A perhaps-apocryphal story has it that Bertrand Russell, a brilliant atheist provocateur of yesteryear, was lecturing on the structure of the cosmos—how our planet orbits our sun which, in turn, orbits the center of our galaxy which, in turn . . . After he finished, a little old lady declared: “What you have told us, Sir, is rubbish. The world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” Russell condescended a reply: “Well, Madam, what is the tortoise standing on?” To which the lady delivered her fatal riposte: “You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But I am afraid it’s turtles all the way down!”

Our claims to knowledge are far more precarious than we can normally stand to admit—and, on close inspection, often rest on faith in experts who have banked their faith in other experts who . . .

 

Philip E. Tetlock is the Mitchell Endowed Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton University Press, 2005)

Image: Essay Types: Book Review