I saw prolific nonfiction writer Chuck Klosterman on a morning news show talking about his new book, “But What If We’re Wrong?,” and his thesis keeps crossing my mind: What if things that we absolutely know to be true turn out to be just as wrong as things our ancestors were equally sure about?
Actually, the better question is which things will we turn out to be wrong about. Believing we’re right about everything is probably the wrongest thing we can believe. This meshes with something I’ve written about before: the Dunning-Kruger effect, which suggests some people just aren’t smart enough to realize how little they know.
Recognizing that our knowledge is flawed is actually a hallmark of intelligence. David Dunning, the Cornell social psychologist who led the groundbreaking 1999 research into self-assessment of competence, later cited a famous speech in which then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned of the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” involved in counterterrorism. Recognizing unknowns, Dunning said in an interview, was “the smartest and most modest thing [I had] heard in a year.”
In his book, Klosterman approaches his basic question — what if we’re wrong? — by envisioning how future generations will look back on our contemporary body of knowledge in the way we look back on, say, the Middle Ages. But it seems to me, as I approach my 55th birthday next month, that it doesn’t take centuries for accepted knowledge to change radically.
Consider boxer Muhammad Ali and football star O.J. Simpson. In the 1960s, Ali was considered by white America to be dangerous and even subversive. But when he died earlier this month, he was widely eulogized as a great American of character and integrity, a role model recognized around the world.
Simpson, of course, was the anti-Ali: As ESPN’s excellent new documentary reminded a new generation, he was the black athlete who was acceptable to white America. Today, it’s widely believed — even by a majority of African-Americans — that he did, in fact, slaughter his ex-wife and another man despite his legal acquittal, and he’s growing old in prison for armed robbery and kidnapping.
If conventional wisdom was wrong about Ali and Simpson, what else are we wrong about? Maybe boxing and football.
Last week, the University of Arkansas board of trustees debated the question of spending $160 million to upgrade Razorback Stadium. When I talked with former U.S. Sen. David Pryor, one of the trustees, about this proposal a few months ago, I wondered aloud whether football would even be a thing 20 years from now.
A lot of us have been uncomfortable with boxing for years, but the unfolding understanding that football players are as susceptible to CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy — as boxers surely has a lot of mommas and daddies rethinking their kids’ extracurricular activities. Will football seem as barbaric to future generations as the Roman gladiator spectacles seem to us? (The future of sports is one of the things Klosterman explores in his book.)
Food is another area in which our absolute knowledge seems to be ever-changing. In the middle of the 20th century, we absolutely knew that chemistry made food better — Space Food Sticks and Tang and margarines that tasted and spread better all the time. Low-fat and no-calorie varieties were going to make us thinner and healthier, while highly processed foods were the affordable answer to hunger. How’s that working out?
What other things are we wrong about? More lanes of interstate through the middle of downtown Little Rock? The long-term effect of online shopping on communities? Public education? Private education? If you think about it too much, you’ll find it hard to fall asleep, which is one reason I haven’t been able to make myself read Klosterman’s book.
The Wikipedia entry on the Dunning-Kruger effect points out that Dunning and his graduate assistant, Justin Kruger, were not the first to notice that certainty and ignorance go hand in hand. Confucius: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Bertrand Russell: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” Charles Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Although not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, I’m also reminded of this truism (or is it?) by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |