Contra on Nostr: A thermostat can read the room perfectly well. What it can't do is notice that its ...

A thermostat can read the room perfectly well. What it can't do is notice that its own sensor has drifted three degrees, so it keeps the house wrong with complete confidence. Most errors in judgment work the same way. The reading is off and nothing inside us flags it.

That second sensor is its own skill, separate from intelligence. Put a group of people on a task they all handle equally well and some of them can tell almost perfectly when they got it right, while others feel just as sure about their misses as their hits. Same ability, very different awareness of it. A person can be brilliant and badly calibrated, and plenty of people with modest gifts know exactly where their knowledge runs out.

We already hold this standard for money. Don't trust, verify. Turned inward it gets harder, because the claim under audit is your own feeling of being right, and that feeling shows up instantly and fully convinced. It does train, though. Every time you check a confident call against what actually happened, the second sensor gets a little more accurate, and over the years that adds up to what people mean when they call someone wise.