Thursday, July 28, 2011
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
On Theory and Wisdom -- Irving Kristol
I'm reading Irving Kristol's "On the Political Stupidity of the Jews" again and came across a little gem I wanted to bookmark. Speaking about how Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were able to reconcile their ideas, Kristol writes:
"They managed it by being sensible and non-dogmatic, and by understanding that ideas that are incompatible in the abstract can often coexist and complement one another in practice, so long as the imperial sweep of these grand theories is limited by political wisdom, which is itself distilled from popular common sense. In a way, this is the most conservative of all ideas, that there is such a thing as wisdom and that, in the end, it is of greater importance in determining good policy than any theory. It is this idea which, more than any other, is in need of affirmation in our time. We live in an age when wisdom is suspect in the eyes of what can only be understood as an overweening rationalism, and when what works in practice is inevitably regarded with suspicion until it is proved in theory."
I'll remember this next time someone tells me something "theoretical" that simply does not make any sense.
And what does this "most conservative of all ideas" idea spell out for theories of rationality, rife with their own rationalist excesses?
David
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"They managed it by being sensible and non-dogmatic, and by understanding that ideas that are incompatible in the abstract can often coexist and complement one another in practice, so long as the imperial sweep of these grand theories is limited by political wisdom, which is itself distilled from popular common sense. In a way, this is the most conservative of all ideas, that there is such a thing as wisdom and that, in the end, it is of greater importance in determining good policy than any theory. It is this idea which, more than any other, is in need of affirmation in our time. We live in an age when wisdom is suspect in the eyes of what can only be understood as an overweening rationalism, and when what works in practice is inevitably regarded with suspicion until it is proved in theory."
I'll remember this next time someone tells me something "theoretical" that simply does not make any sense.
And what does this "most conservative of all ideas" idea spell out for theories of rationality, rife with their own rationalist excesses?
David
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Sunday, January 31, 2010
Chain-reaction Disaster
A recent interview with the Montreal Gazette on the economic costs of terrorism. Actually the parts where Baruch Fischhoff and I are quoted have more to do (unsurprisingly) with risk communication issues.
David
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Thursday, July 9, 2009
McNamara dies at 93
NYT on McNamara. Interesting points made about intelligence; e.g., how human judgment played a role in the misreading of sigint about American warships being attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964.
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