"Maybe you've hit send and immediately wished you hadn't? Fired off an email that missed the point but showed what you really felt (cringe), responded to a post without fully reading it, made a decision based on partial information we could have caught if we'd slowed down. We've all probably paid dearly. These moments create regret, friction in relationships, at work, online. In aggregate, they undermine our collective capacity to communicate and cooperate at a time when we can least afford it. With AI amplifying both possibilities and risks, we need to up our cognitive game; we need to be smarter to work with smarter tools."
"What I call "secure expertise" isn't just competence-it's competence plus awareness of the limits of one's knowledge, a kind of being secure about insecurity. It requires emotional stability: As James Carse might frame it in his work on finite and infinite games, finite players play to win the round; infinite players play to get to a better place over the long-haul. Secure expertise also requires epistemological comfort with uncertainty-being clear about what we don't know and using that ambiguity productively rather than defensively. When these capacities fail, we miss things."
Missed signals in communication—caused by lapses in attention, emotion, habit, relationships, and conflicting motives—create regret and friction across personal, professional, and online contexts. These errors accumulate and weaken collective capacity to cooperate, a vulnerability amplified by AI technologies. Practical fixes include pausing before sending messages, reviewing posts, building metacognitive awareness through practices like meditation, and learning habitual patterns of error. The ideal stance combines competence with awareness of uncertainty and emotional stability, termed secure expertise, enabling better long-term judgment and improved self-governance for both individuals and groups.
Read at Psychology Today
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