And, the more research is done on animals, the clearer it seems that some species are also capable of some decent reasoning and solving problems. Humans have created ways to preserve knowledge and opinions that are far more efficient than copying the behavior of others. This has opened the possibility that what individuals know about the world is actually a sum of what they observe and whatever knowledge was transmitted from their predecessors. Writing made our species smarter than a single individual; the advances in scientific methodology allowed us to circumvent many of the limitations of our brains. But it is crucial to understand those limitations and recognize fully that they apply to ourselves.
It is very easy to point out how other people are dumb. This is so easy because they are dumb, but so are we. We actually must learn how we are very dumb ourselves. I am human, this makes me quite limited. There is no shame in that, although, I have to admit, it really bothers me to notice how we are bad at reasoning.
And there is more. My knowledge is limited to what I have observed myself and what I have learned from others. Since it depends on unreliable thinkers, it must be subject to far more uncertainty than anyone seems to acknowledge. Our civilization has created tools to deal with our limitations, but we don't always use them when making decisions. We can fly, we can visit space and the depths of the oceans, we can endure any climate conditions on our planet. And we don't do any of those because it is a special power of mankind. We do that because we have created tools and methods for that. It is the same with thinking. However, while there are very clear standards that must be obeyed for aircraft to be allowed to fly, the same is not true on the quality of our supposedly rational analysis. And yet, left alone, each of us is just a little smarter than the other animals. We have a horrible tendency to arrive at wrong conclusions about any subject that is not a problem we experience in our daily lives. Of course, we are completely incompetent, far from that.
This exception, that we are actually reasonably competent with understanding people and other issues we have to deal with at a daily basis, has also bad consequences. While it is better to be good at something, it also helps people to feel confident about how they reason.Our intuition is well adjusted to the things we encounter often. But this does not mean it will work when facing new or difficult problems. And yet, people have a certainty about their choices that is completely unjustified, often with disastrous consequences. People express certainty in political, economical, religious, and, sometimes, even about scientific questions they don't understand but that we actually know the answers. Evolution, Medicine and Quantum Mechanics are the first examples that come to mind and I don't need to argue how damaging it might be to have wrong convictions in a health area. This does not mean that errors in areas not directly linked to health might not be equally damaging as well.
It is crucial, in order to answer any questions as competently as possible, that we recognize our own shortcomings. As we will debate later, we must even learn to always doubt our own opinions. Our current society not only accepts but encourages people to make choices between options. And it is expected that people should act as if that choice meant some kind of truth. This kind of belief is actually very wrong. A rational being should not lie to itself by ignoring other possibilities. And yet we do that all the time.
In order to understand why this is so, we will need to answer a number of questions. We need to understand what knowing something means, if it is actually possible to know something. We also need to be able to reason, reaching conclusions from premises and understand when this kind of analysis is a proof and when it is actually just an inference, where, at best, we can hope to assign probabilities to our conclusions. Comparing how normal, untrained humans perform under different circumstances will show us where we are actually weak at it. And that it is very likely that our brains use many different heuristics in decision-making. This allows the brains to get close to the correct answers in a number of situations. But it has serious consequences on how much we can trust things like intuition when we are out of our comfort zone. Finally, one issue that must be addressed very carefully is when we can trust what other people tell us, whomever they are.
I realize that this text and the ideas I will present here might have a difficult time reaching everyone who should be made aware of them. Many people won't like the idea of admitting they are actually stupid, in an absolute sense. It is certainly easy to find the errors I will talk about here on others. But we must learn to notice them on ourselves and correct them. My Master adviser, Henrique Fleming, used to tell his students a phrase from Niels Bohr: “An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.” While there is some truth to it, Bohr forgot to include a crucial part of it. That is that the expert should have learned from those mistakes and not make them anymore. People quite often don't learn when their objective is to prove that they are right, as opposed to find out what is actually the right answer.
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