Alex Rosenberg on Sean Carroll's podcast #21

Rosenberg summarizes findings from his book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories. He explains why narrative history is always wrong. So often our understanding of history is based on applying theory of mind on the protagonist of history – an often faulty projection of what one think are other beliefs, motivations or desires. Stalin and Hitler were bad. Churchill and Gandhi were good. Understanding history is closer to how statisticians try to understand the economy. Or it is more like understanding weather – a mesh up of hundreds of inputs where a causal effect is really hard to pin down.