Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

SCRIBBLERS ARE DISPROPORTIONATELY INFLUENTIAL

If you think we ‘scribblers’ – particularly those of us you can’t understand – have no impact on reality, then you don’t know much about intellectual history. Everything you think about outside of your direct, physical experience, was put there by some ‘scribbler’. And in every era, there were legions who, like you, dismissed some scribbler, only to have his or her grandchildren live in a world created by his scribblings.

You are neither able to introspectively observe the function of your mind, nor judge the content of the theories residing there, nor predict the potential of new explanatory powers provided by new theories that may replace them.

The market for the utility of ideas determines what survives.

—-

(reference to the original:)

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”― John Maynard Keynes