Need more intellectual humility

There’s a lot of talk these days about “intellectual humility,” which most consider a virtue.

It means you will occasionally admit when you’re wrong.

It also means you’re open to new ideas, even from those who you think are wrong and learn from the experiences of people you disagree with.

I try. President Donald Trump, the ultimate practitioner of intellectual arrogance, has a few ideas I actually agree with, even though, having never met the man, I hold him in deep disdain.

I like the fact that he’s treating China like an enemy. I wish he’d treat Russia the same way, or more of the same way. Russia still chafes under U.S. sanctions and Trump is building up the military.

I also think he was right about over-regulation, but I think he used a scythe where he should have employed a scalpel.

We need intellectual humility now more than ever, according to Cindy Lamothe, who wrote very thoughtful pieces about the idea for Vox, a left-leaning internet-based media firm, and New York Magazine.

“As technology makes it easier to lie and spread false information incredibly quickly,” she wrote, “we need intellectually humble, curious people.”

It doesn’t mean you cave every time someone contradicts you, she said.

“Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots,” she said.

“It’s about asking: What am I missing here?”

Further, she wrote, “It doesn’t require a high IQ or a particular skill set. It does, however, require making a habit of thinking about your limits, which can be painful.”

Dirty Harry’s advice, “A man’s got to know his limitations,” should apply even when a .44 magnum hand-cannon isn’t pointed at your head.

Intellectual humility should come naturally to journalists. We are in the business of finding facts, so that we can get as close as we can to truth. That means we should carefully listen to all sides and do our very best to verify the factuality of the information we gather.

We don’t always succeed. Nobody does.

“Our ignorance is invisible to us,” Psychology Professor David Dunning said in a quote in Lamothe’s article.

This is Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger effect, another concept making the rounds. Dunning and Justin Kruger, another psychology professor, learned that what the people of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon thought of their children — “All the children are above average.’’ — is how we think of ourselves.

Dunning and Kruger learned that most of us think we’re smarter than we are.

Critics regularly apply Dunning-Kruger to Trump. I do.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if it applied equally to me.

Intellectual humility is why members of Congress occasionally used to cross the aisle. It used to be that there was an effort to understand where the other side was coming from, and that helped fuel the kind of compromises that got things done in Congress and statehouses across the country.

We need more of that kind of spirit and less “I’m right and you’re wrong” if we’re going to get anywhere.

Get humble, everybody.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a semi-retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

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