Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.
Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.
People and society are largely well calibrated. People who are deemed (by themselves or society) to be bad at maths, at sports, at arts, etc. are usually bad at them.
People and society are not perfectly calibrated.
People are sometimes under-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them lacking confidence.
People are sometimes over-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them being too confident.
Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing.
Most people would fail at passing the bar and the USMLE. This is why most people do not attempt them, and this is why our society tells them not to.
I believe it is load bearing, but in the straightforward way: it would be catastrophic if everyone tried to study things far beyond their abilities and wasted their time.
I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.
Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.
Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.
I believe...
People and society are largely well calibrated. People who are deemed (by themselves or society) to be bad at maths, at sports, at arts, etc. are usually bad at them.
People and society are not perfectly calibrated.
People are sometimes under-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them lacking confidence.
People are sometimes over-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them being too confident.
Most people would fail at passing the bar and the USMLE. This is why most people do not attempt them, and this is why our society tells them not to.
I believe it is load bearing, but in the straightforward way: it would be catastrophic if everyone tried to study things far beyond their abilities and wasted their time.
I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.