Being wrong

(Note to Alice and others like her: While this may initially seem to be a post about politics and the internet, I promise that if you keep reading you’ll see I’m actually making a wider, hopefully less boring point).

Recently I’ve been reading up on Labor’s broadband proposal. My gut feeling was that any half-decent proposal to roll out ‘true’ broadband infrastructure is better than doing nothing (the Libs), while doing nothing is way better than handing it all to an evil, evil monopoly (Telstra). But, not knowing much of the detail of Labor’s plan, I’ve been doing the rounds on the internet (which is, rather ironically, shaped to 64kb at our work at the moment) to try and find out more.

One of my first ports of call was Joshua Gans’ blog. He’s an economist for the people, and has written some very sensible stuff about the economic impact of copyright reform, as well as creating the iTunes index. You could say I highly respect his opinion or, put another way, I think he is a ‘dude’ while concurrently he could lay claim to being ‘the shit’.

So I was somewhat perplexed to see that he’s… not really all that enthused about Labor’s plan. In fact, he doesn’t seem convinced that Australia needs better broadband at all. The limbs of Gans’ argument with which I most violently disagree are:

1) We’re so far behind most other economically developed nations in terms of broadband speed that it’s futile to even attempt to catch up.
2) Australians don’t need faster broadband to be economically competitive. Fast broadband is a luxury, used only by the rich for entertainment, so the Government shouldn’t subsidise its establishment.

On a personal level, this makes me feel extremely uneasy. What’s happening here is that Joshua Gans, someone whose opinion I respect, who ‘gets it’, and who has a great deal more knowledge and insight into the relevant subject than I do, has put forward an opinion I think is rubbish. Clearly, we can’t both be right. Either I’m wrong or he is.

On the one hand, I tend to believe that the opinion I hold is the correct one – otherwise it wouldn’t be my opinion. But objectively, I know that all other things being equal, in matters of economics Joshua Gans’ opinion is more likely to be valid than mine. Cause, y’know, it’s what he’s trained to do, it’s what he does, and I think he’s pretty good at it.

The immediate effect of all this is that I’ve come to doubt my judgement about the issue. I keep asking myself, what am I not understanding about this? But what really sucks is that no matter the outcome, I’ve made an error of judgement. Either I’m wrong about the need for fast broadband, or I was wrong in thinking that Joshua Gans was a switched on guy.

Have you guys ever had a similar experience? Has someone whose opinion you really respected ever come out with a view you totally opposed?


PS: Apparently the humble blog is dying. Perhaps that’s why no one’s been contributing lately…