Frogs aren’t celebrated for their intelligence, but it still deserves a mention that they’ll starve to death beside a bowl of dead flies. To them, only fast-moving dark spots are food.
Rats have enough math to find that snacks are in every third box. But they won’t figure the snacks are in boxes 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7. In their universe, there’s no such thing as a prime number.
If we’ve similar limits to our own knowledge, what we call ‘truth’ is actually something else. As arguments rage, in playgrounds, boardrooms, households, and between tribes and nations, there’s news for all sides: you’re probably wrong. The default condition of knowledge is error. The evolutionary patch keeping us alive is not truthy intuition, but our ability to debug mistakes before they kill us.
For all our instincts on the role of community in survival, this is one where it falters. Put a dozen smart people around a table and they will volunteer to be stupider together than they are alone. The 1986 Challenger launch decision used to be the textbook example: valid concerns were voiced, suppressed, and ultimately overridden, because the room prized unanimity over accuracy. Now it’s Covid.
While social commentators lament a consensus crisis, hedge funds like Bridgewater institute guardrails against it. NASA does, now. There’s neither virtue nor utility in the pursuit of consensus on a chimeric truth. But error is trackable prey. We can have cohesion without consensus if we hunt it together.
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