Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on September 2, 2020
… is from pages 74-75 of Russ Roberts’s ingenious and moving 2014 book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life:
Being aware of reason’s limits doesn’t mean being anti-reason or superstitious or irrational even anti-science. Nassim Taleb points out that a map is very helpful for getting around Paris. But not if the map you’re using is a map of New York. Using the wrong map unknowingly is worse than no map at all – it leads you to overconfidence that can be more harmful than confronting the reality that you’re lost.
Scientists are human beings with their own limitations. Sometimes even the best quantitative analysis is worse than none at all because it gives the illusion of science, what Hayek called scientism.
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