→ Errol Morris & Marc Hauser discuss game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people
So I think you’ve now hit on a true fact about human nature, which is that scientists are always trying to come up with experiments that can account for some significant proportion of variation. Unfortunately along the way we often have a tendency to think we’re explaining more of the variation. What I often find happens—and it’s happening right here, right now!—is that often when an account of some type of human behavior is brought forth to people not in the sciences, they’ll come back and say but here’s an example of where that doesn’t work. And that’s not playing the game quite fairly because the sciences are never going to give a complete explanation of every aspect of human behavior.
