-- David Dunning
For every sense and every component of human judgment, there are illusions and ambiguities we interpret arbitrarily.
Some are gravely serious. White people often perceive black men to be bigger, taller, and more muscular (and therefore more threatening) than they really are. That’s racial bias — but it’s also a socially constructed illusion. When we’re taught or learn to fear other people, our brains distort their potential threat. They seem more menacing, and we want to build walls around them. When we learn or are taught that other people are less than human, we’re less likely to look upon them kindly and more likely to be okay when violence is committed against them.
Not only are our interpretations of the world often arbitrary, but we’re often overconfident in them.
Chabris says. “We’re not all-knowing and all-seeing and perfect at our jobs, so we put [the data] out there for other people to check out, to improve upon it, come up with new ideas from and so on.” To be more intellectually humble, we need to be more transparent about our knowledge. We need to show others what we know and what we don’t.
And two, there needs to be more celebration of failure, and a culture that accepts it. That includes building safe places for people to admit they were wrong.
For a democracy to flourish, Lynch argues, we need a balance between convictions — our firmly held beliefs — and humility. We need convictions, because “an apathetic electorate is no electorate at all,” he says. And we need humility because we need to listen to one another. Those two things will always be in tension.
To be intellectually humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas we love and believe in. It just means we need to be thoughtful in choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting them, seek out their flaws, and never stop being curious about why we believe what we believe.
-- Brian Resnick
This one is packed with good stuff to consider...continue here.
