What Tradition Knows

Bryan portrays himself as an intellectual elitist, but he has an oddly unflattering portrait of the elite.  When it comes to the dreamworld of political debate, elites are relatively rational but that is exactly the sphere in which individuals are least decisive over actual outcomes.  When it comes to the really big, important decisions, such as how many kids to have, individuals in the elite are highly decisive in steering outcomes yet quite irrational.  They underappreciate the joy of kids.

That is Tyler.  This seems a plausible example of where thinking goes wrong, i.e., where those who think less tend to make better decisions by following tradition and intuition, and those who rely more on explicit reasoning often take many decades to realize their mistake.  What are the clearest other examples of this, and what features do such examples have in common?  Ideally, we’d use these features to construct a coherent argument to warn young excess thinkers away from their most common mistakes.

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