Anna Dickens
We’ve all met that person. Someone who knows just enough about a subject to be confident in their assertions, but not quite enough to be right.
It’s a dangerous combo, and not just on pub quiz teams.
I call it the sophomore problem. In the US, where I grew up, we have a four-year high school and university model where we assign a label to each year: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. This naming convention originated in the UK but, as we Americans are prone to do, we’ve made it our own.
Sophomore is derived from the Greek – sophos – meaning clever or wise and – moros –meaning foolish. The “wise fool” is the perfect encapsulation of that second year of study: you’ve graduated from being a naive “fresh man” and now you think you know it all.
You have an answer for everything and the confidence to lecture incoming freshmen, but you are often oblivious to the depth of knowledge you lack and the scale of learning yet to come.
This phenomenon is similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people with low ability overestimate their skills, while those with high ability underestimate that prowess.
Stephen Hawking said it well: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Or take it from Confucius: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
But diagnosing the problem clearly doesn’t solve it, otherwise there wouldn’t be more than 2,500 years of human history between these proverbs.
Lately, I’ve been noting how the sophomore problem plays out in policy development, where the stakes are significantly higher than even the most generous pub quiz.
Politicians can’t possibly be expected to have the necessary depth of expertise on every issue they legislate on. The best hope of creating effective laws and regulation is to ensure their development is informed by a broad coalition of people and organisations with specific expertise. To consult those with pertinent academic, operational and lived experience.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always play out like this.
I recently watched a parliamentary committee taking evidence on a Bill in which one politician criticised the excessive length of the consultation response provided by the expert witness. Meanwhile, this same parliamentarian – and several of their cross-party colleagues – repeatedly demonstrated a failure to grasp the technical and commercial information being presented to them.
Maybe they should have invested more time in studying the consultation responses. Or perhaps they understood just enough to make them believe they knew it all. Which is to say, they had enough knowledge to be dangerous.
One of the most significant threats to developing effective and nuanced policy, free from unintended consequences, is the risk that we alienate the real experts from engaging in the process. Dunning-Kruger in practice.
But what about AI? Now there’s a topic about which I know *just enough* to be a menace.
In many ways, AI replicates the sophomore problem, sans ego. It has boatloads of confidence and an answer for everything, regardless of whether it is right or not. AI bases its responses largely on statistics. The most prevalent or common answer on the world wide web must be the correct one, right?
The same principle in policy development can play out to perilous effects. Hundreds of people and organisations could provide similar responses to a policy consultation. That doesn’t necessarily mean their views should outweigh one or two experts who articulate the long-term – and often difficult to foresee – risks to the proposals.
Brexit is probably the gold standard when it comes to democratic decision-making failing to consider unintended or even inevitable consequences. To quote another wise voice, Albert Einstein: “What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.”
The breakneck speed of change in the world today makes it challenging for legislation to keep pace. Taking a sophomore or majority rules approach may seem ever more attractive.
But developing effective legislation is an essential building block of democracy, and we must do better. We need to value deep and nuanced expertise and empower those who possess it to be articulate, vocal, and brave in the face of populist simplicity.
And we need politicians who are aware of their own sophomoric tendencies. No one can be expected to be an expert at everything.
Through regular, sustained and open engagement among those making the laws, those who understand their consequences intimately, and those who will feel that impact, perhaps we can advance from being policy sophomores to policy seniors.