Self Skepticism and Intellectual Humility: Understanding Your Own Limitations

Einstein once said: “As a human being one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. If such humility could be conveyed to everybody, the world of human activities would be more appealing”

If anyone could be said to be an absolute expert in a field it was Einstein, and even he recognized how woefully inadequate his understanding of the world was. This doesn't mean he didn't recognize that he was an expert and that he was incredibly talented, hard working, innovative and any other superlative you can slap on there. What this means is that he was skeptical even of his own conclusions.

Nowhere is this strange dichotomy highlighted more than when one looks at the Dunning-Kruger effect, which explains how people with a low level of expertise in a field, but some information, often are far more certain of their conclusions than those with true mastery. A corollary to this effect is the fact that simply adding knowledge to a problem doesn't necessarily lead to better understanding, and in fact can often lead to worse decisions. Why? It seems counterintuitive that more knowledge could lead to poorer decisions, but both Einstein and Dunning-Kruger give us hints as to the reasons.

In recent years our political debacles and cultural divides have provided more and more evidence of how difficult it is for people to change their minds when provided new information that contradicts their currently held beliefs. In fact, recent research is seeming to show that when confronted with information that contradicts deeply held beliefs, people are more likely to rationalize their beliefs than to adjust them. This goes back to the expert problem and the emotional attachment we have to our beliefs.

In a very Buddhist way, the attachment to beliefs and ideas is the downfall of good decision making. If we look at the ideal of the scientific method it is one of intense criticism of assumptions and attempts to disprove a hypothesis, not to prove a theory. It is only when a scientist is unable to disprove something, after repeated attempts, and when others can replicate this that a scientist begins to develop something like a conclusion. Even then, they understand that something may come along later to disprove or adjust what they think is correct. This doesn't make them a bad scientist, or that the science was wrong. It is the true process of self correcting ideas. Einstein was wrong about many things, and some he adjusted during his own life, and others were later adjusted in the overall scientific understanding. However, he still created theories that are accurate in most ways, most of the time. His most famous equation (e=mc^2) is still the basis for most of the standard model of physics today. He wouldn't be upset today if a better equation was found to combine the standard and quantum models of physics, he would be excited to adjust and try to disprove the new equations.

Personally, I am in my second semester of law school, after almost a decade working in mental health. In many ways, I have a level of expertise when it comes to my prior career. This prior knowledge has helped at times, and not helped at others. In my Civil Procedure class, we have assignments every week where we answer multiple choice questions, but certain weeks we do additional practice and when we do, one of the questions we get asked is "were there any questions you got right for the wrong reason?" For someone new to the legal profession and with a large amount of prior knowledge that is sometimes related, this is a very important question. It addresses the very thing we are talking about here. If I apply my prior knowledge to new facts without the correct context, it is very easy to sometimes come to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. If I am not skeptical of my own methods, my own thinking, it is very possible that some day I will apply the incorrect reasoning to a new problem and come up with the wrong answer.

What does this have to do with intellectual humility and self skepticism? I need to be reminded constantly that I am in the early part of the Dunning-Kruger curve, where my knowledge and feelings about my conclusions are more likely to be incorrect now than in the future, even though they will often feel more certain. I need to constantly remind myself that as I gain knowledge I will understand more and more of the exceptions and context for all of the new facts and as such will understand more and more how limited my knowledge really is.

This is also being highlighted in a very different way in a fellowship/workshop series I am a part of. It is being hosted by the Ninth Circuit Historical Society and involves small group conversations about very hot button socio-political issues between individuals with very different beliefs and positions. One of the most fascinating parts of this series has been that we have spent the first few weeks not actually discussing the issue itself but the underlying core beliefs and experiences that led us to the beliefs in the first place. Understanding where another person is coming from, how their own experiences have shaped their beliefs and how, to them, their beliefs make perfect logical sense when you understand their starting premises have shown how even a perfectly rational actor applying the same logic can arrive at a very different conclusion if they start from a different baseline premise. This goes directly to the idea of intellectual humility being discussed, because so often in our current discourse we look at people who disagree with our conclusions as being irrational, ignorant, or immoral instead of a rational, informed, moral human with different baseline assumptions.

We can apply this same concept of understanding to our own beliefs and ideas. Examining how we arrived at our conclusions, why we hold on to them, and what the baseline premises we are operating under. This isn't easy, and not everyone is in the correct emotional or mental place, often through no fault of their own, to do this. However, as an aspiration and a practice, this concept of understanding is exactly the humility Einstein was talking about. It is the understanding of one's limitations, biases, and baseline assumptions that allows us to move along the Dunning-Kruger curve and eventually actually attain the kind of mastery of ourselves and our fields that sets us apart from people who never self examine.