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Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the arti
by Bargs 12y ago
Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place.
From the article:
"The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
- anigbrowl 12y agoNot to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks. This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/ * with apologies to Pendleton Ward.
- freshflowers 12y agoThere is a world of difference between being ignorant of your own ignorance and just making shit up when confronted with your ignorance.