Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

 

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

 

Kurt Vonnegut

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Conservatives feel instinctively that it is new ideas more than anything else that cause change. But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

Subject to a kind of disease, which at that time they called lack of money.

 

Francois Rabelais

 

There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in degree in different men ... I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind ... more clever and more learned than it is ... I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person ... They ... express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other sciences about which they know nothing ... If met with applause ... so does the disease itself become aggravated.

 

Maimonides

 

But by and by, the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang, that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.

 

Henry Howard

 

We do not live in a world that mainly suffers bad policies due to lack of ideas about better ones, or lack of elegant explanations supporting good policies, but one that suffers bad policies due to system and meta-system level incentives.

 

Patri Friedman