8 Responses

1. A topic that I am definitely having to have some Epistemically humility with is the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake. Everything in the news is very doomsday on the topic, but as I have talked with people who are in the natural resource industry, their feelings aren’t quite concrete. It has led to more research and talking on my part. My opinion is still up in the air but definitely more in the middle than before.

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2. When I was in 5th grade, my teacher taught us that blood is blue, and it turns red when exposed to oxygen, but recently I learned that it is red the whole way through, it just looks blue because of how light works.

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3. In a college religion course the professor lectured on faith one day. He said we often think we know what something looks like, such as the front of a house. Front door, windows, porch, peaked roof etc. But houses are three dimensional, so someone else may have a better understanding of the side of the house or the back of the house, or maybe they are inside the house. Just because I had never seen the back of the house didn’t mean it wasn’t real. I think about that house often when I want to hold on to a narrow preconceived idea. My example is a little silly and not the most recent, but a friend and I agreed while talking about married couple’s age gaps, 5 years was a big gap and 10 years was the absolute max. But a couple years later I dated and married someone 15 years older than I am. Eighteen wonderful years later, I cringe to think if I had held on to my original idea and chose not to get to know him better only because of a preconceived idea.

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4. My Uncle was a teacher at a large city highschool with a diverse student body. He told me that if you were, when not in a person’s presence, able to recall a person’s race, color, ethnicity, or national origin then that meant you were prejudice and that prejudiced people were horrible people. He was important in my life so I just accepted and believed what he said, as if he was telling me that it’s important to eat your vegetables. I felt terrible for a very long time because I was able to recall these things about people I knew. I talked to other people, did some reading and studying, and a lot of thinking. Finally, much later, I told him that I disagreed with him. If one can notice and remember that someone wears glasses, or the color of their hair or eyes, is in a wheelchair, or wears a wedding ring, has pierced ears, or their sex, that is not a evidence of being prejudiced to be able to recall those details, and neither is being able to recall race, color, ethnicity, or national origin. I thought that the issue was whether you prejudged a person’s character, physical ability, intelligence, or other factor, based on those or other traits. My Uncle did not like my challenging him and told me I was just ignorant and I should not question my elders. This was, I think, the first time I challenged what I was told by an authority figure, and changed my belief, but it certainly wasn’t the last.

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5. I had a hard time finding something recent as an example, even after asking my family…who I thought would enjoy the chance to tell me when I was last wrong about something! The only recent thing I can remember that is not just about pure facts, is when certain medication needed adjusting. To put this in context, I was a biochemist and worked as a pharmaceutical chemist for much of my career before quitting to have a family. I tend to think of myself as fairly well educated when it comes to pharmaceuticals, in particular the medication that needed adjusting. I understand it at a biochemical level (I thought), and I was convinced there would be negative consequences of an adjustment, both mentally and physically… because, you know, I “know it all” apparently. (sigh) So I wrote a long message to my doctor, explaining how I was feeling, knowing that she was going to increase it. I had all these justifications as to why that would’t work. Had the responses all lined up. I thought I had all the side effects figured out. I thought I knew more than my doctor, apparently. To skip to the end – So I took the meds as my Dr. prescribed them – and to my complete shock – it was night and day in the most wonderful way! A bitter pill to swallow (literally), I realized that I could have been feeling better a long time ago if I had just trusted my doctor instead of thinking I knew it all. After applying a healthy dose of humor to the situation to alleviate my shame, I tried to figure out why the medication was working, and where my “facts” were wrong. I still haven’t figured it out – despite my research – and I suppose that might be the other lesson in this for me. Sometimes, it’s okay to just not understand something to the depth that you want. I don’t need to know the exact mechanism for how this medication works, in order to accept the fact that it works in the complete opposite way that I thought for sure I “knew.” In many ways it’s easier for me to be wrong about something when it’s not what I consider in my circle of expertise/experience/interest. I tend to be “Epistemically humble” when it’s outside of that bubble. And well.. in your words “Maybe the sweet spot is confidence in your method for figuring out what’s true, but a light grip on your actual conclusions. Like a scientist who is confident that the scientific method can lead to answers, but open to their own fallibility and limited experience.” – I didn’t have a method for figuring out what was true at the time, because my ego and past experiences with being right about things such as that, very much got in the way. I need to learn to develop that sweet spot you refer to – in all things!

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6. Thankfully, I did find an example of when I had an opinion and then changed it(today) when I was studying Latin pronunciation. I thought my mom was wrong(she did not know that I thought that) when she said to pronounce the ending -us a certain way; I thought the ‘u’ made a sound like “uh.” The book said to pronounce ‘u’ like the ‘u’ in “put,” but I ended up pronouncing it like “uh,” without realizing my mistake, and I stoutly believed I was right. However, after I said “put” several times in my head, I realized I was pronouncing -us incorrectly. In fact, “uh” is the sound used for the short ‘a’.

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7. Back in the late 1900’s (90’s) I used to work at a shoe store. I was trained to use the foot measurement tool and used it a lot to fit people to the correct size…..or at least i thought I did. At some point I began getting holes in my socks where my big toe was. I chalked it up to poor quality socks. My feet hurt a lot and I wrote it off as a side effect to running 2-4 miles daily. Fast forward to 20016 and I was still buying new socks because of the holes and my feet still hurt. My wife suggested that I was wearing the wrong size shoes and that it was the root cause to the holes in my socks. I disagreed and mentioned that I worked at shoe store in the 90’s and know how to fit people for shoes. She disagreed and wanted to measure my feet. I reluctantly let her trace my feet on paper and she went to work looking for shoes. She ordered me a pair of shoes a size and a half larger than what i was wearing. I didn’t believe it but went along with it anyway since it was free returns. Well, those new shoes she ordered me felt amazing, my feet stopped hurting because they weren’t scrunched into shoes that didn’t fit. And the best part was no more holes in my socks! It’s a running joke now whenever I get new shoes that I know what I’m doing because I worked in a show store lol. I wonder how many people out there that I fitted for shoes are still walking around in shoes that don’t fit.

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8. At the beginning of my chemistry course this year, I was getting bad grades on several of my lab write-ups even when I felt really confident in my answers. As a result I thought that the teacher was an unfair grader. When I complained, she gave me her reasons why she marked me off so much. In addition, my dad told me that she was just pushing me academically to be more precise and accurate when writing my lab write-ups. Given what they said, I soon realized that the teacher was in fact being a fair teacher, and was just pushing me academically. I adapted, learned how to write more carefully, and fell in love with chemistry.

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