I Wasn’t There, But Let Me Tell You Exactly What Happened

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2014/02/i_wasnt_there_but_let_me_tell049192.php

February 24, 2014
By Keith Humphreys

In response to my lament to my lament regarding how some people think watching movies makes them an expert in a public policy area, Kevin Drum sees a broader problem in how people judge what they do and don’t know:

Everyone with the manual dexterity to hoist a beer can regale you with confident answers to all the ills of society, while in the very next breath insisting that you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to subject X. That’s a lot more complicated than you think.

Subject X, of course, is something they happen to know a lot about, probably because they work in the field. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that they’ve learned to be cautious about the one field they know the most about doesn’t stop them from assuming that every other field is pretty simple and tractable.

It would be absurd to deny this sad phenomenon. Kevin is noting how possession of deep knowledge in some areas doesn’t generalize into an assumption that there is also relevant deep knowledge in areas in which we are not specialists.

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In interactions in which we are personally involved, we often do not fully understand what is going on. We for example might walk away from a conversation with a loved one or colleague wondering “How did they end up as an argument?” or “What was that conversation really about?”. We also of course forget what happened in our personal interactions, even highly significant ones.

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We understand and remember our own interactions poorly. We are even worse when we are one step away, witnessing other people’s interactions. So far, so banal, but riddle me this: Why are so many people so regularly consumed in debate about what really happened in interactions of which they were not a part and did not witness? Google on any hotly debated pairing — Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, to name only three — and you will find myriad accounts confidently describing exactly what did or did not happen between them.

Our knowledge of interactions that we learn of third, fourth, or fifth-hand is inherently inferior to our knowledge of interactions which we personally witness or experience directly. But the humbling experience of bumbling through and mis-recalling our own lives never lessens some people’s claims of omniscience about the lives of people they’ve never met.