【金句】Thomas Sowell - Many intellectuals are so preoccupied with the notion that their own special...

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• 來源2 - www.goodreads.com/qu...

Many intellectuals are so preoccupied with the notion that their own special knowledge exceeds the average special knowledge of millions of other people that they overlook the often far more consequential fact that their mundane knowledge is not even one-tenth of the total mundane knowledge of those millions. However, to many among the intelligentsia, transferring decisions from the masses to people like themselves is transferring decisions from where there is less knowledge to where there is more knowledge. That is the fatal fallacy behind much that is said and done by intellectuals, including the repeated failures of central planning and other forms of social engineering which concentrate power in the hands of people with less total knowledge but more presumptions, based on their greater average knowledge of a special kind.

許多知識分子如此著迷於「他們自己獨有的特別知識超出數百萬其他人的平均特別知識」的看法，以至於他們忽略了經常更重要的事實：他們的常識甚至不到那些數百萬人總常識的十分之一。然而，對許多知識分子來說，將決定權從群眾轉移到像他們這樣的人手上，就是將決定權從知識較少的地方轉移到知識較多的地方。這是知識分子說話和行事背後的致命錯誤，包括中央計劃和其他形式的社會工程的多次失敗，這些失敗將權力集中在常識總量較少但假定較多的人手上，基於他們對某種特殊知識的平均了解較多。