How bad theories kill

Thomas Sowell looks at some examples of how a bad theory can kill you.

The disappearance of an American teenager in Aruba has been more than a tragedy for her and for her family. It is the latest of many tragedies to strike trusting people who have long been sheltered from dangers and who have acted as if there were no dangers.

Reality: there are dangerous places in the world, peopled by dangerous people who don't care about your civilized sensibilities. Theory: the world is safe.

Theory works fine, as long as you stay in certain regions of the globe. If you wander into one of these areas where the theory doesn't match reality, you can get in serious trouble.

It looks like someone did.

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Not only individuals but whole nations have lost their sense of danger after having been protected from those dangers.

Sowell cites polio, cases of which decreased sharply after a vaccine was developed. When people theorized that polio had been eliminated, they quit taking the vaccine, and cases increased. And this fallacy, the belief that because a danger never (or rarely) manifests, it must be inherently rare, shows up in lots of places.

The kind of thinking involved in the polio fallacy has appeared in many other contexts. When some public disorder gets underway and a massive arrival of police on the scene brings everything under control immediately, many in the media and in politics deplore such "over-reaction" on the part of the police to a minor disturbance. It never occurs to such people that it was precisely the arrival of huge numbers of cops on the scene that brought the disturbance to a screeching halt without having to use force.

And so we get to a current issue:

The latest version of the polio fallacy is the demonizing of the Patriot Act. Some people are yelling louder than ever that they have been silenced, that we have had our freedom destroyed, all as a result of the Patriot Act.

Santayana once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Do you want to be in the vicinity of the slow learners?