Two Minds Blog

  By now you have probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect : A reliable finding across multiple domains of expertise, showing that experts on a topic know the limits of their own knowledge, but people who know only a little about it are unaware of their own limitations. This can also be stated in terms of a gap between one's competence  in a topic area and one's confidence  about it, with over-confidence being a typical characteristic of less-competent individuals. There is a slight tendency on the high end, as well, for experts to be overly  pessimistic about their own performance, with their results on average tending to be slightly better than they give themselves credit for. The logical conclusion from this extensive body of knowledge is that one should probably evaluate people's expertise, rather than how confident they seem, in deciding whether to take them seriously or not. The Dunning-Kruger effect is not enormous, by the way, even though it is statistical...

  The simulation hypothesis  is popular these days in certain high-tech-influencer circles. It's the idea that we are all currently living in a world like the one envisioned in the Matrix movies, where everything we see and do is produced by a computer program. If you haven't heard this one before, start with philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2003 paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?", which presents a mathematical-odds-based argument. Some versions of the argument suggest that the more unlikely the events that have occurred -- for instance, the possibility that Donald Trump would win the White House not just once, but for two non-consecutive terms -- the less likely it is that the world we live in is the actual "base level" world rather than an interesting simulation experiment. For a fuller contemporary treatment of these ideas, I recommend David Chalmers's 2022 book Reality+ .  In a recent post, I also tackled the question of whether it makes ...