Shankar Vedantam

Phil, we heard a question from a listener named Rob earlier, and he actually had a second question I'd like to play for you.

So if the problem of overconfidence is a serious problem when it comes to the knowledge illusion fail, what about the problem of underconfidence?

So one of the implications of what you're just saying, Phil, is that overconfidence might be bad and underconfidence might be bad.

And we have to find that middle path where, in some ways, our confidence about a subject is calibrated to what we actually know about the subject.

Monica from St.

Paul has a question that addresses this very issue.

Thank you.

So the tricky thing here, Phil, is that you've told us that our minds are flawed in that our minds tend to make errors in judgment in terms of how much we actually know.

But our minds are all we have to actually make judgments about whether our judgments are correct.

What do we do?

This is a very tricky point.

A listener named Nevio asked whether there are any practical things that we can do that can help us reach this middle path.

Here's his question.

If I understand Nevio correctly, Phil, I think what he's asking is whether there are practical things that we can do, practical questions that we can ask ourselves that can guide us toward that middle path.

I'm wondering, Phil, if the illusion of knowledge is partly domain-specific, and by that I mean, you know, if there's some issue that I care about a lot, let's say I care about a political issue a lot, it might be that I tell myself that I know a lot about this issue because I care about it deeply.

But there might be some other issue or some other technology that I don't really care very much about.

It's sort of peripheral to my life.

I don't really know very much about it.

I don't care very much about it.

And if you ask me, how much do you know about nanotechnology or material science or astrophysics, I might say, well, I really don't know very much.