CONCEPT
The Conventional Wisdom
Galbraith's term for beliefs that persist not because they survive scrutiny but because they survive social acceptability — the residue of approval rather than the residue of experience.
The conventional wisdom is Galbraith's name for the cluster of beliefs a society holds not because it has tested them but because believing them carries no professional risk, challenges no funding source, and disturbs no dinner party. The phrase entered the language so completely that most people who use it have forgotten it was coined — itself a demonstration of the phenomenon. Applied to AI, the conventional wisdom runs: AI will democratize capability, flatten hierarchies, empower individuals, and create new categories of human flourishing. The script is comforting. It is also, in its broad outlines, not entirely wrong — which makes it considerably more dangerous than if it were simply false. Partly true is how a comfortable fiction survives scrutiny.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Galbraith introduced the concept in The Affluent Society (1958) as a diagnostic instrument. The conventional wisdom is not common sense. Common sense is the residue of experience. The conventional wisdom is the residue of social approval.