Smart People Are Surprisingly Good At Being Wrong

Smart People Are Surprisingly Good at Being Wrong

By Kris Hollon | XKenosis

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One of the strangest things about being human is that being smart doesn’t seem to offer nearly as much protection from being wrong as we’d like to think. Sometimes it makes us better at it.

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That’s not an insult to intelligent people. It’s an observation about what intelligence actually gives us. A sharp mind can spot patterns faster, learn complicated subjects, remember more information and build better arguments. Unfortunately, none of those abilities come with a built-in guarantee that the original conclusion was right.

Give a smart person a bad idea and they may not abandon it. They may build a much better defense for it.

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We’ve all seen this happen. Two intelligent people can read the same research, watch the same event or sit through the same conversation and leave with completely different versions of what just happened. Neither has to be stupid, dishonest or crazy. They can both genuinely believe they’re following the evidence.

That’s where things get interesting.

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We tend to imagine reasoning as something separate from the rest of being human. Facts go in, the brain processes them and a conclusion comes out. Nice and clean. Except the person doing the thinking also has a lifetime of experience, expectations, loyalties, fears, incentives and memories coming along for the ride.

You don’t leave yourself at the door when you think. Neither do I.

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That’s probably why telling someone to “just look at the facts” rarely accomplishes much. Facts matter enormously, but facts still have to pass through a human being. We decide which ones deserve attention, which sources we trust, which details seem important and what any of it means.

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The internet was supposed to help with part of this. For most of human history, getting information was difficult. Today the problem is almost reversed. We can find an argument for nearly anything before we’ve finished drinking our coffee.

That creates a weird new problem. Finding information and finding truth are no longer remotely the same task.

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If I already believe something, I can search for evidence supporting it. I can find experts who agree with me, studies that sound promising, videos explaining it and thousands of strangers assuring me I’m right. Someone who believes the opposite can probably do exactly the same thing.

Both of us can come back with receipts.

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Artificial intelligence turns that dial even further. We now have access to something that can explain complicated subjects, summarize enormous amounts of information and produce a convincing argument in seconds. That’s an extraordinary tool, but it doesn’t remove the human from the equation. We’re still the ones deciding what to ask, what to believe and what to do with the answer.

Maybe that’s why the next important skill isn’t simply learning how to get more information. We’re already pretty damn good at that.

Maybe it’s learning how to live in a world where information is effectively unlimited but certainty still isn’t.

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That requires something different from intelligence. It requires being able to hold a strong opinion without welding it to your identity. It requires being curious about things that irritate you. It requires noticing when winning the argument has quietly become more important than understanding it.

Most importantly, it requires being able to say three words that intelligent people sometimes find surprisingly difficult:

I don’t know.

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Those words aren’t intellectual surrender. Sometimes they’re the most accurate answer available.

There is a huge difference between being uninformed and recognizing the limits of what you know. One closes the door on learning. The other opens it.

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The smartest person in the room isn’t necessarily the person with the fastest answer or the strongest argument. Sometimes it’s the person who realizes there’s still something in the room nobody has noticed yet.

We’re entering an age where answers are becoming almost free. That may make the ability to question our own certainty considerably more valuable.