provide a sort of laundry-list guide on how to approach life. Itâs useful, though the modern reader will likely find there are far too many references to Jupiter. They inspired Franklin to keep a book of what he called thirteen âdaily virtues.â Franklinâs virtues, like Pythagorusâs verses, were extremely short, a list of commonsense watchwords and concepts to arm the individual against such eighteenth-century scourges of character as trifling and dullness
.
Number twelve, chastity,
is accompanied by a proscription against the use of âvenery [sex] but for health or offspring, never to dulness.â
Franklinâs virtues were ordered sequentially with the most important first, beginning with temperance, which proscribed against doing anything to excess. It was this virtue that made possible all other virtues in Franklinâs mind.
The book itself was nothing more than pages of tables, seven columns down (for each day of the week) and thirteen rows across for each virtue. At the end of the day, Franklin would look over the table and if he had run afoul of one of the virtues, he would mark the corresponding cell with a black dot. 5 In his autobiography Franklin includes a sample template but doesnât go into much detail about how well he performed, admitting only that when he began the experiment he was âsurprised to find [him]self so much fuller of faults than [he] had imagined.â (Reputation suggests that he ran afoul of the virtue of chastity rather often.) That Franklin was shocked to discover himself less virtuous than he believed is surprising when you consider how accomplished he was in virtually every area of life. How is it that a man of Ben Franklinâs genius could be
unaware
of his own limitations?
In fact, this self-ignorance fits with what numerous psychologists have discovered about humanityâs innate tendency to overestimate our own competence, fairness, and virtue. This tendency has been observed so many times it goes by several names, such asthe Dunning-Kruger effect, after two psychologists who observed experimentally a natural human tendency to inflate our own level of competence in a variety of domains, both intellectual and social. 6 Then there is the more clinical term âanosognosia,â or lack of self-awareness (reserved for extreme cases). Probably the best synonym for this predilection of self-ignoranceâshared by all humanity but very rarely acknowledgedâcomes from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who throughout his work refers to it as the âinside view.â
The inside view is the human tendency to predict success in novel endeavorsâand the timing of successâas derived from a statistically insignificant reference class, namely oneâs personal experience. That may seem somewhat unrelated to Ben Franklinâs problem of being virtuous until you consider temperance, chastity, and moderation not as innate qualities a person either possesses or lacks but as objectives to strive for daily, which is exactly how Franklin began to perceive them. The surprise he describes in his autobiography is not the fact that he is without virtue but that he thinks he falls well short of a level of virtue he believed he had obtained. He comes face-to-face with his own cognitive bias, his own inside view!
In describing what the inside view looks like, Kahneman will often rely on a personal anecdote from the 1970s. He was able to talk the Israeli Ministry of Education into creating an entire college-level curriculum around his area of expertise: judgment and decision making. He assembled a team with experience in teaching, editing, writing chapters in textbooks, and so on. One member had even designed curricula in the past. Kahneman asked these folks to estimate how long they would need to complete this chore of creating a curriculum and expected they would be able to answer with an above-average degree of accuracy. Keep in mind that
.
Number twelve, chastity,
is accompanied by a proscription against the use of âvenery [sex] but for health or offspring, never to dulness.â
Franklinâs virtues were ordered sequentially with the most important first, beginning with temperance, which proscribed against doing anything to excess. It was this virtue that made possible all other virtues in Franklinâs mind.
The book itself was nothing more than pages of tables, seven columns down (for each day of the week) and thirteen rows across for each virtue. At the end of the day, Franklin would look over the table and if he had run afoul of one of the virtues, he would mark the corresponding cell with a black dot. 5 In his autobiography Franklin includes a sample template but doesnât go into much detail about how well he performed, admitting only that when he began the experiment he was âsurprised to find [him]self so much fuller of faults than [he] had imagined.â (Reputation suggests that he ran afoul of the virtue of chastity rather often.) That Franklin was shocked to discover himself less virtuous than he believed is surprising when you consider how accomplished he was in virtually every area of life. How is it that a man of Ben Franklinâs genius could be
unaware
of his own limitations?
In fact, this self-ignorance fits with what numerous psychologists have discovered about humanityâs innate tendency to overestimate our own competence, fairness, and virtue. This tendency has been observed so many times it goes by several names, such asthe Dunning-Kruger effect, after two psychologists who observed experimentally a natural human tendency to inflate our own level of competence in a variety of domains, both intellectual and social. 6 Then there is the more clinical term âanosognosia,â or lack of self-awareness (reserved for extreme cases). Probably the best synonym for this predilection of self-ignoranceâshared by all humanity but very rarely acknowledgedâcomes from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who throughout his work refers to it as the âinside view.â
The inside view is the human tendency to predict success in novel endeavorsâand the timing of successâas derived from a statistically insignificant reference class, namely oneâs personal experience. That may seem somewhat unrelated to Ben Franklinâs problem of being virtuous until you consider temperance, chastity, and moderation not as innate qualities a person either possesses or lacks but as objectives to strive for daily, which is exactly how Franklin began to perceive them. The surprise he describes in his autobiography is not the fact that he is without virtue but that he thinks he falls well short of a level of virtue he believed he had obtained. He comes face-to-face with his own cognitive bias, his own inside view!
In describing what the inside view looks like, Kahneman will often rely on a personal anecdote from the 1970s. He was able to talk the Israeli Ministry of Education into creating an entire college-level curriculum around his area of expertise: judgment and decision making. He assembled a team with experience in teaching, editing, writing chapters in textbooks, and so on. One member had even designed curricula in the past. Kahneman asked these folks to estimate how long they would need to complete this chore of creating a curriculum and expected they would be able to answer with an above-average degree of accuracy. Keep in mind that
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