Stay humble: navigating the tension between humility and helpfulness for expert advisors
Joe Roussos
3 April 2025
Abstract: Experts play an important role in supporting decision makers during times of crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic. I explore the felt tension between intellectual humility and effective advising. There are several reasons to think that crisis advising is a context where humility is especially important: policy problems are messy and don’t fit within disciplinary boundaries, experts are called on to make predictions in conditions of great uncertainty, and under great pressure, overconfidence is particularly dangerous in high stakes situations. However, there is an apparent tension between being intellectually humble and actually achieving the task of expert advising: helping policymakers respond to the crisis quickly and effectively. I explore this tension and propose some ways of navigating, though not resolving, it.
