When ignorance feels like expertise. The confident idiots we are.

Yes, that is the story of me as a faculty in the classroom.

Come to think of it, that is the story of my life.

I suppose if I were to ever write an autobiography (as if I have not shared enough of my life in this blog!) the title of that book will be "A Confident Idiot."  Hey, what are you sniggering at?

Perhaps you are chuckling at how freely I admit to my idiocy.  That, dear reader, is one of the greatest benefits of aging, unlike the pretensions that I had to stage-manage when I was younger.

Turns out that whether we are young or old, we are all confident idiots, writes a Cornell University professor:

For more than 20 years, I have researched people’s understanding of their own expertise—formally known as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning—and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull.
The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance.

Recall that profound adage about wisdom: not knowing that we don't know is not the mark of a wise one.  To understand deep down that we know very little and that we know that we don't know is one heck of a strong position.  Well, unless you want to be a politician!

Of course, we will assume that the Cornell professor, David Dunning, knows what he is writing about ;)

[In] many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

That's right--the ones who are incompetent are blessed with inappropriate confidence.  Go figure!  No wonder then that politicians are damn confident people ;)

But, hold your laughter:

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.

Recall that profound adage about why people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?  You and I are in our own little glass houses, too!

To quite an extent, it is all because that is how we are wired; the brain is awesome, but that brain is also why we become confident idiots:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)

Thus,

people rely on the cognitive clutter in their minds—whether it’s an ideological reflex, a misapplied theory, or a cradle-born intuition—to answer technical, political, and social questions they have little or no direct expertise in.

Harry Frankfurt had a much simpler way to describe all this: we bullshit!  Frankfurt noted that the ability to bullshit, and the inclination to do so, does not decrease with education but actually increases with it--because of all the new skills we picked up to articulate ideas about which we don't know a damn thing.  While Frankfurt reached that via philosophy, the Cornell professor approaches it via psychology.

So, any suggestions?

For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.

Aha, that is no different from what I tell students all the time.  Phew, good to know that I have not been a confident idiot in advocating that method! ;)

The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. As such, wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth.

Exactly.  If you don't know, be confident and bold when you say "I don't know."  But then try to know as well.

Source: The New Yorker, of course!