We are all confident idiots (2014)
psmag.com
psmag.com
The article acknowledges this somewhat, but it’s an example of another confidence fallacy: The idea that nobody knows what they’re talking about.
It’s a comforting fiction to tell ourselves when we find ourselves less educated on a topic than we might want to be. The disappointment of not knowing melts away when you can convince yourself that even the people who think they know what they’re talking about are just as uninformed as ourselves.
But it’s a trap. It’s the same line of reasoning that leads people to believing their own random guesses about the climate have equal footing to those of career climate scientists. Or that all political candidates are equally dumb and therefore we might as well pick the one with a personality we like the most. It’s a similar to the “death of expertise” phenomenon.
The truth is, many people do know what they’re talking about and aren’t idiots, but you won’t find them embarrassing themselves on a funny Jimmy Kimmel segment or a Trevor Noah show designed to make us laugh. For that, we need to zero in on the people who don’t know what they’re talking about and then pretend that everyone is just like them. It’s more comforting that way.
It was the opposite for me realization for . When I was young I was assuming if somebody was saying something, they were likely knowing what they were talking about.
After a bit of a ride in life, I know now that people that does do exist, but they are a rare bread, and usually about some very specific topic.
Competent people are the exception, not the rule, degraded mode is the default for humanity, and we are pretty good at going with it. At the beginning I though: what they are doing must be complicated, since it takes so much time and effort, or since there is so much debate about it. One day, you have to do it yourself, or you are behind the curtain, and you realize in 2 years anybody seriously working at it would be better that those life timers.
But still, because of the social pressure, playing pretend is the status quo for most.
Not just about jobs, not just about science, but about pretty basic things in life as well.
In fact, we are constructing a lot of our society around myths that are emerging because of this collecting behavior. It's quite fascinating to watch unfold, but it's such a waste of potential.
This is my least favorite genre of lazy content, especially when accompanied by some kind of moral that society is getting dumber.
Notwithstanding that climate models improve with time, is the percent of climate scientist guesses that have come true over the last 50 or so years - at least the "alarmist" ones, which are the ones that climate deniers take issue with - better than chance? It seems the consensus were calling for global cooling in the 70s and then warming disaster around the turn of the century, both of which didn't happen
(In the 1970s some journalists were confidently predicting disastrous cooling. Journalists gonna journalist.)
Some people have in fact looked at the question "how do historical climate-science predictions match up with reality?" and the answer is "rather well". For instance:
https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/historical-climate-models-...
"Our survey began with a literature review of every peer-reviewed reference we could find."
"The first result we found is that all of the 17 models correctly projected global warming (as opposed to either no warming or even cooling). While this is so unsurprising to climate scientists that it is not even mentioned in the paper, it may be surprising to non-experts. The second result is that most of the model projections (10 out of 17) published between 1970 and 2000 produced global average surface warming projections that were quantitatively consistent with the observed warming rate."
"To account for differences in emissions between the simulations and reality, we calculated the warming rates with respect to anthropogenic radiative forcing, the rate at which human emissions trap energy at Earth’s surface, instead of calculating them with respect to time. Using this novel metric of the warming rate, we found that the model projections were even more consistent with reality (14 out of 17 models captured this)."
Science is just as political and conformist as any other industry. "career climate scientist" is just an appeal to authority, who actually would sign praise to anyone that would pay them enough.
An academic is just a person who wants someone to give them money so that they never have to face the vagarities of real life outside of the ivory tower.
Scientists that bring in funding are therefore particularly valuable and highly sought after. However, those that bring-in extramural funding, but do not act politically correct are often quickly dispensed with. Because other donors may dislike them.
Really weird that people still put them on pedestals, but I guess "More Doctors smoke Camels."
It's just another business.
The "death of expertise" phenomenon is given a grandiloquent title to cover up what it's really about: the death of trust in academia. Experts are a much larger category of people than academics and there's no generalized crisis of confidence in e.g. plumbers, electrical engineers, advertising executives, whatever. But those people are rarely interviewed as "experts" by the media and political classes. Instead, when these people push for new social policies on the back of "expertise" it's always academics.
And that's a problem because universities don't care about quality control at all and so academic expertise is absolutely overrun with fraud, stupidity, dishonesty and pervasively low standards. The average well read intelligent person not only can beat the career scientist in many fields, but often will, simply because the distorting effects of the academic system are so large.
Looking forward to your arguments about the substance at hand in fluent Swahili.
Any ideas why? I'd love to know.
Do you have a source for this?
We Are All Confident Idiots (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131704 - Oct 2019 (130 comments)
We Are All Confident Idiots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519764 - Oct 2014 (158 comments)
> This is an American feature too.
How about it's a feature of certain individuals?
I love when people pick a few data points and then use that to generalize a broad swath of over 300 million individuals. I'm sure we could find Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Australian and British people that all have this "feature" too. It still doesn't imply that those entire countries fit that description :)
The existence of the show almost self-validates that the stereotype has some truth within the US itself, although judging which individuals fit into a stereotype/group depends on oneself. You appear to be distancing yourself from that particular stereotype, which is understandable.
I personally admire cultures that laugh at themselves, as is presumably happening with that show. UK culture seems to take the piss out of itself relentlessly, often with deep cultural insight, and weirdly enough often with a perverse reverse pride. I believe wit is highly valued in the UK within all levels of their society, not just highfalutin intellectual pythonic comedy.
In many parts of the world it's much more frowned upon for the less experienced to voice their opinion, and that forces them to really think if they want to say what they're thinking. It correlates a lot with respect to authority, and comes with the downside of missing out on the originality of youth at times.
Personally, I'd prefer a middle-ground, but one where experience and competence are weighed into considering any opinion.
People can't have opinions on what they think nanotech will bring, without becoming experts in it first?
As if that would even help? Knowing everything about nanotech won't give you a crystal ball which informs you about how the future will pan out with regard for how much it's used for good or evil.
Can't some pessimist just voice his or her pessimistic concern about nanotech without reading several texts about it and taking two semesters? At least, if he or she knows it's just an opinion of concern and not presented as an informed fact?
Over a pint of beer, I cannot posit that the purpose of an anus is the elimination of waste, because evolution isn't sentient and didn't articulate such a design intent for the orifice? Or at least, not without it then being assumed I'm a complete idiot who thinks evolution is creation?
Isn't that a rather narrow definition of "purpose"; can't there be a kind of purpose which is emergent, so that when we use the word, we don't mean something was designed by a sentient being? It just fell into place and happens to serve an identifiable role in a system. If it was removed from the system, then such and such a deleterious consequence would come about, and therefore it has a "purpose" (emergent sense) of preventing that calamity.
> Very young children also carry misbeliefs that they will harbor, to some degree, for the rest of their lives. Their thinking, for example, is marked by a strong tendency to falsely ascribe intentions, functions, and purposes to organisms. In a child’s mind, the most important biological aspect of a living thing is the role it plays in the realm of all life. Asked why tigers exist, children will emphasize that they were “made for being in a zoo.” Asked why trees produce oxygen, children say they do so to allow animals to breathe.
Perhaps why this is why it is important to stay curious and open minded. Absorb and reflect from different angles, and stay humble.
Another thing is that some people get offended when you challenge / question them. They dig in deeper then with their beliefs. Makes it harder to debate and learn and come to potentially better conclusions from the start.
My neighbors are huge conspiracy theorists. It is hard for me to understand how they believe what they do because logically it doesn’t make sense (to me). I listen because I like different perspectives, but doing deeper dives doesn’t result in my confidence in what they’re saying. Now, I also take everything with a grain of salt, including the news (even from “great” sources as I’m not the politician in the room when the decision is made so what do I really know. And I try to keep that mindset, what do I really know?
It would be wrong, probably, but I would flash a smile at the interviewer and make an effort to both appear genuine and be totally forgettable.
If you can't bring yourself to admit incompetence, well. You paint yourself as a person who is unable to learn.
Regardless, at some level, it points less to self-believed knowledge, as is the premise of the article, and more to socially pressured self-presentation.
Everyone on Jimmy Kimmel who went home and thought to themselves, or told their significant other "I didn't know what they were talking about but went along with it" is contradicting the premise of the piece.
If they did am experiment like this, informing everyone a priori that some of the statements are bs, and that at the end, they're graded on identifying the bs as well as their knowledge, that could lead to a different outcome. At least it's one way to somewhat mitigate the desirability of appearing knowledgeable.
It's just what I would probably do at this stage in my life.
Jimmy Kimmel’s Lie Witness News SXSW edition link: https://youtu.be/frjaQ17yAww
“Imagine that the illustration below represents a curved tube lying horizontally on a table:” https://www.marketgoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/dunning...
Paper without video links: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/sweetland-assets/sweetland...