Charles Bukowski wrote, somewhere in his enormous body of cantankerous late-career output, that the problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
The line is, by now, one of those quotes that floats around the internet in various pseudo-inspirational permutations, usually attached to a photograph of Bukowski looking suitably battered, and usually deployed as a piece of self-flattering shorthand by people who want to indicate that their own doubts are evidence of their intelligence rather than, as is sometimes also the case, evidence of something else.
I want to take the quote seriously, because the quote is, on close examination, doing something more interesting than the standard pseudo-inspirational packaging suggests. The quote is, more accurately, a structural observation about a particular feature of how cognitive ability and social confidence are distributed in the wider population, and the observation, on the available evidence, holds up considerably better than most quotes of its kind.
The observation is not, on close examination, what most people who quote it think it is. The standard reading is that intelligent people are appropriately humble and stupid people are inappropriately bold, and the world would be better if the humble were running things rather than the bold. This reading is, in some respects, accurate. The reading is also, on closer examination, missing what is actually being described.
What the quote is, in fact, observing
The quote is observing a particular structural relationship between two variables that the wider culture tends to confuse. The variables are the underlying cognitive ability of a person and the visible confidence with which the person operates in public. The wider culture tends to treat these two variables as approximately correlated. The treatment assumes that the more cognitively capable a person is, the more confident they will be about their conclusions, and the less cognitively capable they are, the less confident.
The treatment is, on the available evidence, almost exactly wrong. The actual relationship is, on close examination, the opposite. The more cognitively capable a person is, the more aware they tend to be of the various ways in which any given conclusion they hold could turn out to be incomplete, miscalibrated, or just wrong. The less cognitively capable a person is, the less aware they tend to be of these possibilities, because the awareness itself requires the cognitive resources that the less capable person, by definition, has fewer of. The result is that the people whose conclusions are most worth taking seriously are, on average, the people who advance them with the most qualifications and the most willingness to revise, and the people whose conclusions are least worth taking seriously are, on average, the people who advance them with the most confidence and the least willingness to revise.
This is, in some real way, what the wider psychological literature has been calling the Dunning-Kruger effect for the last twenty-five years, though Bukowski had been observing it, in his own register, for considerably longer. The effect involves the systematic underestimation of one’s own ignorance by people who are, in fact, ignorant about the subject at hand. The underestimation produces, in such people, the visible confidence that the wider culture, in its usual misreading, then attributes to underlying capacity. The capacity is not, in most cases, what is producing the confidence. The confidence is, more accurately, the visible feature of the absence of the awareness that the capacity would have produced.
The version of this I have observed in my own life
I want to describe a particular pattern I have observed in dinner parties across the various cities I have lived in over the last fifteen years, because the pattern is the structural illustration of what Bukowski was describing.
At any dinner party of, say, ten people, there are usually, on average, two or three guests who do most of the talking. These guests are, in most cases, also the guests who advance their views with the most confidence. They are the ones who, when a contested subject comes up, produce immediate, well-formed, declarative opinions about it. They are the ones who appear, by every external measure, to be the most intellectually impressive presences in the room.
What I have noticed, over years of observing this pattern, is that the guests who actually know the most about whatever subject is currently being discussed are almost never the ones doing most of the talking. The actual subject-matter experts in the room, when one identifies them after the fact by their actual credentials or accumulated expertise, are usually somewhere in the quieter half of the table. They have been listening. They have been, in many cases, slightly uncomfortable with the confident declarations being produced by the visible talkers, because they know enough about the subject to know that the actual situation is considerably more complicated than the talkers are making it out to be. They have not, in most cases, intervened. The intervening would require them to publicly contradict the talkers, which would require them to assert their own greater expertise, which would require them to do the very thing their actual expertise has, in most cases, taught them not to do, which is to advance conclusions with more confidence than the underlying evidence warrants.
The quieter half of the table is, accordingly, structurally silent in the conversations that the visible talkers are dominating. The silence is not, on close examination, a failure of intellectual courage. The silence is, more accurately, the natural consequence of having developed enough actual expertise in something to be aware of how much one does not know, even about the things one does know. The awareness is incompatible with the kind of confident declaration the talkers are producing. The talkers, accordingly, win the visible conversation. The dinner-party-goers, walking home, remember the talkers as the most impressive people at the dinner. The actual experts, who said almost nothing, are remembered, if at all, as having been pleasant but not particularly memorable.
This pattern repeats. The pattern has, on the available evidence, repeated for as long as dinner parties have been a feature of human social life. The pattern is what Bukowski was, in his own way, describing.
Why the pattern is so structurally stable
What is striking about the pattern is how structurally stable it has been across cultures and across centuries. The same configuration shows up in the meetings of medieval church councils, in the dinner parties of nineteenth-century Paris, in the editorial meetings of twentieth-century newspapers, and in the comment sections of twenty-first-century social media platforms. The visible volume of confidence is, in each of these venues, almost inversely correlated with the underlying knowledge. The configuration is so consistent that one is forced to conclude that it is not, in any meaningful sense, an accident. The configuration is, more accurately, a structural feature of how cognitive ability and social confidence interact in human populations.
The structural feature is, on close examination, the following. The capacity to be confident in one’s conclusions is, in some real way, the capacity to not notice the various ways in which one’s conclusions could be wrong. The not-noticing requires either ignorance or willful suppression. Ignorance produces the not-noticing for free. Suppression produces it through effort. The intelligent person, who is by structural necessity aware of the various ways in which their conclusions could be wrong, would have to suppress the awareness in order to produce the same level of visible confidence. The suppression is uncomfortable. The suppression is, in most cases, not performed. The intelligent person, accordingly, operates with visibly less confidence than the unintelligent person, regardless of whose conclusions are actually more accurate.
This is the structural inversion. The inversion is what produces the world Bukowski was describing. The world is one in which the people who would be best positioned to advance accurate conclusions are, by the structural nature of their own cognitive operation, advancing them with too little confidence to be heard above the much louder advancement of less accurate conclusions by people who, by the same structural logic, are not aware enough of their own limitations to be quieter about them.
What this means, practically
The honest implication of all this, for anyone trying to figure out whose conclusions to take seriously in a given environment, is uncomfortable. The standard cultural heuristic of attending to the confident voices is, on the available evidence, almost exactly backwards. The voices worth attending to, in most environments, are not the loudest or the most assured. The voices worth attending to are, more accurately, the ones that produce their conclusions with visible qualification, willingness to revise, and explicit acknowledgment of what they do not know.
This is, in some real way, a difficult heuristic to operate by. The qualified voices are, by structural design, harder to listen to than the confident ones. The qualified voices require the listener to do more cognitive work, because the listener has to evaluate the various qualifications and figure out what the speaker is actually claiming under the various hedges. The confident voices require none of this work. The confident voice has, in most cases, already done the work of resolving the qualifications, in the direction of the speaker’s preferred conclusion, before producing the statement. The listener, by accepting the confident statement, is, in some real way, importing the speaker’s resolution without having to perform it themselves.
This is why the confident voices dominate. The confident voices are, in some real way, the lower-friction option for everyone in the room. The lower-friction option is the option most listeners take, in most environments, most of the time. The taking-of-the-lower-friction-option is what produces the cultural condition Bukowski was describing.
What I have, in the last few years, started doing
What I have, in the last few years, started doing about this, in my own modest way, is to make a deliberate effort to listen to the quieter half of the table at dinner parties, and to ignore, where possible, the confident declarations of the visible talkers. The effort is partial. The effort is, however, on the available evidence, producing a slightly better information set than my previous default of attending to whoever was talking loudest. The slightly better information set is, in some real way, what I would have wanted to have access to all along.
The trade-off is that I am, in the process, missing whatever the visible talkers are saying. The visible talkers are, in most cases, saying something. The something is not, in most cases, accurate. The not-attending to it is, on examination, less of a cost than the wider culture would suggest. The wider culture is, in some real way, structurally calibrated to overweight the visible talkers and to underweight the actual experts. The recalibration, in one’s own information diet, is, on the available evidence, a small but real improvement.
Bukowski did not, in the original line, propose a solution to the problem he was describing. The problem is, on examination, not the kind of problem that admits of a solution. The configuration is structural. The configuration will, in all likelihood, persist for as long as the underlying cognitive dynamics that produce it persist, which is, on the available evidence, for as long as humans continue to operate as cognitive beings. The configuration is, more accurately, a feature of the world to be navigated rather than a problem to be fixed.
The navigating is what is available. The navigating involves, in any given environment, the deliberate effort to identify the qualified voices and to take them more seriously than the confident ones. The effort is not glamorous. The effort is, in some real way, what intellectual seriousness in the actual contemporary world consists of. Bukowski, in his own gruff way, was telling us this fifty years ago. The wider culture has not, on the available evidence, particularly taken it on board. The not-taking-it-on-board is, in some real way, what continues to produce the world he was complaining about. The taking-it-on-board is, more modestly, what is available to anyone who has been paying attention.
