Art of Strategy

When it comes to making decisions, epistemic humility—the recognition that our knowledge is limited by cultural and social assumptions, individual biases, and the world's inherent complexity—is a key virtue. When faced with a problem we can't fully understand or predict, we might be tempted to make confident judgments based on intuition and past experience. But when we recognize the limits of our knowledge and seek diverse perspectives with alternative beliefs and ways of knowing, we are more likely to make better decisions. This does not mean that decision-makers should be paralyzed by uncertainty or risk-averse. Epistemic humility simply means acknowledging that there are limits to what can be known for sure about a problem, then seeking out other points of view that challenge one's own assumptions about what should happen next. Epistemic humility also helps us avoid confirmation bias, which leads us into information that agrees with our own biases or hypotheses, reinforc