Blub

[memegarden]

Followup on the Piraha and relative innumeracy

Comments

[qijm]

That would be true, for example, if most of the damage is due to bad social decisions (whether explicit public policy mistakes, or implicit market outcomes), which any one individual has little control over. As a result, if you invest in better understanding, you may just wind up writing whiny weblog entries about what's wrong with bestselling books and dominant software-engineering practices.

This concept comes up a lot in public choice theory subdiscipline of economics under the name "rational ignorance". It is both obvious in retrospect (which speaks to its power, not against its usefulness) and depressing.

[memegarden]

In essence, "since I can't do anything about it, I'm better off not knowing".

[qijm]

Yep. Scary.