How to Deal With Intellectual Insecurity

i suspect that this squirming feeling of self doubt is a persistent feature of learning. It arises from at least two principal causes: cognitive structure and social comparison with expert performers. You always know more than you knew before, but it doesn't always feel this way. There seem to be two strategies for dealing with this kind of intellectual insecurity. The relatively smart often apply this one to the relatively uninformed as a kind of brow beating. In other cases, it's intended to try to remove noise from a discussion so that those with the most experience can speak the loudest.