So if a person finds themselves to be “almost never wrong,” how should they tell if it’s a problem with their self-analysis or if they simply have a lower error rate than those around them? For example, someone with a 10% error rate in basic reasoning will assume he’s “almost never wrong” if his peers have an average of 30%. After all, most of the time he gets in a disagreement, he’ll be correct. Yet, your article implies that he’s misleading himself, and that it’s arrogant of him to assume he’s right so often. Taking this logic to heart, he might overly credit those around him and end up regressing.

I’m not arguing against realizing one’s own fallibility, but the “what’s more likely” argument doesn’t hold much water. For example, what’s more likely, that a man who says “I am the president of the United States” is a crazy person, or the actual president? Odds are he’s crazy, but there’s always an exception, and the government wouldn’t work very well if, every inauguration period, the actual president went with the odds and voluntarily committed himself to an insane asylum.

Maybe people need to think that they’re right, or the one person who is wouldn’t get anything done.

I work in a community with some amount of idol worship, which does lead to people setting aside their findings to agree with someone smarter. These people don’t improve their thinking as quickly. Reasoning is a skill that needs to be practiced, and setting aside your beliefs for those of another doesn’t exercise what’s important for developing complex thought. You don’t get good playing on easy.

If you find a friend who is more correct than you, and you follow his beliefs, then what will you do when said friend gets hit by a bus? How will you teach your kids to think? Or will they also be parrot-folk, always mimicking greatness but never adding to it, content to be good but never the best?

If you’re betting on the other horse, why are you entering the race?

More relevantly, if I have a thousand beliefs, each at 99% credence, and ten of them are wrong, I have not made any errors.

Even more relevantly, it might not be so fruitful to think of person-based error rates, as this is a case of the fundamental attribution error. It may be more useful to think of situation-based error rates, e.g. “I am currently thinking about the origins of the universe. I am wrong with probability so close to 1 that I might as well stop,” or “I am currently evaluating my real-world efficacy. There is a very high chance I’m being biased, so I’ll ask someone else.”