Episode 310: Intellectual Humility and the “Internet of Us”

If we believed in click bait, we would title this "one weird historical thinking trick to save your country." But it's not, so you get a boring but highly accurate title. For this is the first of special series of occasional episodes through the rest of 2023 that explore the connection between intellectual humility and historically thinking. Since the podcast began, we’ve made the claim that historical thinking “gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility.” But what exactly do we mean by intellectual humility? What is it? What’s it for? Why should we want it? And how is it related to historical thinking? In the last decade there’s been an explosion of interest in the concept of intellectual humility. One of the leaders in the field has been Michael Patrick Lynch. He’s the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he is also Director of the Humanities Institute. Lynch began his professional career as an epistemologist, writing books with titles like  The Nature of Truth, and Truth as One and Many. But  then In 2015, Lynch published what now seems like an even more prophetic and insightful book than it was at the time, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. In it he explored the philosophical implications of the rapid shift to a knowledge economy, and the cataracts of information available to us from the devices that we carry around in our pockets. He has since published Know-It All Society: Truth and Arrogance in American Political Culture, which is a title that seems almost too on-the-nose. For Further Investigation To find out more about historical thinking, go here; for an introduction, try Episode 39 Michael Lynch's TED talk on "How to see past your own perspective and find truth" Michael Lynch's "Conviction and Humility", the focus of the second half of the discussion, was a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility Lynch's Exercise in Historical Reimagining–do the following without using information available on the internet. What is the capital of Bulgaria? Is a four-stroke outboard engine more efficient than a two-stroke? What is the phone number of my US representative? What is the best-reviewed restaurant in Austin, Texas, this week? Transcript Al: [00:00:00] This episode of historically thinking was made possible by a grant from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley. To learn more, go to ggsc.berkeley.edu.  Welcome to Historically Thinking, a podcast about history and how to think about history. For more on this episode, go to historically thinking.org, where you can find links and readings related to today's podcast, comment on the conversation, and sign up for our newsletter. And consider becoming a member of the Historically Thinking Common Room, a community of Patreon supporters. Since this podcast began, we've made the claim that historical thinking gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense. And that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility.  But what exactly do we mean by intellectual humility? What is it? What's it for? Why should we want it? And how is it related to historical thinking? In the last decade, there's been an [00:01:00] explosion of interest in research over the concept of intellectual humility. One of the leaders in the field has been Michael Patrick Lynch. He's the Board of trustees. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. where he is also director of the humanities Institute. Lynch began his professional career as an epistemologist, writing books with titles, like The Nature of Truth and truth as one and many. But then in 2015 Lynch published, what now seems, and even more prophetic,