What is Intellectual Humility?



Have you ever stopped to think about how much smarter and how much more you know now than, say, 20 years ago? You might congratulate yourself on learning some stuff, but what about if we turned that question on its head- think about how dumb you are now compared to what you will know 20 years in the future. That's not quite so easy to grasp, possibly because can't grasp what's in our future. Or it just may be our lack of intellectual humility. We all have some difficulty admitting that we may not know everything, or that we might be wrong about something or other. While we may understand the concept of the Dunning-Kruger effect, we don't see it in ourselves. And we all suffer from it at some time, in some ways, although we may never be aware of it.

Intellectual humility is the mindset that tells us we always have more to learn, as long as we are open to the possibility, and are willing to visit the idea that other viewpoints may be valuable. It could be the one trait that allows us to get smarter than we are. -via Digg


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Dumb people are over-confident in their abilities, and they never ask questions before doing something. Intellectuals not only have less confidence, but assume everyone thinks about things the way they do. And they ask how to do something the right way, instead of assuming they're doing it the right way. Obviously there's exceptions to every rule, but overall it's mostly true I'd say. (Having worked the last 25 years in Retail)
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On a scale, form 1 to 10, with 10 being the most intelligent and 1 being worse than useless, the difference between a 9 and a 10 is that a 9 knows everything and a 10 knows nothing.
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