Economists Lose Credibility When They're Too Certain

Every society runs on trust. This is even more true of complex, scientific modern societies than it is of tiny hunter-gatherer bands. Whenever you drive over a bridge, you trust that the engineers who designed based it on sound principles. When you take an antibiotic, you trust that the doctor who prescribed it did so for sound medical reasons. There are a million ways in which we trust the unseen expertise of people we’ve never met.

Science, too, relies crucially on trust. Physicists dutifully use the accepted value for the mass of the electron or Planck’s constant in their calculations, without ever bothering to set up new experiments to check these values themselves. Drug researchers trust the molecular structures they read about in chemistry papers. If scientists didn’t trust each other, science couldn’t function at all.