Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong
"fuagf -- the inherent problem with ideologues is that they place their mental precepts/constructs/frames in front of and over actually underetanding reality -- they force their apprehension of reality to fit their mental precepts/constructs/frames -- precisey bass-ackwards; bullshit inevitably ensues -- there's always still only one reality out there, ever what it is regardless of whether all, most, few or none have a fair grip on it/aspects of it "
Why it’s so hard to see our own ignorance, and what to do about it.
By Brian Resnick@B_resnickbrian@vox.com Jan 4, 2019, 8:40am EST
Illustrations by Javier Zarracina
Julia Rohrer .. https://www.imprs-life.mpg.de/en/people/julia-m-rohrer .. wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong.
To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings. The effort recently yielded a paper that includes six admissions .. https://psyarxiv.com/exmb2 .. of no confidence. And it’s accepting submissions until January 31 .. https://loss-of-confidence.formr.org/ .
“I do think it’s a cultural issue that people are not willing to admit mistakes,” Rohrer says. “Our broader goal is to gently nudge the whole scientific system and psychology toward a different culture,” where it’s okay, normalized, and expected for researchers to admit past mistakes and not get penalized for it.
The project is timely because a large number of scientific findings .. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 .. have been disproven, or become more doubtful, in recent years. One high-profile effort .. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 .. to retest 100 psychological experiments found only 40 percent replicated with more rigorous methods. It’s been a painful period for social scientists, who’ve had to deal with failed replications of classic studies and realize their research practices are often weak.
-- "“Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition”" --
It’s been fascinating to watch scientists struggle to make their institutions more humble. And I believe there’s an important and underappreciated virtue embedded in this process.
For the past few months, I’ve been talking to many scholars about intellectual humility, the crucial characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness.
I’ve also realized how difficult it is to foster intellectual humility. In my reporting on this, I’ve learned there are three main challenges on the path to humility:
1. In order for us to acquire more intellectual humility, we all, even the smartest among us, need to better appreciate our cognitive blind spots. Our minds are more imperfect and imprecise than we’d often like to admit. Our ignorance can be invisible.
2. Even when we overcome that immense challenge and figure out our errors, we need to remember we won’t necessarily be punished for saying, “I was wrong.” And we need to be braver about saying it. We need a culture that celebrates those words.
3. We’ll never achieve perfect intellectual humility. So we need to choose our convictions thoughtfully.
This is all to say: Intellectual humility isn’t easy. But damn, it’s a virtue worth striving for, and failing for, in this new year.
Intellectual humility, explained
Intellectual humility is simply “the recognition that the things you believe in might in fact be wrong,” as Mark Leary .. http://people.duke.edu/~leary/ , a social and personality psychologist at Duke University, tells me.
But don’t confuse it with overall humility or bashfulness. It’s not about being a pushover; it’s not about lacking confidence, or self-esteem. The intellectually humble don’t cave every time their thoughts are challenged.
Instead, it’s a method of thinking. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others. Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots. One illustration is in the ideal of the scientific method, where a scientist actively works against her own hypothesis, attempting to rule out any other alternative explanations for a phenomenon before settling on a conclusion. It’s about asking: What am I missing here?
It doesn’t require a high IQ or a particular skill set. It does, however, require making a habit of thinking about your limits, which can be painful. “It’s a process of monitoring your own confidence,” Leary says.
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