21: The Art and Science of Knowing You Don't Know (with Mark Alfano)

We live in confusing times. Politics is polarizing. Opinions clash on many topics leading to heated discussions. Take environmental change and what to do about it, the best ways to achieve prosperity, or the threats and opportunities of our globalized economy. Are we ready to admit that we often actually don’t understand what’s going on? Mark Alfano joins Igor and Charles to discuss the importance of ‘intellectual humility’ when seeking a more accurate grasp of reality, the perils of poorly designed virtue education programmes, Nietzsche and his take on the intellectual virtues, and the training of machine-learning algorithms to mine our digital footprints for signs of virtuous behaviour. Igor raises concerns that embracing uncertainty may hobble vital action, Mark talks of the dangers of creaking open your social media newsfeed too wide, and Charles learns that fostering contempt for oneself and one’s group may be essential on the path to truth. Welcome to Episode 21.

Special Guest: Mark Alfano.

Links:

• Mark Alfano's Website
• I Know You Are, But What Am I?: Anti-Individualism in the Development of Intellectual Humility and Wu-Wei - Robinson & Alfano (2016)
• Nietzsche's Moral Psychology : Mark Alfano (author) : 9781107074156 : Blackwell's
• Development and validation of a multidimensional measure of intellectual humility - Alfano et al (2017)
• A cross-cultural assessment of the semantic dimensions of intellectual humility - Christen, Alfano, Robinson (2017)
• How ‘Intellectual Humility’ Can Make You a Better Person -- Science of Us
• Wisdom in Context - Igor Grossmann (2017)
• The Strengths of Wisdom Provide Unique Contributions to Improved Leadership, Sustainability, Inequality, Gross National Happiness, and Civic Discourse in the Face of Contemporary World Problems - Grossmann & Brienza (2018)
• Wisdom, bias, and balance: Toward a process-sensitive measurement of wisdom-related cognition - Brienza, Kung, Santos, Bobocel, Grossmann (2018) — Preprint available at https://psyarxiv.com/p25c2
• Situation-Based Contingencies Underlying Wisdom-Content Manifestations: Examining Intellectual Humility in Daily Life | The Journals of Gerontology: Series B | Oxford Academic - Zachry, Phan, Blackie, Jayawickreme (2018)
• Constructing and Validating a Scale of Intellectual Humility @ The Intellectual Humility Capstone Conference (2015) - YouTube
• Online Personalization Creates Echo Chamber to Affirm Biases - The New York Times
• Alessandra Tanesini – Philosopher, Sailor, Wine buff
• The Puzzle of Humility and Disparity (2020) | Daniel Howard-Snyder, Dennis Whitcomb, and Heather Battaly - (2020)