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Even intelligent embrace bad ideas

Brilliant minds can illuminate dark spaces of our knowledge and solve incredibly complex problems. They can make the world a better place and help us do things we couldn’t do before.

An unfortunate byproduct of intellectual brilliance is that it sometimes gives too much credibility to its possessor. A genius in physics, medicine, or business does not mean an equal brilliance at every other aspect of life and society. History is full of intelligent people making huge mistakes. Arrogance can cloud judgment when they use their notoriety to pretend expertise where they have none. A person who has made a great contribution to understanding how a small portion of the world works does not automatically know the truth about everything.

When anyone, regardless of how profound their knowledge, tells us what should be, he takes off his expert’s hat and puts on his human being hat. His opinions of how human society should work are simply that: opinions. They are no more credible than anyone else’s opinions. A nuclear physicist can tell us how reactors work, but not whether a reactor should be built or where it should be placed. That involves human factors for which scientific expertise is irrelevant.

An individual’s opinions depend on the particular framework of assumptions built over a lifetime of learning and experiencing. The experience of reality is run through a filter that helps us make sense of events and fit them comfortably into the framework. That filter necessarily reflects the biases inherent in the framework. The filter excludes things that don’t fit within the preexisting framework.

Technologists, problem solvers who find clever, elegant ways to make things work better, sometimes credit themselves with much more insight into human society than they deserve. Society is not a machine that they can tweak, adjust and direct. It is, instead, an extremely complex, adaptive system that changes, often unpredictably, in reaction to inputs. That is why political programs always and everywhere have negative unexpected consequences.

Many technologists are beginning to embrace the idea of a basic income guarantee, the idea that every person should be granted a substantial amount of money by the government, regardless of how much income they earn, regardless of their contribution. It is a subsidy for being alive. Their concern is that technology will advance to the point where machines will do everything that human workers can and will put everyone out of work. That would mean that all of the wealth would accumulate in the hands of a few and the rest of the people would be left with nothing.

That central planning mentality assumes that nothing else will change, that government will have to intervene to keep the masses of people from starving. What it ignores is that everyone, including non-technologists, solve problems using the tools at hand. As technology becomes ubiquitous, it becomes less expensive, as it has done throughout history. That reduction in cost means anyone can use it to make their own improvements, to use it for their own competitive advantage, to use it to develop their own solutions to problems.

The central planners ignore that human wants, needs, and desires are unlimited. People help other people solve their problems using the less expensive tools made available by technological advances. When robots become cheap, entrepreneurs can use them to enhance their own productivity. Central planners ignore history. They ignore the negative consequences that always occur with government solutions. They ignore the separate agendas of politicians who don’t have the needs of the little guy at heart.

When smart, successful people become central planners for society, they embrace stupid ideas that always end in failure.

Dan McLaughlin, a Randolph resident, is the author of “Compassion and Truth – Why Good Intentions Don’t Equal Good Results.” Send comments to editorial @observertoday.com or follow him at daniel-mclaughlin.com

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