For perspective, early experiments with electrical stimulation of living brain tissue during surgery began to reveal how we rationalize processes inside us that we don't understand. An electric current sent to one part of a person's brain would reliably make that person laugh. When asked why, the person would say the doctor's face was funny. Clearly that was not the actual reason.
It's the same with other, more naturally present brain processes. Since these experiments, researchers have found much evidence that the reasons we give for our opinions and actions are unreliable. We aren't being dishonest. (There can be a difference between honesty and truth.) We explain why we think we like this product or distrust this person, but often the evidence strongly suggests that our minds are fabricating an explanation so that we can feel whole and coherent. Often the actual reasons are much more basic.
This is why a little subtle dishonesty can be very persuasive. Our minds are already at a disadvantage in that our beliefs about why we choose this or that are often mistaken or inaccurate. Malicious actors can exploit this.
The phrase "con artist," after all, comes from "confidence man," someone who would use trickery to get taken into your confidence. Confidence is a key weapon in the confidence man's arsenal. Our country is presently run by a confidence man. His tactics aren't even a secret. Yet they still work on tens of millions of people who have heard that he's a habitual liar and a con artist. They believe that they're laughing because the doctor is making a funny face, not because of the brain surgery they know they're in, but their minds are being hacked.
For the reasons I've just outlined, we should be careful not only against knowingly accepting confidence as the reason we believe something—or someone—but also against unknowingly accepting confidence as our reason for believing.
I'll give you a better way.
First, listen not for what a person believes, when they speak, or how strongly, but for why. Why does the person say this? If they are biased or trying to trick you, there will be problems with their reasoning. Whether they know there are problems with their reasoning or not, they will try to distract you from talking about those problems openly and civilly. They will try to make this about you and them, for example, by guilt-tripping you or making you feel proud, instead of giving bulletproof reasoning or listening to questions with a good attitude, thinking about them, and being grateful to the people who bring them up.
It's like isolating two suspects at the station and questioning them separately until one says something inconsistent with the other's assertions. Here, though, you are not looking to make sure every thought coming from a person is consistent with every other. That worry is a red herring, one good liars know how to exploit. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," remarked Ralph Waldo Emerson in his landmark essay, "Self-Reliance." Don't be afraid to disagree with what you've said before, or to observe two facts that seem contradictory, or even a hundred facts that seem contradictory. And let others do the same. It's smarter! It's kinder! It leads to discoveries! Eventually, even to agreement and consistency! See, you can find possible inconsistencies even in math proofs that are valid and known to work. Preoccupation with enforcing this unrealistic standard outside of math, or else with attaining an appearance of perfection outside of art, is following or planting a red herring. Let people be inconsistent; you are.
Try this instead. You're looking for how they support their beliefs and claims with evidence and logic. We may have a veil over our mind's inner workings and be deluded as to why we choose A over B, but logic either works or doesn't. Evidence is either accurate or inaccurate. There are shades of evidence from "none" to "extensive," yes, but the physical world does not change to match a wrong view; it stays the same. It's the view's responsibility to match the physical world and its potentials, not the world's responsibility to be how a confident person says. This is how we begin to extract ourselves from the problems I've outlined above. Don't make it personal, just look for why. What is the person's reasoning? What is the evidence?
It's like isolating two suspects at the station and questioning them separately until one says something inconsistent with the other's assertions. Here, though, you are not looking to make sure every thought coming from a person is consistent with every other. That worry is a red herring, one good liars know how to exploit. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," remarked Ralph Waldo Emerson in his landmark essay, "Self-Reliance." Don't be afraid to disagree with what you've said before, or to observe two facts that seem contradictory, or even a hundred facts that seem contradictory. And let others do the same. It's smarter! It's kinder! It leads to discoveries! Eventually, even to agreement and consistency! See, you can find possible inconsistencies even in math proofs that are valid and known to work. Preoccupation with enforcing this unrealistic standard outside of math, or else with attaining an appearance of perfection outside of art, is following or planting a red herring. Let people be inconsistent; you are.
Try this instead. You're looking for how they support their beliefs and claims with evidence and logic. We may have a veil over our mind's inner workings and be deluded as to why we choose A over B, but logic either works or doesn't. Evidence is either accurate or inaccurate. There are shades of evidence from "none" to "extensive," yes, but the physical world does not change to match a wrong view; it stays the same. It's the view's responsibility to match the physical world and its potentials, not the world's responsibility to be how a confident person says. This is how we begin to extract ourselves from the problems I've outlined above. Don't make it personal, just look for why. What is the person's reasoning? What is the evidence?
Now comes the most important part.
How does the person handle being disagreed with?
To the trained eye, if you have no better source of information right now, this can sometimes tell you everything you need to know.
It's a window on how they reached their opinion in the first place.
It's a window on how they reached their opinion in the first place.
If their first response is to undermine the person disagreeing by trying to make them look incompetent, stupid, or just plain bad, then that's a giant red flag. They are not relying on reason. They are making this personal. They are focusing on optics and its cousin side-taking rather than on facts and the tissue of reality and uncertainty that connects them.
A mostly accurate view can reflect reality quite well despite containing inconsistencies and paradoxes. The entire field of science is not invalidated every time a discovery resolves a point of confusion or rewrites part of a textbook. What picture in a few words can capture all the nuances and smooth out all the sharp edges? I know of no such picture, do you? A con artist will try to erase or deny these. An intellectually honest person, by contrast, will want to think about potential paradoxes and data gaps and talk about them and find out more.
It is not confidence to look for, but this kind of adventurousness. That is, if you really lack time, energy, or skill for a better, more thorough, more evidence-based approach.
A mostly accurate view can reflect reality quite well despite containing inconsistencies and paradoxes. The entire field of science is not invalidated every time a discovery resolves a point of confusion or rewrites part of a textbook. What picture in a few words can capture all the nuances and smooth out all the sharp edges? I know of no such picture, do you? A con artist will try to erase or deny these. An intellectually honest person, by contrast, will want to think about potential paradoxes and data gaps and talk about them and find out more.
It is not confidence to look for, but this kind of adventurousness. That is, if you really lack time, energy, or skill for a better, more thorough, more evidence-based approach.
A person who cannot admit uncertainty is less reliable than anyone else, when it comes to ultimate believability. No one is truly certain, 100%, about anything. Whoever claims to be is lying, often unknowingly. Knowledge in large part comes down to how we find, respond to, and manage uncertainty. If we decline to look for it, deny it when it's mentioned, and manage it by believing it doesn't exist, then we are con artists. Perhaps we are not malicious. Very likely we are not. Perhaps we do not even know we are con artists. Perhaps we are unknowingly conning ourselves for lack of training in a better way. Perhaps it would be more accurate and kinder to say we are unwittingly allowing our instincts and biases to con us. But if we are allowing our instincts and biases to con us, then we are opening ourselves up to attack by intentional con artists. And we are also magnets for all kinds of wrong ideas that people naively hold with great confidence, great, infectious, influential confidence.
Confidence is not bad. Do not take me the wrong way. Having an even keel of self-confidence and self-efficacy allows us to hear criticism and accept that we are imperfect and try again and improve. Healthy confidence is critical to living, learning, even listening. No one is always at exactly the same level of confidence, let alone entirely confident or entirely unconfident. It is a useful, an unavoidable and necessary, inner emotional signal, in its shades of presence and absence. But it isn't a reason to believe something. Confidence isn't logic. Confidence isn't evidence. And it isn't reliable.
Think of confidence as a quick sketch—a one-line drawing that may have artistic merit—rather than as the thing that's being drawn. You can admire that one-line drawing. You can feel it was made by a master. You can wish you had that vivacious boldness. You can feel inspired, comforted. You can imagine what the one-line drawing represents, even in great detail, if you want to make enough effort. But now do something for me, and more importantly for you and for people you know who listen to you. Put down the one-line drawing you've admired, and take a long, inquisitive, skeptical, deep look at the thing the sketch was a sketch of.
Forget the one-line drawing. What do you see?
Congratulations. Now you know how to do better.
