把事物社会化会毁掉它的真实Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It
Naval：让一件事变得社会化会毁掉它的真理性，因为社会群体需要共识才能生存——否则他们会争斗不休、无法相处——而共识的本质是妥协，不是追求真理。
科学——至少是自然科学——曾是这样一个独特的学科：可以有一个个体代表社会其他人去追求真理。其他个体验证他确实拥有当前对现实运作方式的最佳模型，然后这个模型就可以通过发明传播到社会的其他角落。
但社会科学是溜进学术界并反客为主的病毒。社会科学已经完全腐化了。
首先，它们需要向社会争取资助，因此带有政治动机。其次，它们自身也受到社会的影响，因为其研究和模型被用来推动政策。所以，它们最终也难免腐化。如今，连自然科学也受到社会科学的攻击，变得越来越社会化。
你看到的群体思维越多，离真理就越远。你完全可以拥有一个和谐的社会，同时允许社会中的求真者去发现真理，找到改变和改善整个群体现实的方法。
纵观历史，大多数科学突破并非来自科研机构。那些重大的突破来自独立的自然哲学家个体——他们是独立的思想家，在世时遭人诋毁，常常受到迫害，凭着自己的真理与整个社会对抗。往往要经过几十年甚至几百年——常常是在他们去世之后——这些真理才被接受。
许多这类学术理论实际上既经不起重复验证——看看心理学领域发生的事就知道了——甚至经不起现实的检验。
罗里·萨瑟兰（Rory Sutherland）有一句很精彩的话，大意是："市场营销是一门知道经济学家哪里搞错了的学问。"经济学家假设人们的行为完全理性，但人类显然是有血有肉的生物体，所以你可以利用营销钻这个空子。
纳西姆·塔勒布（Nassim Taleb）会更进一步，说他们假设的理性是虚假的。人类会把覆灭的风险、归零的风险计入考量，而学者们在遍历性推理上犯了错误。他们假设对整体有利的，对个体也有利，但实际上并非如此。
个体不想归零——不想死——所以不会去冒覆灭的风险，也不会去冒破产的风险；而群体则应该愿意承担破产的风险，因为这个风险分摊在众多不同的人身上。
Naval: Making something social destroys the truth of it because social groups need consensus to survive—otherwise they fight and can’t get along—and consensus is all about compromise, not truth-seeking.
Science—at least the natural sciences—was this unique discipline where you could have an individual truth-seeking on behalf of the rest of society. Other individuals verify that they did, indeed, have the best current model of how reality works, and then that could be spread out through inventions to the rest of society.
But the social sciences are this virus that crept into academia and have taken over. Social sciences are completely corrupted.
First, they need to appeal to society for funding, so they are politically motivated. Then, they themselves are influenced in society because the studies and models are used to drive policy. So, of course, that ends up corrupted as well. Now even the natural sciences are under attack from the social sciences, and they’re becoming more and more socialized.
The more groupthink you see involved, the farther from the truth you actually are. You can have an harmonious society while still allowing truth seekers within the society to find truth and to find the means to alter and improve reality for the entire group.
Historically, most of the scientific breakthroughs didn’t come from scientific institutions. The big ones came from individual natural philosophers who were very independent thinkers who were reviled in their time, often persecuted, who fought against the rest of society on the basis of their truths. And it took decades or centuries—often after their deaths—before those truths were accepted.
A lot of these academic theories don’t actually stand up either to replication—if you look at what’s going on in psychology—or even to reality.
Rory Sutherland has this great quote where he said something along the lines of, “Marketing is the science of knowing what economists are wrong about.” Economists assume perfectly rational behavior, but humans are obviously wetware biological creatures, so you can hack around that using marketing.
Nassim Taleb would go even further and say that they assume false rationality. Humans are pricing in the risk of ruin, the risk of going to zero, and the academics are making mistakes about ergodic reasoning. They’re assuming that what’s good for the ensemble is good for the individual, and it’s not.
An individual doesn’t want to go to zero—doesn’t want to die—so they will not take risks of ruin and they will not take risks of bankruptcy; whereas a group should be willing to take a risk of bankruptcy because that’s spread out among so many different people.