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The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong – Futurism – io9

Claim to be an expert: it makes people’s brains hurt. In a remarkable new study, Jan Engelmann and colleagues used fMRI to observe the brains of people who received expert advice during a financial simulation. They found that subjects thought differently about their decisions when they received the advice— even if it was bad advice— than when they worked on their own. As the researchers put it, “one effect of expert advice is to ‘offload’ the calculation of value of decision options from the individual’s brain.” Put another way, “the advice made the brain switch off (at least to a great extent) processes required for financial decision-making.”

No expertise, no problem. It’ll actually make your work more accurate if you claim to be an expert— if you’re certain that you’re an expert— but you actually aren’t.

Sounds counterintuitive, right? (Ed.: This is how you know I’m a successful futurist. I said what you didn’t expect. Now I’ll quote some Science to make my point.) In fact, as J. Scott Armstrong has shown over the last twenty or so years, advanced degrees and deep knowledge don’t make you a better forecaster or expert. Statistically, experts are hardly better at predicting the future than chimps throwing darts at a board. As Louis Menand put it, “The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge.”

And it’s perfectly natural to suffer from what Nassim Taleb calls “epistemic arrogance.” In all sorts of areas, we routinely overestimate our own certainty and breadth of knowledge, and underestimate what we don’t know. If you do that, you’re just like everyone else.

So knowing you’re not an expert should make you more confident in your work. And confidence is everything.

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