Reading Notes Fools and Ignorance - Humans, This Inconvenient Creature Author: Rei Tachibana

・For the brain, “inferior” individuals are a reward, while “superior” individuals are a loss.
The problem with fools is that they are unaware of their own foolishness.
・What we “know but don’t know” is referred to as “intuition” or “tacit knowledge.” The kind of wonderful things that move people often stem from intuition or tacit knowledge.
・Only children with high cognitive abilities benefit from tests that check understanding and feedback that enhances learning. They know what they don’t know, so they can correct their mistakes and reach the correct knowledge. However, children with low cognitive abilities cannot understand why or where they made mistakes, and even with feedback, they don’t know what to do with it.
・In various fields, there is often a mismatch between how others evaluate us and our actual abilities.
・There are two conditions for realizing collective intelligence (the idea that gathering the intelligence of many people leads to superior intelligence): 1) Discussions must be held only among those with a certain level of ability. 2) If the first condition is not possible, then it must be possible to make choices according to the judgment of an excellent individual.
・The condition for making good choices is “to exclude fools.”
・When fools greatly overestimate their abilities and the wise underestimate theirs, the quality of group decision-making deteriorates.
・Giving a trophy for first place to a child who restarted a sprint race does not make them run faster. The foolishness of the educational policy of “praising to encourage growth” is similar to this.
・Research on the relationship between self-esteem and violence has shown that what predicts violence is not the level of self-esteem, but its stability. People with high and unstable self-esteem are easily hurt by even slight stress and become aggressive towards others to recover. Conversely, people with low and unstable self-esteem tend to direct aggression towards themselves, becoming repressive.