A Conference on Intellectual Humility

where I got to meet Annie Duke and Kmele Foster

Shadi Hamid wrote,

By chance, as Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza, I found myself at a summit on “intellectual humility” hosted by the John Templeton Foundation. It felt self-indulgent to discuss a philosophical concept with seemingly little relevance to the conflict. When it came to life and death, did any of this really matter? But what I found was that it did.

I attended that same conference. I will refer to the event as IH, for Intellectual Humility.

Hamid’s piece does not report on IH. Instead, his WaPo op-ed gives his perspective on the Israel-Gaza conflict. You can tell where he stands by his use of the phrase “as Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza,” rather than, say, “as Israel reeled from the shock of the October 7 pogrom.”

I have the opposite purpose. I am not going to connect IH to Israel-Gaza. I want to describe what went on at IH itself. The Gaza conflict did not come up in any of the formal sessions. It also did not come up in any informal discussions that I had with other participants. But I was distracted and exhausted by the events in Israel and Gaza, to the point that when I talked with Kmele Foster at dinner it was a long time before I realized who I was talking to.

I find the term “Intellectual Humility” to be too imprecise. If it were up to me, we would use Julia Galef’s phrase “Scout Mindset,” where you try to seek the truth with as much of an open mind as possible. This is as opposed to that Galef calls “Soldier Mindset,” where you keep your mind closed and instead focus on defending your opinions. See my book review, Drop Your Intellectual Defenses. See also the first item here.

There were only about 40 participants in the summit. I presume I was there because somebody at the sponsoring foundation had read my book, The Three Languages of Politics.

Hamid was probably the most famous person at IH. The participants I most wanted to meet were: Annie Duke, author of several books, including Thinking in Bets; and Kmele Foster, who is very difficult to characterize. I might say that he is part tech bro, part black intellectual (see this, for example), part podcast producer…he would probably shudder at some or all of these labels.

There were three sets of actors at IH. One set was the representatives of the John Templeton Foundation, which organized and funded IH. A second set was the participants, those of us who were brought in to discuss the topic. A third set was from a consulting firm, which was there to facilitate the discussions, using what I think of as formal brainstorming techniques. I had seen such tools used in a corporate setting in the early 1990s.

This was not a “sit and watch” conference. We were there to engage in group exercises, to discuss, and to produce documents that articulated actionable ways to achieve intellectual humility in society.

I very much appreciated this participatory approach. But the schedule was grueling. We worked hard. Other than meals, there were no breaks. I told one of the consultants “Have a participatory, working conference. Or have a conference with no breaks. But not both.”

The brainstorming process began with efforts to get us to define Intellectual Humility. We also were tasked with describing the current state: polarization, divisive media, unable to reach consensus on facts, etc. In contrast, the desired future state: people able to have reasonable discussions, Jonathan Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge” functioning, etc. We were also tasked with describing the stages that might take us from here to there.

There was a tension within the conference, which I only tuned into near the very end. The consulting firm was using techniques intended to facilitate open-ended brainstorming. But the Templeton Foundation was looking for people to whom to give grants. Other than a few of us, most of the participants came with a goal of obtaining money for their existing projects.

When I realized what was going on, I was reminded of the joke about the boy with the hammer who thinks everything is a nail. The typical participant came with a particular hammer, trying to convince the foundation that it could nail Intellectual Humility.

The rent-seeking agenda of most participants ran counter to the brainstorming agenda of the consultants. No really new ideas were written up. Many of the participants were academics, so a lot of the ideas were “more research on ____.” Several topics were proposed that might have sparked new ideas, but since they were not anyone’s hammer, they were left unexplored.

Of the hammers, I thought that Annie Duke’s was the most interesting. She wants to embed the techniques of decision science into the K-12 curriculum. These include probabilistic reasoning and other good habits that you will find in Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset and elsewhere. These habits are designed to take you out of soldier mindset, which means you would act with more intellectual humility.

Duke alludes to studies that show that these tools can be taught to adults, resulting in better life outcomes. There is not yet much evidence regarding teaching these tools to children.

I have no doubt that the world would be a better place if, by the time they are adults, people would learn decision science and be able to transfer their classroom understanding to their everyday lives. But that is a big if.