Today's Wisdom - Love, Cyber Security and Dunning-Kruger

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. We hope today’s edition offers some powerful, contemplative lessons to carry through your weekend. Special thanks to the team at ClearerThinking for providing today’s guest feature. With a community of over 400,000 members, they are an incredible resource for anyone looking to sharpen their mind, we highly recommend visiting their page for more. Today’s wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

There's a persistent cultural myth that meaningful connection is abundant, that soulmates, best friends, and close family bonds are everywhere waiting to be found. The reality is startlingly bleaker. A study of over 10,000 American adults (below) revealed that 28% had fallen in love only once, 30% twice, and just 17% three times, while a full quarter said they had never experienced romantic love at all. These are the mathematics of scarcity and romance is just the beginning. Research shows one in four American men under 35 feel lonely on a daily basis, meanwhile, only 47% of adult children describe having a genuinely close, emotionally supportive relationship with their parents. The numbers force an uncomfortable conclusion: if deep connection is this rare, then the people currently in your life who love you, the imperfect parent who calls too much or the old friend you keep meaning to text back, are far more special than you realize.

The scarcity is part mathematics, part human nature. Anthropologist Helen Fisher points out that of the billions of people alive, only a tiny fraction will cross your path at the exact moment when both of you are emotionally available and looking for the same thing. But even when you find those rare people, keeping them requires something our society has perhaps stopped teaching: the ability to repair. Social media and self-help gurus have built a culture that celebrates "cutting people off" as an act of self-care, where a single political disagreement justifies ending a decades-long friendship, where one argument with a sibling becomes grounds for permanent estrangement. The average friendship now lasts seven years before dissolving, often through the failure to recover from a single fight or misunderstanding. We treat our closest relationships as disposable the moment they require uncomfortable conversations or the humility of being wrong. Meanwhile, research on regret from Cornell University found that when elderly people reflect on their lives, their deepest regrets aren't about failed relationships but about the ones they abandoned too quickly.

The longest-running longitudinal study on human happiness, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has followed participants for more than 80 years and reached a striking conclusion: the single strongest predictor of well-being and longevity is the quality of our close relationships. Not their perfection, not their intensity, but their durability. Enduring bonds, the study found, buffer stress, protect physical health, and quite literally extend life. And yet we live in an era that has perhaps never been more hostile to durability. We have been conditioned to optimize our lives as though friendship and relationships were software and not living things that grow precisely through the friction of surviving hard seasons together. Psychologist John Gottman's decades of research found that the defining feature of lasting relationships is a simple willingness to turn toward each other during moments of conflict rather than away. The irony is that the very discomfort we run from, the awkward phone call, the overdue apology, the honest conversation we've been postponing for months, is the exact material from which closeness is made. Fix what is frayed (whether that is romantic, your family member you haven’t forgiven or that friend you fell out of touch with since college) while there is still thread left to work with.

You've probably experienced it: you mention needing new running shoes in a conversation with your friend, and within hours, Instagram is showing you ads for Nike trainers. The popular explanation is that your phone is secretly listening to everything you say, but the truth is somehow worse. Your phone doesn't need to eavesdrop on your conversations because it already knows more about you than you know about yourself. The algorithms have mapped your location history, scraped your browsing habits, analyzed your friends' purchasing patterns, and built a predictive model so accurate that it can guess what you want before you fully want it. The microphone conspiracy is almost quaint compared to the actual surveillance architecture you've already agreed to.

Location tracking is where the invasion becomes truly granular. When you grant an app access to your location, most people assume it means the app knows which city you're in. What you're actually handing over is "Precise Location," which tracks your movements within a few feet and allows apps to build what intelligence agencies call a "pattern of life" map. They know where you work, where you sleep, which gym you go to, which bars you frequent, and which neighborhoods you avoid. Advertisers use this to infer your income bracket, your relationship status, and your spending habits without you ever telling them directly. The fix is buried in Settings under Privacy and Location Services, where you can downgrade apps from Precise to Approximate, giving them your general area without the forensic detail of your exact apartment number. Even more disturbing is "Significant Locations," a hidden feature that keeps a complete diary of everywhere you go regularly. Navigate to Settings, then Privacy, then Location Services, then System Services, then Significant Locations, and you'll find months of logged visits to your favorite coffee shop or your office. Apple claims this data is encrypted and stays on your device, but the fact that it exists at all should make you uncomfortable. Clear the history and turn it off.

The most invasive tracking happens through systems most people have never heard of. Background App Refresh allows apps to ping servers and update content even when you're not using them, and every ping is a data handshake that broadcasts your IP address and activity status to whoever's listening. Turn it off in Settings under General, your apps will still update the second you open them (leave on email and messaging). Then there's Cross-App Tracking, controlled by a toggle buried in Settings under Privacy called "Allow Apps to Request to Track." This manages your IDFA, the Identifier for Advertisers, which is essentially a digital ankle bracelet that follows you from your browser to social media to shopping apps, stitching your entire online life into a single surveillance file. Toggle this OFF and you've just severed the thread that lets advertisers stalk you across the internet. A simple ten-minute privacy audit every three months, going through these settings and revoking the permissions you carelessly granted years ago, is the difference between being a data product and reclaiming some measure of control.

Below - An interesting watch about how to protect your phone from hackers.

You’ve probably heard that people who are bad at something tend to overestimate how skilled they are (they don't even know enough to know how bad they are!), while the top performers tend to underestimate their abilities. This idea gained attention in 1999, when Justin Kruger and David Dunning introduced what’s now known as ‘the Dunning-Kruger effect’ - a cognitive bias whereby people who lack competence in a task are also unable to accurately assess their own performance. Many studies have produced results consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect: on various tests of ability, lower scorers tended to rate themselves above where they actually placed, and higher scorers tended to rate themselves lower. Does that mean the Dunning-Kruger effect is real?

Maybe not. Results seem to show it might be caused by common imperfections of ability tests. Here’s one example: lots of tests are only able to assess ability within a certain range. This means the worst performers can be below the minimum possible score, and the best performers can be above the maximum. On such tests, it is logically impossible for the worst performers to underestimate themselves (they can only be accurate or overestimate) or for the best performers to overestimate themselves (they can only be accurate or underestimate). This biases the data in such a way that produces the appearance of a Dunning-Kruger effect. That’s exactly what our researchers at ClearerThinking.org found when we ran simulations on data from a large study we conducted (1817 participants), to test claims made about IQ.

But Dunning-Kruger effects aren’t only produced by test imperfections. Our team has found that they might also be the result of rational thinking. Imagine you know nothing about your ability in a certain domain. Since many abilities fall on a bell curve, it makes sense to assume that you’re probably somewhere near the middle (or average). It’s perfectly rational to start from there and only gradually update your beliefs about your ability as you encounter new evidence. This means that low performers will tend to overestimate their abilities and high performers will tend to underestimate, simply because they don’t have perfect information and they’re gradually updating their beliefs from the most reasonable starting point. Not necessarily because they’re being irrational. Ultimately, all this leads to a nuanced conclusion: the Dunning-Kruger effect might exist, but some of the attempts to demonstrate it may be statistical illusions (caused by test imperfections) and others might just be the result of rational responses to uncertainty, rather than a special blindness among the unskilled. This means you could be warranted in treating the Dunning-Kruger effect with a little more skepticism than you would have before learning this information.

We hope you enjoyed today’s edition! If you did, feel free to share it on social media or forward this email to friends. Thanks to ClearerThinking.org for today’s guest lesson. We highly suggest checking them out, they have over 80 free tools to help you make better decisions and hone your thinking.

Until next time... A Little Wiser Team