2024-10-03

I offer a quick response to the Aeon article, published today, Against humility by Rachel Fraser. I write this here because there seems to be no comment facility for that article.

In brief, then, the key to me is to be discerning about when it is appropriate to be intellectually humble, and when not. That's part of the hidden curriculum in good PhD studies. You, as a PhD candidate, may well know more about your particular little intellectual corner than anyone else, because you have put more time, attention, energy and care into the study of that corner than anyone else. But woe betide you if you allow that confidence to spill over into domains that you haven't really studied deeply.¹⁾

I saw this quite a lot even as an undergraduate, studying Physics and Philosophy. Philosophers tended not to know enough physics to understand the answers that physicists already provide. Physicists tended not to be philosophically sophisticated enough to avoid their questions being naive; or perhaps just asking questions that already had answers. In recent years this kind of problem seems only to have deepened and broadened, as people increase in skepticism, conspiracy theory, and believing that their opinion is as good as anyone else's.

Some people I know fall back on what they call another kind of knowing, an intuitive mode. They say they have learned to distinguish when an intuition is reliable, and when less so. Maybe — just maybe. But how would the rest of us tell? I'm quick to add, not simply by comparing their intuition with the consensus of current opinion. We know current opinion is often mistaken, or more darkly, deliberately misled.

And my sense is that I can ask another question that is very reasonable: how did you, the intuitive one, come to the place of knowing whether your intuitions were accurate (helpful, valid, or whatever standard you wish to apply) or not? If it was merely by internal reflection, then I fear that I have little confidence in your judgement of that. I know from my own experience that mere internal reflection is subject to myriad potential self-deceptive errors. If it's simply by comparing one's intuitive forecasts with what turned out, then what about cognitive biases such as confirmation bias? I want to know your methodology, and I cannot accept a methodology that is itself based solely on internal reflection. That way lies … – in my opinion – … darkness.

The way forward that I do see is through collectivity. This is a theme that keeps on recurring throughout my writings in recent years.

Judging the reliability of one's own intuitions seems to me an inherently complex task, as there are so many factors involved. The best bet, as with Ashby, is to increase the complexity (or, using his term, “variety”) of the judging system. Obviously, to me, by including other people. And not just any old other people. But people who you know and trust, and who know and trust each other. It is the feedback of the collective of critical friends – allies, if you like – that I would rate as most reliable. We all have our weaknesses, our blind spots, our “protector parts” to use the language of IFS, and critical friends, collectively, are in the best position to lovingly call them out and lead us to seeing them. They can help us (as we can help them) to know, more reliably, when to be intellectually humble, and when to stand up and stand firm in what we sense as true, even against the norms, or the prevailing received opinions, of our current culture.

If we fail to bring in this collective dimension, we have only ourselves to blame for the mistakes we make, and they can be pretty devastating to contemplate. I know from my personal experience of failing to have such a collective around me. One of my favourite, salutary passages from Four Quartets reminds me of this:

… the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

• collective ikigai