Stupid, Stupider and Really Stupid
In 1867 Mark Twain in a letter to the Alta California wrote the following:
“I am thankful that the good God creates us all ignorant. I am glad that when we change His plans in this regard, we have to do it at our own risk. It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art, and ignorant also of surgery. Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty, is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of coloring; and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face, is, to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. Accursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it.”
When you watch any vox pop some people appear willing to say just about anything on camera to hide the fact that they don’t know what they are talking about.
Don’t believe me? Let me explain further.
When there are random samples of the population stopped on the street and asked questions some of those on camera are just clueless. But others –most in fact – seem eager to please, not wanting to let the interviewer down by giving the real response, namely, “I don’t know.”
For some interviewees, the most confident-sounding respondents, they seem to think they do know what they are talking about even when that premise is for many wholly bogus. Such people operate on the basis that they are privy to some fact, some memory, or some intuition that assures them their answer is not only reasonable but also correct.
This is exposing one of the saddest laws of the universe and it is this: the incompetent don’t realize how incompetent they are.
Instead they are “blessed” with a self-belief in their own incompetent confidence fueled by something that seems to be knowledge but is nothing of the kind.
Although what we know is often obvious to us, the broad outlines of what we don’t know are often completely invisible. The fact is often we fail to recognize the scale of our own ignorance. This is a terrifying reality. You, reader, are ignorant of just how ignorant you are. It’s like having an illness that you are carrying around but one that is not recognized nor for that matter being treated.
Logic demands this lack of self-insight. For the incompetent in any field to recognize their incompetence that would require a level of insight into the very thing that often they lack. Take a writer as an example. If that writer does not use the rules of grammar correctly, for instance, then he will never know how badly he writes something in terms of grammar until he actually knows those rules of grammar. Put simply poor performers in whatever filed fail to see the flaws in their performance of the thinking behind it.
The sad fact is that we all grossly overestimate our prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, public speaking, or knowledge of almost any subject we have decided to pontificate upon. Students who earn Ds and Fs in exams always think they are hard done by and that their efforts deserved a better score. Similarly, the person who doesn’t get job after the interview always seems to overestimate their competence and says that the problem is one with the interview panel.
It is sorely tempting to think that this universal rule doesn’t apply to you. However, the problem of unrecognized ignorance is as universal as the rule. But we need to stop thinking of ourselves as uninformed as more misinformed.
More worrying still an ignorant mind is rarely an empty vessel. Think instead of one filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, metaphors, and, perhaps crucially “hunches” – all of which has the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge when it is nothing of the kind.
Stop for a minute and consider what you have just read. If you were brutally honest then you would have to admit that this is true.
It all started a long time ago. Some of our deepest intuitions about the world go all the way back to when we were being weaned by our mothers. Some of these early learning experiences are better than others. But the whole point of growing up and being educated is to test many of our presuppositions.
The whole point of an educated mind is to know one’s limits. Being educated means being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t. Adults with little formal education show a bias towards their own views and theories based on little more than “hunches” or vague feelings. In the current age of ready access to a global audience via the internet this has never been more obvious and dangerous. There are “experts” all over the place. The question more often is how expert are they really?
The truly frightening thing is that research has found that conventional educational practices largely fail to eradicate a number of our earliest misconceptions. So sometimes all that education does is imbue us with a greater confidence in the errors we retain.
A recognition of this in business is important, perhaps like never before. Just take a look at the number of consultants floating about and charging by the hour. Anyone in business needs to know who is who and what it is they are selling. But an awareness of this superficial knowledge bias is also important when it comes to hiring anyone and, therefore, building your team.
Over confidence in business is always fatal. I’m suspicious of those who talk up the business and its prospects without a detailed analysis anywhere in sight.
At the start of this post I quoted Mark Twain as a young man. As an older – and wiser? – man he wrote the following:
“The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.”
Wise words …
