Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected “scientific” establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.

Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge-we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

For most professional researchers, other people's ideas are like other people's children.