On Intellectual Humility
I'm currently working on a longer piece for my main blog. Here, I want to present a few key ideas and arguments and possibly gather some feedback.
The central thesis of the article is that everybody should only hold a very limited number of opinions and convictions, which should be hard-earned and thoroughly thought-through1. It's basically a long counter-argument against the popular notion to have "strong opinions, loosely held".
Here are a few arguments and considerations:
You're basically always wrong
The world is, to put it mildly, a very complex place. Not only do we need scientists to constantly improve our knowledge about the world; what's more: most scientists are forced to specialize into a niche sub-domain of their field because there is so much to know, and because the details matter.
For that reason alone, any layman's idea of how the world works is almost guaranteed to be wrong. Whenever you make a factual claim about nature, chances are you are mostly incorrect.
When you think you know stuff, you probably don't
In their famous scientific paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It" (2000), David Dunning and Justin Kruger described — actually as a side note to their main focus of the study, meta-cognition — the human tendency to drastically overestimate the scope and accuracy of their own knowledge in domains in which they had little to no expertise.
Another effect they discovered that got not nearly as much attention: Real experts who actually know a lot about any given topic systematically underestimate their expertise.
In other words: Whenever you feel like you really know what you're talking about, there's a good chance you don't. More likely, you're standing on the proverbial peak of "Mount Stupid": You learned just enough about the topic to gain a false sense of security, but you actually lack the knowledge to tell the difference between what sounds plausible and what is likely true. At that point, you are probably only a few more articles, lectures or books away from falling into the "valley of despair"2 that awaits everyone who really wants to become an expert.
"Strong opinions, loosely held" is a recipe for a misinformed society
Apart from such epistemological considerations, there are psychological factors in play that should keep us all from making bold claims in public that we probably cannot defend when faced with scepticism.
One such factor is the Confidence Heuristic: the human tendency to mistake self-confidence with actual competence. Another of those factors is the Illusory Truth Effect, which describes our disposition to accepts repeated claims as true, even after they have been debunked.
In any society full of humans with such faulty truth-seeking faculties — which is all of us —, a low threshhold for making bold claims is not a healthy strategy. It's basically a sure-fire way to spread half-truths, disinformation and misinformation way faster then experts or AI fact checkers could correct for.
What I suggest instead is what I call "Conviction Minimalism"3: Our ontological default position should be to be very quick to say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have a strong opinion on that", unless one actually worked extensively on learning a lot about the subject in question and is confident in his/her position — ideally after having traversed the valley of despair.
In a future article, I will write more about what I mean by "conviction minimalism".
Footnotes
Sometimes, I just love the English language ^^↩
What that usually means is that on your way to real expertise, you are very likely to confront a phase where you have many more questions than answers, and every new answer seems to come with a bunch of new questions. Basically, you feel like you will never get to a place where you actually know what you are talking about.↩
Thinkers like Sam Harris have used terms like "intellectual honesty" to describe a very similar idea. I prefer "intellectual humility".↩