Phil Fernbach

That being said, people aren't that great about generalizing their knowledge from one domain to another.

So I might...

learn a little bit about some topic and become more humble about that topic.

But then tomorrow, I might jump right back into feeling like I'm an expert on some other topic.

That's a very human tendency as well.

Absolutely.

And that's why I got so interested in this topic, because I realized it's not about toilets.

It's about pretty much everything that we argue about, both as individuals and as a society.

If you think about, say, your financial well-being, if you feel super confident about your ability to beat the stock market and you start taking on more and more risky bets, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble on a personal level.

At a societal level,

Our core beliefs about policy issues and social issues are what determine the laws that we pass, the decisions we make as a society about how we're going to set up our government, when we're going to go to war.

These really kind of important decisions are determined by our strength of belief about whatever the underlying issue is.

That's a great observation.

And in fact, I started a project a few years ago on precisely this.

We called it the WebMD effect.

And the idea was people were going and Googling their symptoms and doing a few minutes of diagnostic work and then going into the doctor and being super sure that they knew what they were talking about.

But of course, medicine is a highly complex field and the body behaves in ways that are very hard to predict and understand for someone who doesn't have detailed training and knowledge.

And so I very much relate to what your doctor friend was saying.

Well, Rob makes a very insightful point.

And this is something that I've struggled with and thought about so much over the last 10 years or so.