“Intellectual humility” is a copout

Why builders need to raise, not lower, their epistemic bar

Jacques-Louis David , CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The TLDR version:

If you follow the latest social science research, the rationalist blogosphere, or Y Combinator’s Hacker News, you’ve probably encountered the calls to “intellectual humility.” Its proponents rightly caution us against the false and easy certainty characteristic of so many on all sides of the culture wars. But their implied solution is to renounce certainty as a goal—which is at best a copout, and at worst a capitulation to the deadliest dogmas around today. 

To the extent that we want to live well and build things worth building, we need to be right, a lot, and we need to know that we are—so that we have the courage and discernment to act on the knowledge we do possess. This is at least as important as “knowing what we don’t know,” and arguably moreso, if our goal is not merely to avoid missteps but to boldly and actively live well. 

The best thinkers—and thus the best builders—are not intellectually humble, but inte…