This is rarely talked about, at least not around me where I look. When you make something, something expressive, you are going to be misinterpreted. It is inevitable. I'm not saying lay down your white-out brush and never attempt clarity. But if you are always breaking and papering over and whitewashing your efforts to make sure they cannot possibly be misread, what you are doing is technical writing, not expressive writing.

Someone's going to misread you. The best you can do is the best you can do. Sometimes you will have to leave in the possibility of an interpretation you don't like, one you see, one that's painful to know is latent in this, because you do not have the skill to recapture what you would lose if you surgically removed this possibility.

There is no perfect creation. The closest creation to perfect is the millionth, not the millionth revision of one.

These days

The claim that there's too much political correctness these days raises my hackles. On the one hand, I'm really not a fan of "correctness" to begin with. True is true. What's correct? Someone's opinion. But my attitude here is nothing new at all. It isn't "these days." It's my permanent attitude, and I'd apply it to every era of human history.

If you're in a minority and you say "political correctness these days," I will fully sympathize, for the reason I just stated. For you, I will not assume that "THESE DAYS" is code for being unwilling to consider yourself prejudiced when you are. To state that differently, if a lot of prejudice gets directed at you, I will not infer that the actual problem is in you. Furthermore, I do agree that there is something going on THESE DAYS that's relatively different from how things were a generation ago: extreme polarization.

If you're a white guy (doesn't mean you aren't in any minorities, but bear with me) and I hear "political correctness THESE DAYS" as a complaint coming from you, I will be seeing Trump's face in my mind, unfortunately.

It's a double standard, I know. It is not strictly applied. But "political correctness THESE DAYS" is automatically suspicious to me, and I'm very willing to sympathize, but, see, I need an actual reason. I need a reason to see those words as something other than prejudice.

To NOT get this response from me, all you need to do, really, is talk about polarization instead. I don't care who you are or what country you live in. Polarization is quickly a sickness. Extreme polarization is ultimately worse than COVID-19.

As for political correctness THESE DAYS, a lot of it is about making sure people who are not like you feel welcome in society. If there are a few verbal misfires, it's well worth it for that larger goal. Most of the change (the "these days"), if we filter out polarization, is absolutely needed, even critical.

We've really gotta watch out for this ready assumption that there are two sides to every coin, and therefore two genres of human, one for each side, and that's that. Come on, fellow beings. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not a flat surface.

There are not two sides to every story. There are more than two sides to every story. There is not a reason for everything. There are multiple factors behind everything. There is not one causal sequel for an event. There are multiple causal sequelae, probably impossible to list, because there are so many.

That's how reality actually works. Binary numbers are great, but splitting a nation or a world into two parties is an unhelpful fantasy.

So no, I am not worried about people becoming more mindful of others these days. More of that, please! I'm worried about people who stop thinking, who lose curiosity, who are suddenly convinced they have nothing to learn. I worry whenever it's the general belief that to stop thinking is correct and good—versus incorrect and bad, the only other possibility, apparently—which means now we are not mindful enough.

And that is not a kind of person. It is no indication of being on a right side or a wrong side. This mindset, the way it feels to be in it, does not carry a barcode that identifies whether you're mistaken or not. It isn't one kind of person who thinks in black and white. That is what humanity is like. We've all got to watch out for it, and help each other be better, more observant, wiser.

Debatiary

I've noticed there are at least 5 quite different kinds of debate. What they're called isn't that important, so don't mind my names too much.

• Gladiatior
• Procedural
• Feminist
• Academic
• Collaborative

Televised debates are almost always gladiator debates. Representatives of factions duke it out, striving to show each other up and seize prime moments for one-liners. Two things set this debate style apart from others. First, it's done for the spectacle. Everything is pitched, above all, for the wider audience: pitched to persuade, pitched to win favor. Second, no one on stage can ever admit they're wrong or express much doubt. Not only would such an admission seem weak, but the speaker making it would be seen as failing to represent—or even as betraying—their ardent supporters, and they'd be punished.

The debates that go on in courtrooms and houses of deliberation are what I call procedural. They have clear rules that must be followed closely. These are similar to games, with distinct moves. They have a lot in common with gladiator debates, in that, for example, lawyers aren't primarily concerned with sharing the complete truth. Participants want to win for their clients or constituents, and they will use persuasion to do so. But procedural debates can also have an objective focus. A jury's purpose is to select the true story. A good lawmaker wants the law that works best for everyone.

Feminist debates are similar to what's seen in classroom discussions. Everyone has a perspective and this is politely respected. There is not a pressing need to establish fact versus illusion. That would be seen as rude. Another place this style is seen is in group therapy sessions. The emphasis is on sharing, respect, listening, and turn-taking.

Academic debates prioritize theories, interpretations, argumentation, and evidence. They have some of that in common with procedural debates and feminist debates. They are often competitive in the sense that participants will take clear positions and promote those. Ever human, academic debaters can still become offended when someone doesn't agree, which introduces an ironic element of interpersonal squabbling and feuding where, in theory, it ought to have disappeared.

Collaborative debates are what I consider true debates. They take all the best qualities of the others. Participants strive for truth, uncovering it by sharing and listening to and critiquing evidence. They take positions, but they freely change these, and they know that they can play Devil's Advocate and they won't offend their fellow participants. Everyone there knows that they are all there to advance their knowledge together. Winning means learning something new, helping to build a product, or even just imagining in a fresh way.

That last kind is rarely seen, except maybe between two or three close collaborators.

Stuck appearing

I have a recurring dream that there's a class I've been forgetting to go to all semester. However well I do in the others, this one is an F, probably an unavoidable F, come to think of it (how do I keep blotting it out so completely?), and I bet there's a test today or tomorrow. Fear rises. I don't remember how I'd find out when the next test is, or what's on it. Where did I put the syllabus? Don't I have one? It would be so embarrassing to go and see the professor—I probably won't. Sometimes, the dream includes the detail that I never finished high school, so I'm back in high school as an adult to get this out of the way, and I'm the only one like that, which makes me self-conscious. At first, I'm glad to finally get around to this. Then I realize I've somehow completely forgotten that class all quarter, and I'm going to fail it. So I'm back in high school remedially, but I'm failing it.

Considering that I spend so much time teaching high schoolers, and there actually were classes in college just like that, the only thing that's really surprising is that after I wake up, I still fully believe there's that panicky class I haven't been going to, and it takes a few minutes to convince myself it isn't true. On the other hand, I haven't finished my Master's project in 8 years and counting, so there's that.

This time, my mother was driving me to school. We stopped at a supermarket and spent a strange amount of time there, so I prepared mentally to arrive at lunch. She took a photo of the checkout conveyor and put it on Facebook (she's never used social media, and it didn't exist then). Back in the car whirring down the main road to school, I closed my eyes and imagined I was on a yellow bus; and I was, looking out the window. I tried to think about less typical things to photo and post (in the dream apparently my mom's conveyor belt snapshot was a total cliche). I fell asleep. When I woke up, my brother was to my left driving the car, his present age. "What are you doing here? How did you get here?" I asked. He sort of chuckled and said, "Hm. How DID I get here?"

Biosphere routines, feedbacks

I always feel slightly at odds with the term "climate change." Deep political stasis needed shattering with a slogan, and the phrase filled in. We had to unify and focus, pack up our smorgasbord of ecological concerns and send a single must-have item home. The old terrestrial alarms of the 19th and 20th centuries ended up putting decent people off. Numbing them. Too often our best information was seen as alarmism. It wasn't seen as fire alarms or canaries in coal mines, as notices we should at least hear and preferably investigate to see if we can help. As in all eras, some concerns were exaggerated, or turned out to be failed best guesses from partial facts, but so many weren't.

The stasis isn't unlike finding yourself saying "everything causes cancer!" to dismiss a new snippet on how you might get or avoid cancer. The rational action, of course, is to listen to the piece of information. It could save your life. (And it could save someone else's if you share.) If you believe that thinking about cancer will spoil your fun while you smoke barbecued lamb or spray paint a car door in an unventilated basement, I'll tell you what'll spoil your fun: dying unexpectedly. Talk about exaggerated concerns! It is untrue that everything causes cancer. It is true, however, that the dose makes the poison. So if you were rational, you wouldn't say "everything causes cancer!" You would listen and then try to glean what evidence there is and what dose of this factor could be threatening. Even too much water will poison you, but if a companion points out that the wild berries you're eating are poisonous, good luck with the reasoning that "everything is poisonous!"

"Everything's bad for the environment!" Are we on the same page about the difficulty we Earth aliens are having when we think about this? It's a lot easier to ruffle your flightless wings and stick your head in some mud. It's more difficult to think, "Wait a minute. Many things are bad for the environment. It isn't just one. But, hm, not everything is bad for the environment. And not everything is equally bad. Hm. So what are the worst things? And what are the best things? Where can we start today?"

It isn't actually that hard. It's just harder. And many people out there are setting the easy example of head-under-quicksand-it's-really-great-try-it. Humans love to imitate each other.

Climate change has helped focus our concerns. Most of us know it isn't just global warming from CO₂ that's looming on our radar. At the same time, I worry that "climate change" is both too vague and too specific. If someone doesn't feel as if a changing climate sounds all that bad—after all, we've lived through ice ages and hot spells, and plants will enjoy some extra CO₂—then "climate change" is just vague enough and just specific enough that this person may feel excused from considering any of the problems at all.

This leads to the question of whether we face one problem or many unconnected problems. And while there are many problems, I believe they are connected. These are dangers to the biosphere introduced by inefficiencies and inadequacies in the world's political and economic practices. In my opinion, we have plenty of information about how to upgrade those practices. The trouble is that it's happening so much more slowly than the speed of knowledge and understanding.

Sneak

Today I want to talk about Shakespeare. And not the stuff everyone always talks about—he was an actor, a playwright, a poet, likely gay, all actors at the time were men, he invented many words and phrases we still use, he was "the greatest," etc. I want to talk about three other things, one mentioned slightly less often, one mentioned rather less often than that, and one basically never mentioned. But I don't want to talk a lot. (Edit: too late.) I want to put the thoughts on the table for later.

One, mentioned slightly less often. Plays circa 1600 were still considered just about the lowest of low culture, and actors were looked down on or even despised. They were seen as riffraff. You know how some adults see young skateboarders in motley clothes as deficient human beings who should be cleared away? "NO SKATEBOARDING," don't you see the sign? Wait, why isn't there a sign! [Marches off to yell at some official.] In 1572, the British Parliament officially called actors "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." There were laws against hanging out in the streets while also having acting as a profession. Peculiarly like that sign against the skateboarders, right? There were guilds for other professions, the respectable ones, but unlike today, there was no Screen Actor's Guild protecting actors' human rights and wages.

Okay, I admit I'm exaggerating slightly. It had been rough, it had been like that, but things were changing, slowly, at least for several of the very best troupes. Shakespeare's troupe would perform for King James sometimes, and this association with royalty gave them some protection and extra funding. They would constantly perform for the public in open-air theaters, people of all classes, and not just in London, but also in the countryside. We have to remember the then-recent history of theater, which was still in evidence all around the country: actors are scum, plays are trash. Today Shakespeare is often seen as high culture, such high culture that we expect to feel dumb trying to decipher his torrent of metaphors, so much that if you merely claim that your movie or novel is based on Shakespeare, that immediately makes you seem legit.

This all very loosely and associatively reminds me of "Mad King Ludwig II" of Bavaria. Ludwig was called insane by his doctors—quite suspect doctors who happened to have been bribed by his enemies to find something wrong with him. What ensued from their examinations was 19th century fake news. Their critical evaluations of his psyche were splashed over the newspaper for everyone to read. In our era, that would already be seen as a terrible breach of privacy for a psychiatrist, but worse still was the diagnosis. Actually, Ludwig was just gay—hardly a mental illness, but sadly that isn't how people saw it back then. As I mention above, Shakespeare was probably gay or bisexual, though he married and had three children. How this might have interacted with his Catholicism, which was another taboo in early Church of England times, is a fascinating question, and who knows, might have something to do with the disappearance of all his books, manuscripts, diaries, etc.

Anyway, this young monarch of Bavaria was also popularly trashed for his building projects, which almost everyone considered a colossal waste of money. To be fair, the kingdom of Bavaria was not doing so well, and more money would certainly have been appreciated. But also to be fair, these were not state funds he was exhausting, but the family's funds. Now fast-forward a bit. His castles bring more money into Bavaria today, thanks to tourism, than any other industry there. And here's a commercial trifle many people care about: Neuschwanstein, his unfinished chef d'oevre on a mountaintop, gives us the image of a fairytale castle, the one lifted directly into Disney's logo. Our so-called mad king built the Disney castle before there was a Walt Disney alive to copy it. (If you're ever in that part of Bavaria and you haven't been up that mountain, I highly recommend the visit. You will not regret it.)

While King Ludwig may not have been a very good king—he wasn't even interested in being a king—his unparalleled vision probably mists into your mind when you think "fairytale castle." Today, we would likely consider Ludwig's extravagant construction projects not so much a waste of money, but rather a series of moon shot speculations that turned out unexpectedly well. Ludwig was not only insulted and smeared for turning "insane" enough to love men, interior decorating, and co-designing beautiful architecture. Tragically, he died young by assassination. It seems obvious that he was an artist born into the wrong profession: king.

Their biggest commonality is that the enduring value of their work was not recognized, and they had to contend with fairly brutal prejudices against their sexual orientation and even talents and religion (in Shakespeare's case).

Two, mentioned rather less often than that. Shakespeare and company were using a new technology. There has to be some reason we're virtually unaware of any plays after the ones by Sophocles in ancient Greece (most of us), and then suddenly we're aware of this Shakespeare bloke from 2000 years later. Does it strike you as odd, on reflection? What happened to all the other playwrights in that time? Were there any?

Yes, of course. Something new was happening that begins to explain this misalignment, and I mean something other than the printing press. Remember, there was no printing press in ancient Greece, and some of Shakespeare's plays were likely written out from memory by his fellow actors years after his death, so "lack of a printing press" doesn't explain the 2000 year gap at all.

Curious yet? Ok, what was changing was that for the first time in history, building technology was good enough that you could actually make a theater that was difficult to sneak into without paying. A few guards couldn't stop a crowd before. For the first time, you could charge everyone a price of admission, like at the movie theater. That's so standard for us today that we don't stop to wonder whether it began at some particular moment in time. It began in Shakespeare's day. Ticket prices were low—I've heard one penny—so basically anyone could attend, and yet barring people who didn't pay—to encourage payment—allowed at least the very best troupes to make a steady living. Few respected the actors or the art form, but if you were Shakespeare enough, you could be well-off from ticket sales. This here, my friendly readers, is a very early example of middle-class culture. It wasn't just kings paying for private entertainment or free religious/moral tales for everyone. Shakespeare was something like a Kickstarter baby. His generation of playwrights was more crowd-funded than any of its predecessors. (At least, this is what I read in a scholarly introduction to Antony and Cleopatra written by the editor, A.R. Braumuller. It's called "The Theatrical World," and it appears at the beginning of every book in the Pelican Shakespeare series.)

One other shift was that though the Catholic Church had long suppressed theater, which probably explains some of the big gap, England had split from the Catholic Church in 1534 with the foundation of the Church of England. I have no idea whether that was a factor, but it seems possible.

Three, one basically never mentioned. We give credit where it's due for words and phrases that come to us from Shakespeare. There are hundreds, thousands. But you know what's strange? When you compare Shakespeare to other top playwrights from his time, he actually invented (or recorded before anyone else) fewer words than they did. Not bad for a buncha riffraff, huh? It's just that his plays were so impactful that the words and phrases he did invent changed the whole language. Many consider his writing the beginning of modern English.

So—we especially remembered his inventions, even though there were fewer of them. Why?

There's a distant parallel in the works of the "Italians" Petrarch and Dante. I use quotation marks, because there was no Italian nation at the time, even no Italian language at the time. Those two poets spliced together the local languages, the bits they liked—kind of a "greatest hits" of ways people spoke around the peninsula—in their writings, synthesizing what eventually became modern Italian. They weren't the only good writers. But what they wrote stuck so much it defined a language, this time a language where no single language had existed before the publications. This all circa 1300, when, as I say, there was no such language as "Italian." In 1850, there still was no such language as "Italian," but Petrarch and Dante spoke up from 500 years before. Their works had gotten so much traction over the centuries that they were instrumental in standardizing a language for the new nation.

Incidentally, almost a total tangent. This "invention of a national language" is why Italian spelling is so consistent and intuitive that Italians don't even really use a word for "spelling," they just say "writing." The language "began" recently enough that the spellings haven't accumulated baggage from old pronunciation patterns. Like, "through" and "who" have baggage from ancient pronunciation patterns. Same with French words like "ancêtres," where the accent on ê denotes that the word used to be "ancestres," but the middle s is no longer pronounced. Also the final e is mostly silent, the s at the end is silent, and the n is not really pronounced anymore either, though it influences the a somewhat. None of that guff in Italian. To a native English speaker, spelling in Italian feels like cheating.

We had Chaucer and Shakespeare and then centuries of language evolution, and only then some modest attempts at standardizing and simplifying spelling, which had to honor the old and the new and countless works in between. With the new country of Italy, they just updated Petrarch and Dante and taught that to everyone. ("Just" is an atrocious disservice to how long this took and how much effort, given that only 2% of the peninsula spoke the language when the nation formed in 1861. But it sounds smoother, ha!)

Another similarly tongue-defining pair of works is the Tanakh/Old Testament (for Hebrew) and the King James Bible (for English, in fact contemporary with Shakespeare, and some believe he was on the writing team). Both have been widely read for so many generations that they've played a major role in defining and preserving the respective languages. We would have a language, but without a big culture of widely admired examples of how to express ourselves, the language would have drifted faster, and "English" words from 1600 would probably be totally incomprehensible by now. In a sense, the best writing almost conspires to keep itself remembered by sticking pins in the language. It says, "Slow down! Keep speaking my language my way so you can remember me!"

Think about this: if a video game console came out without any games, or with only completely bug-ridden, slapdash, unplayable games, then no one would bother to write any emulators for the console. No one would bootleg the games. No one would write games in the same style. Soon, no one would remember the console or the games. If there were any unique interaction idioms in those games, they'd be forgotten, and if you were to encounter them, they'd make no sense to you. This is something I like to investigate... I've toyed with many old classics whose interaction innovations simply didn't catch on, and though I find the awkwardness lovable, sometimes it's even more incomprehensible today than it was back then.

Do you remember VTech Socrates? You don't. It was my first and only game console as a kid. And it was decently educational, and the music settled so deep in my brain that when I finally heard it again recently on YouTube, for the first time since I was probably 8, it was as if I'd heard it a week ago. But there were almost no releases for Socrates, just the math/spelling/music skills cartridge that came with it and one other that could be bought. Yours truly should be the prime candidate for a person who would know what that other game was, yet I have no clue. The company went out of business quickly. You've never heard of it. Right? There is no VTech Socrates emulator. The games don't look like games from any other system.

Meanwhile so many people love Super Mario Bros (I'm not particularly a fan but I respect it), it's easy to get a Nintendo emulator. Because it's easy to get a Nintendo emulator, it's also easy to run any of the other games that came out for that system. Other games were very popular too, and keeping a clutch of these popular games alive means that less successful ones for the same console stay more hydrated and whole than they would have been otherwise. Because the "language" of that console, its style, its controllers, its interaction idioms, remains a prevalent influence, no one is going to forget how to run, play, or make any of those games very soon. That means someone who grows up playing only the newest games today will still be able to understand the old Super Mario Bros easily. The influence on the present keeps the past available. Looked at a certain way, it almost feels like a conspiracy. With religion, it feels even closer to conspiracy. But I'm just being colorful.

So yes, Shakespeare was a wordsmith and a gifted one, but his language is not more complicated than the language of his rivals (less complicated, actually), and he invented fewer words. But I suspect we remember his words (or the words of his troupe if you see the authorship as communal, and it was—plays were often written collaboratively in taverns) simply because the plays are better overall. Then again, I've never read or seen one of these rival plays by the likes of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, so I don't have more than a suspicion. Some of the rivals and rival works were more popular than Shakespeare at the time. Would I recognize the words they coined? I don't know.

For one argument that could back the "better overall" claim up, it's often said that Hamlet was the first "modern" character, the first character with so complex a personality, with realistic enough introspection and inner conflict that we don't see him as phony, abstract, stilted. The earliest high-water mark for lifelike character writing that's agreed on is Odysseus. But there's a big jump, both in time and in realism. Hamlet is kind of the Mona Lisa moment in character creation and development. All other characters before that just seem less real. Or so it's said in English departments! If that isn't a misconception, I can believe that this special incantation—the lifelike figment, the entirely believable ghost of a human machine—would be more memorable than inventing words or writing rococo sentences. Maybe "good characters" is the best explanation.

Certain questions

Most people judge a person's claims and opinions by that person's confidence. We don't always realize we are doing this. We may explain it to ourselves another way; it has the status of an unconscious bias.

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?

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.

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 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.