticism wedged at the bottom of them the same sort of skepticism we likely apply to others when we listen to their beliefs and opinions we have assumed the following we are somehow special that our rationality is somehow always superior in all these cases with all these other people that we do not possess the
same propensity toward the erroneous nature of presumptions of biases and to faulty reasoning that everyone we disagree with does what is more likely we and the people who agree with us are the only rational and right ones in history or we just like everyone else are probably wrong in at least some sense the history of humanity is a series of failures on a seemingly never-ending path toward unattainable absolute truth we are no different we are each infinitesimal appendages attached to this body of ignorance stricken by our own ignorance and limited to where we reside on
this body arguably the best way to be the most right the most often is to assume that you are probably always some amount wrong after all if reason is potentially a tool evolved out of the need to better socialize then perhaps we can and should if we agree use our reasoning to reduce the intensity with which we wield reason in other words perhaps we should use reason to realize the limits of reason to realize that the plights of us are in others and the ignorance of others is in us to realize that we should try
to be right less and curious more and finally to realize that the prerequisite of the powers of reasoning is the responsibility of empathy compassion and humility [Music] this video was sponsored by blinkist perhaps one of the most important but difficult parts of learning is engaging in a wide range of topics and books that oppose our default views investing many hours into a book that argues for things you don't necessarily agree with can understandably be somewhat unappealing because of this however many of us can find ourselves in increasingly isolated echo chambers of ideas and beliefs but
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