What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us

My coauthor sent me article yesterday which does a very good job of giving a real-world example of a couple of the principals we discuss in our book. In the article Daniel Klein, an economics professor at George Mason and a self-proclaimed libertarian, describes how he boldly penned an extremely controversial Wall St Journal op-ed piece based on some research he had done–only to have to retract everything he said a few months later when it became clear that he was flat-out wrong.

The...