Even knowing that I don’t know can’t cure me of acting as if I know. That intuitive Aha! is as irrepressible as my breathing or my heartbeat. Overconfidence is the feeling of knowing — even when part of me knows, or should know, that I don’t. I love saying “I don’t know,” but I don’t love it nearly as much as I should; just as water is the universal solvent, “I don’t know” should be our universal first response to nearly every hard question…

… What I learned, those first days of college so long ago, wasn’t how to stop being overconfident. (I’m old enough now to realize that I’m unlikely ever to learn that.) What I learned was the power of feedback, the importance of throwing yourself open to being corrected in public. That doesn’t eliminate error and misjudgment. It does teach you to do your homework, to consider the historical and social contexts of your evidence before you draw conclusions, to evaluate the quality of your information before you act on it, to go back and check your work again before you commit, and above all to think twice. Making your decisions as if you will publicly judged on them can, perversely, lead to a different kind of overconfidence: the belief that you’ve now been so careful that you can’t possibly be wrong. But you will at least reduce the risks from the most common upstreamsources of error, like making snap judgments, relying on faulty data, and overlooking relevant evidence.“

— Jason Zweig (link)