The incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence

"I alone can fix it," he said.  And 63 million adults applauded and made him the leader.

He described himself as a "stable genius" and his supporters were thrilled with his reptilian cunning.

He is no physician, and yet he freely advises people, including experts, on what they should do.  During these COVID-19 times, he is practicing what he campaigned on--that he alone can fix it.

We have always known about confident idiots like him.  I blogged about the Dunning-Kruger effect more than 5 years ago--in November 2014.

[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.

"I alone can fix it."

Confident idiots spew bullshit all the time.

It is not an accident that I was drawn to Harry Franfurt's On Bullshit as soon as the tiny book was published.  Which is also why I loved Montaigne's Que sais-je?  Which is also why I developed a course that I offered only once, on intellectual humility.

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

But, 63 million loved the man who claimed to know it all!  And now we are all paying the price for his ignorance and incompetence.

I could be wrong, ... but ...

To a large extent, I felt  smacked around into being intellectually humble when I started graduate school. I was amazed at how much had already been said and written about, and I became convinced that I had nothing to offer.  What the heck could I think about that the great minds had not already thought about?

I was an easy convert to "I don't know a damn thing!"

I became convinced, very easily, that my work would not be about uncovering anything dramatic.  No patent or copyrights.  My intellectual ego was quickly deflated.

In addition, I also became suspicious of people who came across as intellectually arrogant, as if they knew it all.  I started staying away from them.

When I started teaching, this understanding that we know very little is one that I have tried to get across to students without making that explicit all the time.  The subversive that I am, it has been mostly an implicit message.  Sometimes, through humor--like joking that the genius Einstein had no idea how to communicate in Tamil when even a three-year old kid in Tamil Nadu can do that ;)

Intellectual humility has always fascinated me.  I have even blogged about that here.  Like this one in 2012.  Or, like when I quoted Montaigne: Que sais-je?

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

Had I known about Benjamin Franklin's approach, I would have adopted that too: "whenever he was about to make an argument, he would open with something along the lines of, “I could be wrong, but…”

I offered that seminar in 2016 and, therefore, had no idea about this systematic attempt to understand intellectual humility:

in 2016, professors from Pepperdine University broke the concept of intellectual humility down into four components and published an assessment to measure them:

1. Having respect for other viewpoints
2. Not being intellectually overconfident
3. Separating one’s ego from one’s intellect
4. Willingness to revise one’s own viewpoint

An intellectually humble person will score high on all of these counts.

I am not sure whether boasting that I will score highly on these will be intellectually humble ;)

The author notes that "certain activities generally correlate with higher intellectual humility across the board":

Traveling a lot — or, even better, living for extended periods in foreign cultures — tends to make us more willing to revise our viewpoints. After all, if we know that it is perfectly valid to live a different way than we do, it makes sense that our brains would be better at accepting new approaches to problems at work. This aligns with recent research on the neuroscience of how storytelling helps us build empathy for other people. (Read neuroeconomist Paul Zak’s HBR article on this fascinating subject here.) Fiction readers tend to score higher in intellectual humility, perhaps because their brains are a little bit better trained to seek out stories that vary from their own, and see characters’ experiences and opinions as potentially valid. Preliminary research is also showing us that practicing mindfulness meditation, learning about the ins and outs of your own ego using a framework like the Enneagram, and learning about Moral Foundations Theory through programs like Open Mind Platform can each help us operate with more intellectual humility.

Readers of this blog, or the rare person who has paid attention to my remarks in the classes, will notice that these activities are also the activities that I talk up and practice.

I cannot understand how one could be anything but intellectually humble.  But then, to use Franklin's wise words, I could be wrong ;)