Samin Jahan

Professor Jamison

FIQWS 10108

17 October 2018

The Dangerous Levels of Confidence Among Us

            Stephen Hawking once said “the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”. What he means by this is that not knowing something (ignorance) isn’t harmful to the presence of knowledge but claiming false information as knowledge is harmful to your knowledge. In other words, the people who are wrong and are too ashamed to accept it are led to darkness. This is a common issue in society where people force themselves to believe they’re right even though they’re wrong. This is addressed more elaborately by Kathryn Schultz on a TED talk about “on being wrong”.

Kathryn Schultz begins her talk by introducing a common world view that the human species is fallible, and everybody is prone to make mistakes. But she makes it clear that she wants to dig deeper into that. For example, one might accept his/her little mistake, unintentional action or a miscalculation. However, when it comes to all the beliefs that the person holds in present time, it no longer can be accepted as a mistake. Kathryn states and covers three things in her TED talk about this matter. Why we get stuck in the feeling of right? Why it’s such a problem to have this feeling? And to convince us that it’s possible to get out of feeling stuck.

First, I would like to say I agree with Kathryn on this topic based on my experiences with society. Many people today are trapped inside this bubble of always being right and push away things aren’t right according to them. The experience I have is I’ve noticed this sort of stubbornness among students who consider themselves as intelligent generally or in studies. I can confirm this because these students had the same assumptions about me that Kathryn included in her talk. The assumptions these people make about you, when you disagree with them are either ignorance, moronic, or evil. However, there are also many intelligent students who are the opposite that I’ve met.

This video reminded me of another TED talk by Michael Patrick about “How to See Past Your Own Perspective and Find Truth”. He touched on two points that were very similar to what Kathryn talked about. One was the problem of people being stuck in their information bubbles and using the bubble to view reality in that confined way. The second part was when Patrick talked about having humility, which in his talk means having a self-openness to improvement and understanding that you don’t know it all.

There were many rhetorical situations involved in Kathryn’s talk. Her use of media/design helped the audience understand more clearly what she is trying to convey and achieve her ultimate goal which is to convince the audience that it’s possible to step outside the feeling of very right about everything. This leads to the second important rhetorical situation which is stance. Kathryn states the central problem of her talk to be a problem to individuals in their specific lives and to society. This statement was her taking a position and she develops an argument in favor of that, in order to persuade the audience.

I enjoyed this talk a lot although I did not understand a part of her speech which brings up a deep philosophical question. She says feeling wrong is the same as feeling right, but how do you know if you’re right or wrong then? Anyways I didn’t understand how this relates to the moral of her talk. I guess the answer would just be “I don’t know…”.

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