Suggestions For Dealing with Know-it-Alls

In "How to converse with know-it-alls," Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay suggest techniques for dealing with know-it-alls. Know-it-allness is often caused by the Dunning-Kruger Effect (which the authors also call "the Unread Library Effect" and cognitive scientists call "the illusion of explanatory depth."

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill; 2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others; 3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; 4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

How do you show know-it-alls that they don't know as much as they think they know? Boghossian and Lindsay suggest that we ask them to explain their claims in detail.

[R]esearchers asked people to rate how confident they were in their ability to describe how a toilet works. Once subjects provided answers, experimenters had them write down as many details as they could in a short essay, and then they were again asked about their confidence. Their self-reported confidence dropped significantly after attempting to explain the inner workings of toilets. People know there’s a library of information out there explaining things — they just haven’t read it! Exposing the flimsiness of their knowledge is a simple matter of letting them discover it for themselves.

One most easily does this by asking know-it-alls to explain their claims in detail:

Whether it’s gun control legislation, immigration policy, or China trade tariffs — and have them provide as many technical details as they can. How, exactly, does it work? How will change be implemented? Who will pay for it? What agencies will oversee it? . . . People become less certain, question themselves more, and open their minds to new possibilities when they realize they know less than they thought they knew.

Just politely ask straightforward question and insist on answers that you can understand. Keep an open mind.  Perhaps they will convince you that they are correct! If you are not convinced, however, be patient and follow up with more questions.  If the conversation goes on and on, don't allow your fatigue to get the best of you.  Don't ever indicate that you understand when you don't.  That would not be helping anybody.

As I was reading the above article, I researched other ideas I could add to this post. The authors of, "An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think" discussed the DK effect with David Dunning, who warned of the First rule of the Dunning-Kruger Club: "people don’t know they're members of the Dunning-Kruger Club." These people lack "Intellectual Humility."  In other words, they assume they are correct, which means (to them) that there is no need to seek out and correct their intellectual blind spots.

Dunning offered this additional advice for dealing with people in the DK Club. One bit of advice is to challenge the know-it-all to think in terms of probabilities:

[P]eople who think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties.

Dunning warns that many people don't "make the distinctions between facts and opinion." People are increasingly creating not only their own opinions, but their own facts.

Yet another problem listed by Dunning is that people are increasingly unwilling to say "I don't know." Trying to get people to say that they don't know when they don't know is a serious and so far unsolvable problem. It would seem, then, that cross-examining the know-it-all as to the source of their information is critical.

Dunning also suggests a downside to getting things correct: "To get something really right, you’ve got to be overly obsessive and compulsive about it." In other words, it's not easy to get facts correct on a complex issue.  It takes work.  Those people who are more accurate take the time to ask themselves whether and how they could be wrong. "How can your plans end up in disaster?"  Know-it-alls fail to show this concern that it often takes a lot of work to get to the truth.

Finally, in a nod to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Dunning states that it's important to realize that one is better off to invite others to test one's ideas.  Dunning states: "We’re making decisions as our own island, if you will. And if we consult, chat, schmooze with other

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The Wrong Kind of Fireworks

Celebrating our freedom while 41 people are shot in one night in NYC.

The headline from the Daily News: "41 shot overnight in NYC with at least 4 dead in citywide explosion of gun violence." Then I noticed this headline: "16 Dead, at Least 67 Wounded in Chicago Shootings This Weekend."

Maybe the headlines should include the phrase: "Bullets: The other Pandemic." Epidemic shootings are terrorizing numerous city residents and this is absolutely unacceptable. Do our politicians not care or is the problem that they are pretending that there are no solutions?

There is a cycle of violence in many cities that begins with financially struggling families who are forced to send their kids to shitty schools. Then the cycle moves to 1.3M students who drop out each year. Stir in the lack of comprehensive and free birth control so that people can plan when they want to have families.

Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.
Then comes street violence and deaths and then to prisons, where we've decided that the best thing we can think of doing is to park people in prison for 10 or 20 years each, before we dump them onto the streets, insisting that they can fend for themselves even though many employers want nothing to do with people with criminal records, especially violent criminal records.  Our politicians claim that it would cost too much money to improve things, even though the prison-industrial complex is extraordinarily expensive:  $33K per year per prisoner on average. 

I cannot think of a better formula for hurting adults and children than the above formula.

There doesn't seem to be any political will to fund new creative types of interventions into any of these steps. It's especially frustrating that we won't fund (and in fact, we've been cutting) interventions at the early childhood step even though that is the best place to invest. That, in fact, was one of the first posts I wrote for Dangerous Intersection. Still true today and still being ignored today. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

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The Two Starkly Different Meanings of “Black Lives Matter,” and Political Ideas That Must Never Be Criticized

"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.

Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:

In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.

I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.

In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B.  Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.

Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.

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About Mary Wollstonecraft

Today I first learned about proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. I can barely fathom how any person could muster the courage to take such a strong moral stand in 1792. You don't need much imagination to understand the abuse she took as a result of writing her book. History is filled with many such "insane" ideas that eventually become common sense. From Wikipedia:

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the 18th-century British proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who believed that women should not receive a rational education. . . . Wollstonecraft maintains that women are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men, and that treating them as mere ornaments or property for men undermines the moral foundations of society. . . . She launched a broad attack against sexual double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.

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