Simone Stolzoff

You don't necessarily need to know where you are on that spectrum.

But if you feel like you're a little bit too far in the complacency spectrum, maybe you need to push yourself towards some novelty.

If you're a little bit too far on the sort of chicken with a head cut off end of the spectrum, maybe you need to find a little bit more comfort to help rectify your situation.

Well, what expertise does is it gives you confidence.

The problem is when it becomes overconfidence.

And you see this in a lot of different fields.

One is sometimes someone has expertise in one field, which makes them think that they can pontificate about the best things to do in all these other fields.

Yeah, exactly.

Totally.

Another thing is when you have a really narrow area of expertise, you start to see the whole world through that area of expertise.

The analogy I like is you're like a drunk man who's looking for his lost keys under a streetlight because that's the only place where it's lit up.

You don't see the bounds of your own understanding of the world.

I write a lot about what's called the replication crisis in social sciences, which is

In these industries like social psychology, there have been all of these canonical studies.

You may have heard of, say, the marshmallow study.

Yeah, I mean, it just hasn't been able to be replicated.

And so your ability to withstand eating a marshmallow doesn't actually predict your future life outcomes and not actually the things that correlate are income and how much safety and security you had growing up.

But it is this big existential threat for someone who might have dedicated their life to studying a particular psychological phenomenon.

Not to mention all these perverse incentives around the need to publish papers in their field and the need to get recognition from their peers.

And so how do we get past a moment where trying to be interesting is more important than trying to be right or tell the truth?