Simone Stolzoff

And that is what I think particularly in academia, we could use more of what's called intellectual humility, being clear about the things that we don't know.

And we'll go back to Chesky as an example.

During the beginning of the pandemic, he didn't know exactly what the future of global travel was going to be.

He didn't know whether hosts would be able to continue finding guests in another weeks or months or years.

But he found certainty about the things that he could communicate about.

So he increased his cadence of how often he was communicating with his team.

And he said, okay.

Now everyone can know that every day I'm going to give them an update.

And sometimes the update is going to be, there is no update today.

But that sort of regularity of cadence can be something that people can depend on.

I don't know exactly what the future of this business is going to be, but I know that these are my values, these are the company values, these are how I want to act in spite of not knowing exactly what is to come.

That's counterintuitive, right?

The benefit of expertise is being able to spot patterns.

You have these quick heuristics that allow you to say, if you're an ER doctor, identify what's wrong with the patient.

But one research study found that those more experienced ER doctors, especially with gray area cases, can also jump to conclusions quicker and not stay open to some of those educations that might exist.

There was another study about biologists collecting field data, and they found that some of the experts collected less accurate field data than the novices because they were just looking for things within their realm of expertise.

The analogy of when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail comes to mind.

Expertise can give you overconfidence in your own abilities and make you see the entire world through the narrow lens of what you know, as opposed to staying open-minded to what is actually presenting itself.

Yeah, they call it the doubting disease.

Yeah.