 I was walking with some friends around some fancy houses and one of them said, man, I really love to have a porch like that someday. I said, you idiot, that's not a porch. It's a Mercedes. Indo in Indonesia comes from the Latin word for India. Thus, your meme is metaphysically not funny. Thanks, but I don't celebrate New Year's. People like me are cognizant of the passing of time on a daily, if not continuous basis. Hence, I have no need for such a holiday. Have you done a wire shark analysis? Have you read the source code? Go back to your corner script, Kitty. Any ignoramus can read a blog. The I am very smart subreddit is a rich vein of this sort of stuff. Condescending explanations, pretentious language, ridiculous boasting. It can be funny if you're in the mood for it, but if you're like me, you can only stare so long into the abyss before you start ringing your hands and thinking about how you've had a Facebook account since high school. Yeah. In stark contrast, there's the Change My View subreddit, where users submit opinions they feel trapped by, requesting good arguments that might convince them to see things in a different, more nuanced way. They really seem like polar opposites. CMV posters are pretty certain that they must be missing something important, while the subjects of I am very smart are sure they know what's up. Gallant uses argumentation and reasoning to understand the shape of new ideas, while Goofus over here has fashioned whatever intellect they have into an obstacle for future learning, which they are desperately in need of. We recognize a sort of virtue that separates these groups, a character trait that CMVers have in abundance and I am very smarts, ought to develop, something like intellectual humility. It's pretty easy to sort examples of behavior into bins of intellectual humility or arrogance without too much trouble. Alice publicly admits that recent criticism of her research is well founded and her findings might be wrong. Bob has checked and double-checked his design, but is grateful when a co-worker offers to look it over. Chuck haughtily corrects someone that Toronto is the capital of Canada, not Ottawa. Recognizing these sorts of examples as belonging to one category or the other is fairly trivial, but pinning down exactly what it is that makes one person intellectually humble and another intellectually arrogant is trickier than you might think. In an influential 2015 paper, philosopher Dennis Whitcombe and colleagues scrutinized some popular explanations of intellectual humility, ideas that seem to explain that key difference up to a point. For example, some have suggested a criterion of accuracy, claiming that an intellectually arrogant person is just someone who routinely overestimates how much certainty they're entitled to with the evidence that they have, while an intellectually humble person prioritizes having the right level of confidence in their beliefs, no more or less than the evidence warns. This seems promising at first glance. The I am very smart rogues gallery is flush with self-assurance that's a few sizes too big for their wacky and incorrect views. Unfortunately, there are some gaps in this explanation. Like, you're not really addressing how people go about forming their beliefs in the first place, and if someone's unaware of their own epistemic blind spots, it can result in less than appropriately humble behavior. A person unfamiliar with optical illusions might have their heart in the right place, wanting to believe things with the certainty warranted by the evidence, and still come off like an arrogant jerk when they vehemently assert with complete confidence that these lines aren't parallel. Trusting with their own eyes or telling them isn't usually an issue, but if they keep making similar mistakes they don't look especially virtuous. Also, the accuracy criterion doesn't say anything about how someone behaves once they form some opinion about their beliefs. It's possible to fully realize that you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and keep talking. Trust me on that one. Another possible account of intellectual humility focuses on motivation, claiming that intellectually humble people are especially unconcerned with status, entitlements, and other social rewards that are granted to smart folks. It's pretty clear that many of the I Am Very Smart examples are motivated by a desire to claim some sort of intellectual authority or prestige for their big wrinkly brains, but again, this definition seems to miss the mark in important ways. It's possible for someone to be largely unconcerned with the social effects of their intellect and still be petty or defensive about admitting errors to themselves, maybe because it doesn't fit their self-image as a smart person. It's also possible to be a thoughtful, unpretentious, earnest scholar who still has lofty ambitions to gain recognition and earn a name for oneself. Whitcombe and his crew advance a different notion, suggesting that the essence of intellectual humility is recognizing and owning one's limitations, paying all due attention to the numerous flaws and shortcomings that make each of us less than perfectly rational thinkers and not trying to hide, minimize, or dismiss them, but instead admitting where they're a problem, taking them into account wherever they might affect some outcome, and working to fix or avoid them. This seems at least plausible at first glance, so did our other guesses, but it captures a lot of what makes those explanations convincing, and then some. Recognizing and owning limitations suggests a cluster of intimately related behaviors, a realistic assessment of one's weaknesses and limits, a desire to represent them accurately regardless of any potential social fallout, awareness that these flaws are undesirable, and some dedicated effort to improve or to mitigate their effects wherever possible. Those last two points are interesting features of the owning definition that don't appear in other accounts of intellectual humility. Someone who's unaware of their own blind spots, unapologetic if they're pointed out, and unmotivated to work on them, sounds like peak hubris. Now, all of this is, I'm sure, very interesting, but you don't get this many philosophers analyzing a concept this carefully out of some idle curiosity about what words mean, not usually anyway. There's an implied ought here, a sense of duty or virtue. By analyzing the essence of intellectual humility, we're sort of hoping for some clarity or direction about how to be intellectually humble. The folks on I Am Very Smart and CMV probably aren't capital L, capital T, like this, just in these little snapshots we're seeing. They've likely developed persistent cognitive and behavioral habits that make them overblown buffoons or curious scholars. It stands to reason that if we can figure out what it is they're doing exactly, we might be able to adjust our own habits in a corresponding fashion and be better for it. This idea that intellectual humility is a virtuous habit worth cultivating is inadvertently driven home by the paper's authors in this simple effort to check their work, verifying that the limitations owning account really does capture the essence of what we're looking for. They list a set of reasonable statements about how stereotypical intellectually humble people behave, showing that owning intellectual limitations produces the same results in each case. It's a good sanity check for their theory, but also consider how these behaviors fit into the broader goal of trying to be a good responsible thinker, talking openly about one's errors and reasoning, not blaming others for one's cognitive failures, not pretending to know something that's unfamiliar, deferring in potentially dicey subjects to more knowledgeable people, readily revising beliefs when new evidence comes to light. It seems that someone who honed their intellectual humility, learning to recognize and own their intellectual limitations exhibits all these very desirable traits. No wonder we admire such a character. One of these points in particular really struck a nerve for me, and judging by a paper written in response by philosopher Maurer Priest, I'm not the only one who saw something valuable enough to highlight. According to Whitcomb et al, intellectual humility can profoundly affect how someone interacts with others. They claim that it reduces a person's propensity to treat intellectual inferior with disrespect on the basis of supposed intellectual superiority. Priest suggests that this is really the heart of what the limitations owning account is trying to get at, an appreciation and respect for the intrinsic difficulty of intellectual endeavors, and a reluctance to demand special treatment because one imagines that someone else is lower in the intellectual pecking order. As a dude who regularly stands in front of a camera to talk about nerd stuff and is invariably out of his depth, I am frequently reminded of just how big the ocean of knowledge is and how little of it I've seen. If you take some of the philosophy and psychology we've covered on the show seriously, even the things we think we do know are contingent on certain assumptions that we have to make to get anywhere, but rattle suspiciously with many good reasons for doubt. There are also numerous historical accounts of well-intentioned, smart folks chasing something that looks like a good idea to disastrous ends. The longer we study ourselves, the more limits we find, and the more we study the universe, the larger we realize the ocean of knowledge really is. For me, that perspective throws the question of intellectual humility into sharp relief. Even the most prolific human minds are deeply flawed in obvious ways, and dwarf by the enormity of how much there is to know and understand. If the essence of intellectual humility is owning one's limitations, it seems fitting that those who have really internalized that situation, who have struggled hardest to learn as much as they can and found no end to that endeavor, would know better than to get snooty about trivia. Especially if they're wrong. How about you? Do you think the Limitation Zoning Account of Intellectual Humility checks out? Is priests right about the respect others are owed in their intellectual endeavors? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Quick note, I got my second Moderna shot a couple of weeks ago and although my 5G signal has not improved, I feel fantastic. If you have not gotten your vaccine yet, if you're still on the fence, if you have access to one, please go and do that out of a sense of civic responsibility and also maybe to stave off the probability that you'll accumulate any of the laundry list of long-term effects of contracting COVID. Again, thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow, subscribe, watch, share, and don't stop thunking.