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"Cogito ergo sum," said Descartes, "I think therefore I am." He was stating that looking into one's own mind told us all we needed to know about ourselves, but either the last few centuries have dramatically darkened the sight glass or else Descartes' admonition for introspection never became the rage for self-improvement he might have hoped.
Cogito Ergo Something or Other
by Del Miller
July 17, 2000
We live in a world positively overrun by a certain tribe of upright primates possessing levels of intelligence and degrees of competence that vary radically from one individual to the next. A necessary skill for getting by in such a world is the ability to judge the intellectual capacities of those around us effectively enough to keep the more challenged of our neighbors from inflicting bodily and financial harm to us through their sheer lack of measurable gumption. The ever-present shortcomings of our fellow humans provide endless practice for this exercise in judgement and we all develop a personalized arsenal of coping mechanisms ranging from caution and skepticism at the low end, all the way to the concealed weapon sort of strategies at the other extreme.
But all these defenses against the incompetent masses are effective only if we ourselves are intelligent enough and rational enough to go through life without falling on our own petard and screwing up our own existence, even without the eager assistance of those fools on the outside. It isn't enough, therefore, that we avoid a collision course with the intellectually deficient morons that populate our lives; we also have to guard against our own failings. In the words of Dirty Harry Callahan, "A man's gotta know his limitations."
Even a sideways glance at the law of averages makes it pretty clear that we each stand an alarmingly strong chance of being some sort of dodo, but fools that recognize themselves to be as such are vanishingly rare. In fact, we all tend to think of ourselves as at least average in the attic. But is this realistic? How can everyone be above average? Are we just fooling ourselves to think that we can defeat the grim statistics of human fallibility?
"Cogito ergo sum," said Descartes, "I think therefore I am." He was stating that looking into one's own mind told us all we needed to know about ourselves, but either the last few centuries have dramatically darkened the sight glass or else Descartes' admonition for introspection never became the rage for self-improvement he might have hoped.
So my first question is, "Are you an idiot?"
The second question is, "Are you sure?"
The answer, my friends, is not pretty.
A rather disturbing article appeared recently in the scholarly Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University present lengthy descriptions of experimental methods and statistical analyses as well as a raft of charts and a bibliography of impressive mass, all describing their research to determine the relationship between how we perceive our abilities and the very different matter of how good we actually are.
Kruger and Dunning tested hundreds of subjects using a variety of measures for intellectual and social competence and then asked these same individuals, without their knowing the results, how well they thought they performed on the tests. Not surprisingly, the average subject estimated that he scored about a dozen percentile points better than average, a systematic error that represented nothing more than perhaps a bit of healthy vanity. High achievers, on the other hand typically guessed that they ranked a dozen or so points poorer than the scores indicated, reflecting maybe a bit of humility one might not expect.
But the surprising and most important results came from the knuckle draggers that scored in the bottom twenty percentile, who generally assumed that they performed as much as FIFTY to SIXTY percentile points better than they actually did. In fact, the more incompetent the subject the more he overestimated his abilities and, what's worse, the more confident he was in his glowing self-evaluation.
The authors compiled all of their data and came to an inevitable conclusion. The smarts that enable one to deal competently with life are the same skills that are necessary to recognize competence when he sees it. This not only leads to a faulty perception of one's own knowledge and abilities but breeds an overconfidence that inhibits learning the truth. In the words of the authors, "Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it." In other words, the fool is a fool because he isn't aware that he is one and he can't be aware of the fact because he is a fool. The only cure for his foolishness is, paradoxically, to teach him the skills to recognize dunderheadedness when it rears up in front of him so that he can see that he is, in fact, a dolt. He may still be a dolt but at least he has a fighting chance of getting somewhere.
Stupid universe
This circular perversity sounds to me suspiciously like Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, which states that the quantum nature of reality limits the degree to which we can simultaneously know both the position of a particle and its momentum. Perhaps there is some cosmic connection between the physics of the very small and the psychology of the very small-minded -- you can be absolutely certain of where you stand only if you don't know where you're going.
But it is a complex universe and in a sense we all become incompetent at the borders of complexity, where the human mind begins to lose a grip on the whole. Intractable complexity, or chaos, becomes the predominant dynamical behavior wherever you find a large number of mutually interacting variables without a definable boundary condition, that is, whenever you don't know where you stand. The result is a system behavior so complex that you don't know where you're going and that is about as good a description of life as I've found.
Life, in all its glory, is complex because it is chaotic, right down to its mathematical descriptions, and anyone who claims, with a high level of certainty and depth, to see clearly into its inner workings is dancing dangerously near a low percentile score on Kruger and Dunning's test.
Absolutely relative
Now some people become irritated with this sort of argument because it smacks of the post-modern denial of anything constant or definable in the world around us. All this relativism seems an excuse for everything from sloppy thinking to decaying morals and as a promotion for such unhealthy, eschatological habits as agnosticism, existentialism and a tendency to vote Democratic.
There ARE absolutes, most certainly, but their signal is buried in the noise of a complicated universe and an unfounded certainty about how things work is very often a sign of the same overconfidence that Kruger and Dunning attributed to an incomplete understanding of our own limitations. It isn't the existence of the truth I question, it's the veracity of the too confident observer that gives me pause. As Charles Darwin said, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".
Opinions and other nonsense
The World Wide Web has become an immense forum for any fool with a keyboard and a spare opinion lying around. Lord knows I've stated plenty of mine and that very fact causes me no little amount of anguish. Just publishing an opinion implies a certain, smug, self-righteousness about one's position that calls into question whether the writer actually knows anything or has simply floated his self-image on a muddy lake of self-satisfied indulgence. I have to wonder if my contributions on these pages are of any real value or if they merely spring from the false confidence at the nether end of the competence curve.
Meanwhile, intensely serious diatribes are waged and vast flame wars erupt across the web over any subject one might choose; from what ought to happen to Microsoft to what Apple ought to do next; from what copyright law should be to the value of rumor sites; from whether Nintendo is better than Playstation to whether web writers are really journalists. Many good points are made and I learn a great deal from all sides -- and the discussions are often entertaining -- but I find it unsettling that everyone feels so absolutely certain that they are so absolutely right. The writers' unalloyed devotion to their own positions convinces me of little except that they might ought to reconsider the arguments of others.
To me, the value of the web is all about the communication of thoughts and ideas, not some contest of egos with a trophy awarded for most inflexible thinker. I would like to see our community rise above the bickering and reserve the passion and constancy for only those issues that truly deserve them. Our Web would be a better place for it.
Of this, I am absolutely certain.
_______________________________________________________
Copyright 2000, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
- <http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html>
- "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing
- One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"
- by Justin Kruger and David Dunning
- Department of Psychology Cornell University
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- © 1999 by the American Psychological Association
- December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134
- "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing
Copyright 2000, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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