Some deep part of me believes that people are only confident when they're very likely to be right, and I defer to confidence because *my own* bar for speaking confidently is pretty *damn* high.
but no, turns out, ppl say confident things with a low accuracy bar *all the time*!
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I'm slow on the uptake; so many times I've been pulled in by a very confident speaker confidently saying things I don't really understand - then when I check, turns out he's actually wrong about quite a lot. This is super disorienting and I don't understand that at all.
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If you're dealing with a really complex or nuanced system, you should get an allocation of 1 confident thing to say per year; everything else you say should be "I suspect" or "it seems like this indicates".
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But for ppl who are very confident, particularly about very difficult subjects, what is going on in their heads? It seems like they're doing a separate thing from truth-finding, which is something like... deliberately making particular maneuvers in social reality space.
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Which like, might also be valid and in some instances leads to good things, I don't know cause I don't understand it - but whatever it is, it's not the default way I assume ppl operate, which is "have a really damn high bar for expressing confidence"
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This happens on so many levels!
Here's an example that blew my mind: a UCLA physics professor was so confident that a YouTube blogger is wrong on some mechanical physics thing, that he bet $10,000. And the prof lost.
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*that* I respect a lot more; being confident and being wrong isn't inherently bad - if you're 95% confident, that's high, but you'd expect 5% wrong in that case - and putting money on the line to test it is noble and i love it
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If this is an oblique reference to a recent conversation: that's simply his normal way of speaking (though he is also very confident in his interpretation of the world)
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When people do this; and I later find they don't know nearly as much as they implied they did, I find it impossible to take them seriously again.
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