Overconfidence

[-]Matt Goldenberg5y300

I think a common mistake on LW is to mistake emotional confidence (which comes from believing deeply internalizing emotional schemas ike (I'm capable, I'm worthy, I'm enough) with epistemic confidence "I'm 80% sure my current plan will work, I'm 70% sure about this particular fact"

That is, I think this article has causality a bit backwards. You think that being competent helps you be "overconfident". I think that your belief that you're competent IS the thing that you want.

[-]Nicholas Kross5y80

Posts like this are correct on the emotional confidence stuff. In turn, more of them could link to Conviction without self-deception. (Or maybe the good kind of "self-deception" is less "sky is green" , and more "using Newtonian physics instead of quantum physics to build an airplane".)

[-]Matt Goldenberg5y20

I haven't read Nates post in a while, but if I remember correctly it sort of makes the same conflation between epistemic confidence and emotional confidence.

[-]rmoehn5y90

Other people—especially women—love me when I'm a cocky arrogant megalomaniac.

Maybe it just divides people? Average behaviour doesn't move the liking scale. Cocky arrogant megalomaniac behaviour makes the liking scale swing positive in some people, negative in others. And since you're in a cocky, arrogant mode, you only notice those who like you.

The airplane example illustrates it, too. I bet a good share of passengers thought, ‘what ****er is delaying the airplane now?’, whereas another share smiled about Gates' nerve.

If you get things done by making enemies, in the end you don't get much (good) done. Cf. many of the people you listed.

[-]lsusr5y80

I think the core thesis of your comment is dead-on. Variance could explain all of my observed effects. If people label you unimportant by default then increasing variance is a good way to make friends amidst a large population.

As for enemies…

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

―Winston Churchill

[-]rmoehn5y30

I agree, it's hard to avoid making enemies. Even harmony-seeking people annoy others who have little interest in harmony. (I'm not talking about anything Confucian here.) Then again, it's better to make enemies with discretion, and not use it as an excuse for bad behaviour.

[-]Richard_Kennaway5y80

Belief and action are different things and obey different laws. If I run for a train, the lower I think my chances, the more effort I must put in.

[-]Viliam5y70

Can you think of anyone who has changed history who wasn't a little overconfident? Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvolds—but no one nontechnical.

Could it be that overconfidence is most important when you need other people's cooperation?

The confidence calculation in Neo's example can also be made about other people, with similar circular logic. Imagine you have an option to either support someone, in which case they have a 17% chance of huge success, or not support them, in which case (suppose they have no other option) they have a 0% chance. If they succeed to convince you that the chance is 100%, they will actually get the 17% chance; if they fail to convince you, and you decide that a 17% chance is not worth your investment, they get 0%.

And sometimes the best way to convince other people is to believe it yourself.

Nobody likes phonies. [...] When you combine enough competence with enough confidence, the drawbacks of slight overconfidence (like arriving late to an airport) get lost in the noise.

On a competence ladder, it is easy to distinguish between people who are below you or at the same level as you... but everything above you seems similar.

If you are at level 10, "phony" refers to someone at level 9 pretending to be at level 12. But if you meet someone at level 12 pretending to be at level 20, how would you know? Your only pieces of evidence are "they say they are at level 20" and "I see they are at level above 10". (If you are careful, you will also notice the base rates: "people at lower levels are a priori more likely than people at higher levels".) And maybe someone at level 13 might tell you this person is a phony, but from your perspective, it's a word against word, who knows.

Which suggests that the optimal strategy depends on your level and the levels of people whom you are trying to impress. If you are at lower or same level, be honest about your abilities. If you are at higher level, pretend you are at least twice as high -- they can't tell the difference anyway.

And even if someone sees you fail, they can't know whether it is a 1:1000000 situation, or 1:10. Unless they can observe you long enough to collect enough data. But by that time, everyone knows that you are the best.

[-]Mathisco5y60

This reminds me of Left Brain, Right Stuff. It also has content on how overconfidence helps athletes perform something like 4% better, which is a big deal in a relative competition where small differences can make you win or lose. He then continues to find business analogies.

[-]halinaeth10mo30

Makes me think of the concept of "reality distortion fields" as it applies to overconfidence in leaders (I read about this applied to Steve Jobs specifically- his ability to get people to also believe in & work towards the impossible).

Does anyone have the link to what I'm referring to? But overall, I do believe charisma has a lot to do with letting go of the need to have an accurate "map" of yourself and your strengths/shortcomings.

[-]mesaoptimizer1y20

According to Eliezar Yudkowsky, your thoughts should reflect reality.

I expect that the more your beliefs track reality, the better you'll get at decision making, yes.

According to Paul Graham, the most successful people are slightly overconfident.

Ah but VCs benefit from the ergodicity of the startup founders! From the perspective of the founder, its a non-ergodic situation. Its better to make Kelly bets instead if you prefer to not fall into gambler's ruin, given whatever definition of the real world situation maps onto the abstract concept of being 'ruined' here.

It usually pays to have a better causal model of reality than relying on what X person says to inform your actions.

Can you think of anyone who has changed history who wasn’t a little overconfident?

Survivorship bias.

It is advantageous to be friends with the kind of people who do things and never give up.

I think I do things and never give up in general, while I can be pessimistic about specific things and tasks I could do. You can be generally extremely confident in yourself and your ability to influence reality, while also being specifically pessimistic about a wide range of existing possible things you could be doing.

Here's a Nate post that provides his perspective on this specific orientation to reality that leads to a sort of generalized confidence that has social benefits.

[-]mesaoptimizer1y20

I do think that systematic self-delusion seems useful in multi-agent environments (see the commitment races problem for an abstract argument, and Sarah Constantin's essay "Is Stupidity Strength?" for a more concrete argument.

I'm not certain that this is the optimal strategy we have for dealing with such environments, and note that systematic self-delusion also leaves you (and the other people using a similar strategy to coordinate) vulnerable to risks that do not take into account your self-delusion. This mainly includes existential risks such as misaligned superintelligences, but also extinction-level asteroids.

Its a pretty complicated picture and I don't really have clean models of these things, but I do think that for most contexts I interact in, the long-term upside of having better models of reality is significantly higher compared to the benefit of systematic self-delusion.

[-]Nicholas Kross5y10

This ties in well with the Procrastination Equation. Useful overconfidence means setting your "expectancy" term really high, even outside your comfort zone or social convention/rules.

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