Why are we so confident about what we know? We assume expert or high-level knowledge in many fields of knowledge for which we have no rational basis to assume we are experts. Even in fields where we might justifiably be called experts, we regularly fail to make the best possible judgments, decisions, or predictions. Obviously, this is a well-studied phenomenon called overconfidence bias, and I’m no psychologist, so what follows are some ill-informed reflections on overconfidence. To be clear, my only qualifications for writing about anything are the fact that I am as fallibly human as anyone else, and yet most of us (myself included) assume we have things more figured out than the next person. To be clear, like most people, I do think that I have things more figured out than the next person, even as I acknowledge the limits of my own knowledge and flaws of my limited perspective.
One way this manifests is that when I consider myself ten or fifteen years ago, I feel confident I had far more of an overconfidence bias than I do now. Reading some of my writing from college, the sense of confidence it projects is quite irrational given my lack of expert knowledge. Sure, in the context of my major, I may have felt like an expert after spending months working on a senior thesis which actually made a somewhat limited argument, but in the scheme of the academic literature and experience and knowledge base of actual academics, I was just scratching the surface.
Indeed, the more I learn about the world, the more I reflect on the past realizing just how little I knew, despite my own overconfidence and self-assuredness. I maintain these attributes in some respects. I am prone to overconfidence in my correct view of things. Something about teaching high school students whose own intellectual overconfidence sometimes outweighs their limited experiences and knowledge, and the deference many students pay to teachers as holders of expert knowledge, might predispose teachers to feel especially confident in the conclusions they draw, particularly in relation to their subject-area expertise. And yet, one of the things I love about teaching high school students is the many insightful and fresh perspectives they offer on whatever topic is under discussion, even if some of them are a little overconfident in the correctness of their views.
At the same time, I often have students who do recognize their relative ignorance, and who want to opt out of having a perspective. One of my jobs as a teacher is to have students weigh competing perspectives and come to their own conclusions. I teach students to present these conclusions with confidence and teach them to take a stand and to develop an opinion even if they are far from experts on a topic. I encourage them to listen to understand rather than to rebut, and to change their minds if they are convinced by their peers or learning materials, and I utilize a variety of methods to accomplish that goal. In the end, many students do change their perspectives, but plenty of them come away as confident in their opinions as they felt at the start, despite my cautions about the limits of our individual perspectives.
In the social media “hot take” age, I wonder to what extent people – my students included – feel pressured into having an expert opinion, even when that opinion is derived either from limited knowledge and evidence or the opinions of other respected individuals who are deemed experts. Whether your opinion is derived from a serious academic like Noam Chomsky or Alan Dershowitz (I admit, I’m cringing at calling Dershowitz a serious academic) or a popular idealogue like Shuan King or Ben Shapiro might depend on your own ideological bent. On some level, democracy, at least in the American sense of polling people for their perspectives on issues, asks all citizens to have an opinion on everything. Taking the lead from public opinion is obviously a flawed way of going about governing, but even elected representatives can’t be expected to have expert knowledge on all the topics they make and approve policy on.
A more functional system of government might actually respect true expert knowledge and academic consensus on topics ranging from climate change to pandemic response, and yet expert knowledge within these (and all) fields is so specialized that your average citizen or average lawmaker can’t necessarily be expected to draw a reasonable conclusion from experts (who often disagree) about the best way to address climate change, or the relative safety of school re-opening during a pandemic. So, what are we to do? Our debates as a country, and a world, might be more productive if we focused and made a conscious effort to acknowledge our limited perspectives and knowledge, and if we focused more on curiosity and listening to understand. Certainly, a world where fewer people were irrationally overconfident and intellectually arrogant would be a more hopeful and compassionate world.