“You’re only human. Mistakes are a part of your life, unavoidable, they happen to everyone. There’s no way you could have foreseen it.” is often used to console someone suffering the consequences of a mistake. You may have said it to someone yourself. When you make a mistake, do you say it to yourself though? You ought to. You’re also only human.
What is Epistemic Modesty?
Humans are fallible. We know this. It’s not possible to argue otherwise. Individually and collectively we make poor political and economical decisions, we mistreat other humans and occasionally make decisions that work out by accident. Of course, we’re so fallible that we think the decisions that turn out well are intentional. We are very much fans of the hindsight and overconfidence bias, whether we say we are or not.
Epistemic modesty is an admission. An admission that we are stupid and there is little we can do about it. There are very few people who are willing to make that admission, and for obvious reasons. Confidence is sexy. If you say something with enough confidence people will become attracted to it. It’s not too hard to see that this is true. Imagine 2 people standing behind a lectern, one speaking articulately, pacing back and forth, shoulders back, projecting their voice across the room; another quivering, hiding behind the lectern and double guessing what they’re saying. Assuming both people are saying the exact same thing, the former is a much more compelling leader. One is therefore more likely to believe the former’s message. This in itself is not irrational. Someone who appears confident is preferred as a leader because confidence a by-product of competence. When it is irrational to follow someone confident is when that person is suffering from overconfidence or egocentric bias rather than them being competent.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool” – Richard Feynman
If you are the easiest person to fool, you can easily become a delusional arbiter of truth, or at least the truth as you think you know it. You may even gain a following with your confidence act. However, leading more people into the flames than otherwise is not what a virtuous leader does.
Why Epistemic Modesty is Important
Without epistemic modesty we become more human (read: fallible) than we need to be. If we are modest about what we know, we can look for what we don’t know rather than guess about it and pretend that we do. Ultimately, this leads to better decisions as more accurate information ought to.
Confidence used to hold higher value. As tribes would gather to hunt, it was more important that the plan was executed with absolute confidence than the plan itself being perfect. However, we’ve evolved past the need for confidence into the need for careful consideration. The plan and decisions are now more important. With the scalability of our current technology, action can do great good or great harm. Thus, the increased weight placed on decision making.
Public vs Private Epistemic Modesty
It’s one thing to admit to yourself privately that you don’t know that much at all. It’s another to tell everyone else you don’t much. You may consider this a dilemma. Perhaps you’re thinking all you need to do is admit fallibility to yourself then gain socially from acting confident despite some internal uncertainty in order to gain a following on your now slightly better ideas — better because self-doubt lead you to discovering more and better information for yourself). I argue this is myopic.
Publicly admitting that you are doubtful has several positive consequences:
- You gain a reputation for not knowing much. This motivates you by creating for you the social identity of an epistemically modest person. You will therefore continue to read, particularly things that you disagree with, as you know this is the surest way to combat your ignorance.
- Peers see it’s possible. You will serve as an example to others, allowing them to express their lack of confidence. This has huge consequences in group decision making which is notorious for creating undue polarity (and even incorrectness) due to group-think.
- You gain from others’ insight. Sure you could be privately modest and improve your ideas by yourself, but outsourcing to other brains, having exposure to a wider range of thoughts and judgements than you could conjure alone is always beneficial.
How to Become Epistemically Modest
As I said earlier, the biggest step is realising you’re not that smart. Read books like Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman which explains how you’re always being fooled, all the ways in which you are fooled and, perhaps most importantly, that knowing about the ways you’re fooled does not make you that much more immune to being fooled. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is another great book. It tells of how humans did not evolve to live in the modern world. We are a product of evolutionary necessity, not of a rational designer who knew of the present condition. Thus, we cannot be too confident in our abilities.
Once you’ve recognised that you are quite easily fooled, you should have the motivation to read more. Learning of cognitive biases is no panacea, but you can strengthen your immune system enough such that you’re a little more capable. Poor Charlie’s Almanack is one book that will greatly assist you on that journey; Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin is another.
There are also some immediately actionable practices:
- Admit/tell people you’re wrong or made a mistake as soon as you realise it
- When explaining something you’re not exactly sure about, say so. This helps others trying to form an accurate model do so. Without admitting doubt, the other will weigh your explanation too heavily as they examine their fragmented knowledge. You will do others a disservice by acting over-confident. This includes admitting you don’t know when you don’t know.
- Ask for criticism or feedback. Sometimes it will be complete garbage. Sometimes it won’t. Just keep an open mind when critically evaluating feedback
- Share your knowledge. In order for others to act on more knowledge, they need more knowledge. If you are modestly confident in your knowledge and not sharing it, you are hampering the development of others and therefore society.
Before you return to your day, remember: Deliberately having people believe something is true that is not true is the definition of a confidence man.
Notes:
I owe the phrase “epistemic modesty” to Tyler Cowen, in particular this podcast episode: https://fs.blog/tyler-cowen/
