Day: April 8, 2026

Thanks to our bounded rationality and imperfect knowledge, it is certain that we are more likely to be wrong than right about many important issues. Fortunately we have the capacity and the motive to learn. Moreover we have an inexhaustible and nearly costless source of information for us to learn from. Therefore if we are willing to put in the effort, we can be less wrong about important matters.

I know that I am less wrong now than I was a few decades ago. I used to think that the world was in deep trouble because of the population problem: there were simply too many people and since resources were limited, it stood to reason that poverty was likely to persist—and indeed increase—as humanity due to its fecundity exhausted those limited resources.

I found India’s poverty in the 1980s and ’90s particularly distressing since I had seen it firsthand. I believed that India’s deep and persistent poverty was primarily because of its unsustainably large population. It was clear to me that poverty was an arithmetic problem: per capita resource availability. Only by reducing the denominator would the ratio improve since (it seemed to me) there was no way to dramatically increase the numerator which was by definition fixed. Continue reading “Learning to be Less Wrong”