I've been lucky enough to know some amazing people. They're compassionate, endlessly interesting, genuine and smart. Really smart - Matilda smart. But surprisingly few of them believe this. If one of them is reading this now, I'm willing to bet that he or she has already decided that I must be talking about a group that doesn't include him or her. Part of what makes these people lovely is their humility, so this is probably better than the opposite, but it's still awful that they spend so much time thinking they're the dumbest person in the room. Just telling them they're not doesn't do much, since they're pretty well convinced anyone who reassures them is either just being nice, or else is just mistaken.

So, here's an attempt at convincing them with some armchair psychology (an increasingly rare part of the great philosophical tradition). Just for simplicity's sake, I'll use an arbitrary letter (K) as the name of an arbitrary smart person, and use male pronouns.

Factor 1: A false inference to "everyone has better thoughts than I do."
K is sitting in a talk or a seminar. He's got a couple half-formed thoughts drifting through his mind, and he's wondering whether he should try to voice them. Then someone next to K (let's call her, arbitrarily, 'J') pipes up and makes a comment that wasn't at all along the lines of anything he was thinking, and is a good point. K thinks to himself, "That was really smart. I wish I was half as smart as J."
The mistake: J's thought seems smarter to K's than his own because it comes as a surprise to him. Sometimes, K will have a thought that surprises him, but most of the time, his thoughts slowly gather in his head without much fanfare. Unexpected thoughts are more impressive, though, and since K wasn't inside J's head, he has the sense that her comment just dropped from the sky like a pearl of wisdom. In addition, K might implicitly assume that J already had the thoughts that were rolling around in his head (and that she had them more clearly), then decided that her question was better.

Factor 2: How it feels inside your head.
Let's stick with the earlier story. As K sits in the talk, he has a couple thoughts about what's going on, but they're only half-formed. So if he were to introspectively rate his level of mental activity, it wouldn't get more than a 4 out of 10. Then K hears J make her comment, and perhaps sees a few exchanges between her and someone else, where she makes a few more good comments. K thinks, "J must have had much better-formed thoughts in her head than I did, and more of them. At least a 9 out of 10 on the mental activity scale."
The mistake: K assumes (naturally) that J must, for each comment, have had a previous thought that was as well formed as its later linguistic expression. After all, those expressions are really K's best evidence for what was going on in J's head. Now, K has found himself voicing comments, and has found them coming together pretty much just as they're voiced - this is creepy when you notice it, so K assumes that it doesn't happen with other people.

Factor 3: How we respond to others' occasional bad comments.
The story has to get a little more broad here. Say that K and J spend a semester together in the same seminar. One day, K asks a question, doesn't understand the answer, asks again, then realizes that he had just misunderstood something. He feels dumb. The next day, J asks a question that K doesn't really understand, asks again, and then says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I was misunderstanding." K still doesn't understand exactly what was going on. He quickly forgets J's comment, and goes back to thinking of the surprising and smart things she said. But he beats himself up about his ill-guided question for months afterwards.
The mistake: J's question might have been just as confused as K's, but K doesn't have any sort of access to the thoughts that lead up to it, so he can't be sure if it issued entirely from a simple confusion. On the other hand, he has pretty good introspective access to what led up to his question, so he can be sure when it came from a simple confusion. Moreover, having been impressed by things J said in the past, he's inclined to interpret everything J says very charitably, whereas there's no question of interpretation in his own case. K also tends to forget the things he said that struck other people as really smart, in part because they didn't catch him by surprise (see Factor 1).


Back