The Romance of Self-Correction
There is a certain elegance to the idea that society heals itself.
Left alone, the story goes, systems of knowledge correct their own errors. Critics arise. Competing institutions challenge one another. Markets punish falsehood. Networks of independent thinkers quietly converge on better explanations.
No central architect is required. The process is organic....
The strongest version of this narrative is its insistence that truth is not a passive outcome of societal evolution but an active achievement. It rightly highlights the historical struggles behind institutions like peer review and investigative journalism, which were not inevitable but hard-won. The argument effectively dismantles the myth of spontaneous self-correction by showing how errors persist without deliberate intervention. This is a necessary corrective to naive optimism about systemic ...