Pride and Prejudice

14 Jul

It is ‘so obvious’ that policy A >> policy B that only who don’t want to know or who want inferior things would support policy B. Does this conversation remind you of any that you have had? We don’t just have such conversations about policies. We also have them about people. Way too often, we are being too harsh.

We overestimate how much we know. We ‘know know’ that we are right, we ‘know’ that there isn’t enough information in the world that will make us switch to policy B. Often, the arrogance of this belief is lost on us. As Kahneman puts it, we are ‘ignorant of our own ignorance.’ How could it be anything else? Remember the aphorism, “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know”? The aphorism may not be true but it gets the broad point right. The ignorant are overconfident. And we are ignorant. The human condition is such that it doesn’t leave much room for being anything else (see the top of this page).

Here’s one way to judge your ignorance (see here for some other ideas). Start by recounting what you know. Sit in front of a computer and type it up. Go for it. And then add a sentence about how do you know. Do you recall reading any detailed information about this person or issue? From where? Would you have bought a car if you had that much information about a car?

We not just overestimate what we know, we also underestimate what other people know. Anybody with different opinions must know less than I. It couldn’t be that they know more, could it?

Both, being overconfident about what we know and underestimating what other people know leads to the same thing: being too confident about the rightness of our cause and mistaking our prejudices for obvious truths.

George Carlin got it right. “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” It seems the way we judge drivers is how we judge everything else. Anyone who knows less than you is either being willfully obtuse or an idiot. And those who know more than you just look like ‘maniacs.’