The Social Animal

Epistemological modesty is the knowledge of how little we know and can know. Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life. This attitude is built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery.

The science writer Jonah Lehrer sometimes reminds his readers of Karl Popper’s distinctions between clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies. You can take apart a clock, measure the pieces, and see how they fit together. Clouds are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. It’s

But the wanderer endures uncertainty. The wise wanderer holds off and restrains, possessing what John Keats called negative capability, the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“When I come out of the state, I’m changed. I see the world differently. Daniel Siegel says it’s like you’ve been walking through a forest at night, shining a flashlight to light your way. Suddenly you turn off the flashlight. You lose the bright beam of light on the narrow spot. But gradually your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and you can

The modest person uses both methods, and more besides. The modest person learns not to trust one paradigm. Most of what he knows accumulates through a long and arduous process of wandering.

Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded.

Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two.

The manager of a Brunswick pool-table store tried an experiment. One week he showed customers to his lowest priced pool table first, at $329, and then worked his way up. The ones who bought any table that week spent on average $550. The next week he showed customers to the $3,000 table first and worked his way down. That week, the average sale topp

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, but of his own weakness in the face of it. He knows that his mind will seize on the first bit of data it comes across and build a universal theory aroun