Epistemological modesty is a profoundly immodest way of saying “I don’t know as much as I think I know.” It stings a little less when you put it in big words. Just as important as the desire and curiosity to seek out the truth is the counterbalance of reigning in conclusions and confidence levels.

Politics

There are few things people are more confident in than in their own political views. Some of the political polarity in our society comes from the fact that people’s views are more grounded in their contrast to the opposition than in their personal values. In this way, contra-beliefs have become a proxy for the “different values” that we previously used to describe political difference.

Take an enduring political question: how much should the U.S. spend on foreign aid? Most people probably already have an opinion (the U.S. spends too much, the U.S. spends too little) on this question just from political context. How much does the U.S. actually spend on foreign aid? This question is directly relevant and integral to forming any opinion about the current state of affairs and yet most people don’t know. Take a guess, here is the answer. It’s about 0.5% of the annual budget. Which is interesting because a lot of people simultaneously think we spend too much on humanitarian efforts abroad and place their ideal spending % somewhere around 10% (20x more than actual). The point here isn’t that people are bad with numbers and worse with big numbers. It’s that our intuitions need to be checked. These percentages aren’t hashed out in popular debate, but we still have strong intuitions about what the U.S. should be doing. Our convictions are based in party affiliation and conversation is shaped by a conceptual rather than data driven idea of “American isolationism”. A disposition toward epistemological modesty starts us with what we don’t know. It forces us to ask the right question and have a dialogue about the relevant data. By doing this we learn that most everyone believes the U.S. should spend some amount of money on foreign aid. The differences that were once framed as ideologically incompatible are now on the same value spectrum and can be discussed with meaningful terms.

In our current polarized state epistemological modesty isn’t the answer, but it may help. There are certain topics where turning our confidence level down a few notches could bring about real dialogue. The risk of taking this modesty too far is political inertia and nihilism; “we can’t do anything because we don’t know anything.” Of course there’s a large space in between where we can have political energy and personal beliefs but not pretend to be expert pundits on twitter.

Science

No one knows more about what they don’t know than an expert in a scientific field. The irony of this modesty is that in order to make progress in science we need a spirit of unrelenting confidence. We need the people that solve problems under the current framework as well as the occasional disruptor to current paradigms of understanding. Like the guy who abridged his physics Ph.D. and left the field entirely after receiving so much flak for a theory that would eventually become mainstream after he died. As a society, it seems safe enough to defer to scientists, but how should scientists proceed if some forms of progress are dependent on a complete paradigm shift? The paradox remains that scientific revolution can simultaneously be a creative act and a destructive one. Scott Sumner an economist offers this about his field:

In macro, it’s important for people like me to always search for the truth, and reach conclusions about economic models in a way that is independent of the consensus model. In that way, I play my “worker ant” role of nudging the profession towards a greater truth. But at the same time we need to recognize that there is nothing special about our view. If we are made dictator, we should implement the consensus view of optimal policy, not our own. People have trouble with this, as it implies two levels of belief about what is true. The view from inside our mind, and the view from 20,000 miles out in space, where I see there is no objective reason to favor my view over Krugman’s.

Psychology

Well even if I don’t really know a lot about the world, at least I know a lot about myself, right? Unfortunately we don’t even have an untainted view of ourselves. Self-serving bias i.e. marking your own homework is one of the special ingredients that makes us all the protagonist of our own story. Also, we have a whole new field on the science of happiness (okay, maybe it’s just a plethora of TED talks). But we wouldn’t need TED talks if it was intuitive and everyone knew everything they needed to know to be happy. For example, according to this study, people derive more emotional benefit from spending on others than on themselves even when the prosocial spending doesn’t provide an opportunity to build or strengthen social ties. We all know charity is good and even that it feels good. But really we need to remind ourselves that it feels even better than we think it will.

We’re not just wrong about what makes us happy, we’re also wrong about how we spend our time. This study found people greatly overestimate how much time they spend on Facebook (interestingly they also greatly underestimate how many times they open Facebook). I’m not sure which of these memory biases is the cause for this phenomenon, but if we can’t remember how many hours we spend on Facebook should we rely on eyewitness testimony? It seems that some epistemological modesty is in order for how we see ourselves and our memory. Michael Crichton talks about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Meta

Epistemological modesty entails being informed about the limits of our own knowledge. On the frontier of science it becomes clear all the things we don’t know. We can ask the right question (how did life evolve from nonliving matter?) about the things we don’t know. But there are some things where we can’t even ask the question because we don’t know what we don’t know e.g. St. Augustine can’t ask about self driving cars because he has no concept of the modern car. Similarly there are risks that are known, even more risks that are unknown but fathomable, and a great expanse of risks that are unknown and unfathomable. These are called unknown unknowns. and they should keep us modest too.

Single-sentence refutation: Too much epistemological modesty could stifle progress in science, technology, and politics–when people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake, should we wait and see how things play out, or should we act while perhaps taking a blunt approach?