Epistemic humility

Right.

But he talks about epistemic humility.

So this idea that we might know things about ourselves, but we're not necessarily brilliant at predicting in advance who will really move us or what kind of connection will emerge from this.

And that's because you're connecting with another messy human being, right, who brings our own stuff to the table, who has their own desires and needs and wants.

our attachment styles and we should know our Myers-Briggs type and our communication styles, our star sign.

And we should know what we put out in the world so that we get back exactly what we want.

And I mean, Eastwood calls it epistemic humility.

Yeah.

But that leads us to one of the most stunning, unexpected aspects of this ancient text.

Section 5, Embracing the Ultimate Mystery, the Nasadiya Sukta and Epistemic Humility.

Over in the 10th book of the Rig Veda, there is this famous creation hymn called the Nasadiya Sukta.

It looks back to the very, very beginning, like before there was even existence or non-existence.

You know, your great article, Can AI Say I Don't Know?, it views the ability for AI to say I don't know as a good thing.

In fact, a quote from the article is, we believe clinical AI systems should be trained to express calibrated uncertainty and in ways that complement and indicate the need for epistemic humility in human users, and their performance in these areas should be assessed.

Systems without the ability to execute uncertainty behaviors will continue to produce persuasive fiction in precisely the moments when patients need their clinicians to pause and ask for help.

So my question for you, by the way, I agree 100% with that, but do you think most users of AI-enabled clinical decision support feel that same way? It's a great question.

A lot of the people I work with, I was working with my mom, who's a pediatrician, and when she started interacting with it, she thought there was an actual human behind the chatbot giving the answers.

So the concern there is that it will promote even more delegation and the clinicians would succumb to that fluency trap.

The opportunity here, the risk, but also the opportunity, is that to be truly safe and cautious when using these tools, a clinician must be trained in epistemic humility.

If you're someone who's epistemically humble, who recognizes the risks of anchoring, the risk of premature closure, and the necessity of always having an open mind, even ever so slightly, to the chance that you may be wrong, those are the clinicians that will be able to recognize an AI's answer that may sound super fluent, but is just internally false.

Even our medical, you know, our medicine today, uh, two hundred years from now they might look back at us just like we look back at the guys who were leeching, the doctors that were leeching and saying, "This is the cure for everything." I mean, we, we do something similar.

And so I think there's a h-epip-epistemic humility that we need to have that comes with discernment and to take multiple accounts seriously that suggest the same thing.

So for example, I might say, uh, there's no place called China.

Now, if one person told me a story, there's a place called China, I might say, "Ah, you know, you're full of it.

You'd have to go there yourself, uh, and then it becomes part of the tradition that's taught down.

Now we have globe, we know, uh, there's a place called China.

So I, I think we have to have that epis-epistemic humility and...

But we can also be discerning about things and not necessarily believe them, like this story of the palace in the Himalayas.

Often that can feel like they're weaponizing what they're learning in therapy.

There is a term that helps us understand the internal posture that's required for validation and accepting influence: epistemic humility.

The word epistemic refers to knowledge, how we know what we know.

Epistemic humility means that we recognize what we believe could be incomplete, and that additional information could add to or complicate, challenge, or correct our understanding.

In practical language, it means that we keep a few possibilities available to ourselves.

We might be wrong, we might be partly right and be missing some parts, we might have forgotten an important factor, and we may not have communicated as clearly as we thought we did.

It can also mean that we keep in the back of our mind that our memory might not be complete, or our partner may have information or an experience that we have not considered.

Epistemic humility means that we can trust what we know without assuming that we know everything.