"humility" has a different meaning on LessWrong than In common parlance, where itOutside of LessWrong, "humility" usually refers to "a modest or low view of one's own importance". In common parlance, to be humble is to be meek, deferential, submissive, or unpretentious, "not arrogant or prideful". Thus, in ordinary languageEnglish "humility" and "modesty" have pretty similar connotations.
On LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky has proposed that we instead draw a sharp distinction between two kinds of "humility" — social modesty, versus "epistemic humility" or "scientific humility".
"humility" has a different meaning on LessWrong than In common parlance, "humility"where it refers to "a modest ofor low view of one's own importance". ToIn common parlance, to be humble is to be meek, deferential, submissive, or unpretentious, "not arrogant or prideful". Thus, in ordinary language "humility" and "modesty""modesty" have pretty similar connotations.
On LW, then, we tend to follow the convention of using "humility" as a term of art for an important part of reasoning: combating overconfidence,overconfidence, recognizing and improving on your weaknesses, anticipating and preparing for likely errors you'll make, etc.
Can confirm, article was totally crazy pro-modesty propaganda; have mostly rewritten from scratch. :)
Humility describes the conceptIn common parlance, "humility" refers to "a modest of low view of one's own importance". To be humble is to be meek, deferential, submissive, or unpretentious, "not arrogant or prideful". Thus, in ordinary language "humility" and "modesty" have pretty similar connotations.
On LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky has proposed that we should,instead draw a sharp distinction between two kinds of "humility" — social modesty, versus "epistemic humility" or "scientific humility".
In The Proper Use of Humility (2006), Yudkowsky writes:
You suggest studying harder, and the student replies: “No, it wouldn’t work for me; I’m not one of the smart kids like you; nay, one so lowly as myself can hope for no better lot.”
This is social modesty, not humility. It has to do with regulating status in
general,the tribe, rather than scientific process.If you ask someone to “be more humble,” by default they’ll associate the words to social modesty—which is an intuitive, everyday, ancestrally relevant concept. Scientific humility is a more recent and rarefied invention, and it is not inherently social. Scientific humility is something you would practice even if you were alone in a spacesuit, light years from Earth with no one watching. Or even if you received an absolute guarantee that no one would ever criticize you again, no matter what you said or thought of yourself. You’d still double-check your calculations if you were wise.
On LW, then, we tend to follow the convention of using "humility" as a term of art for an important part of reasoning: combating overconfidence, recognizing and improving on your weaknesses, anticipating and preparing for likely errors you'll make, etc.
In contrast, "modesty" here refers to the bad habit of letting your behavior and epistemics be ruled by not wanting to look arrogant or conceited. Yudkowsky argues in Inadequate Equilibria (2017) that psychological impulses like "status regulation and anxious underconfidence" have caused many people in the effective altruism and rationality communities to adopt a "modest epistemology" that involves rationalizing various false world-models and invalid reasoning heuristics.
LW tries to create a social environment where social reward and punishment is generally less sure about what we know than intuition implies. Itsalient, and where (to the extent it persists) it incentivizes honesty and truth-seeking as much as possible. LW doesn't always succeed in this goal, but this is closely related to epistemology.nonetheless the goal.
The basic concept heremost commonly cited explanation of scientific/epistemic humility on LW is that humans are over-confident on average (found in Yudkowsky's "Inside-view forecasting is a classic example) -- people are not only wrong, they are very confidently wrong. Consequently, it seems to beTwelve Virtues of benefit to assume that your assessment of confidence (how sure you are in a given theory) is overconfident in any given instance, and to plan accordingly.Rationality" (2006):
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Twelve Virtues of Rationality
(And, just to prevent life becoming too easy, make sure not to become underconfident in the process of avoiding overconfidence!)
In LessWrong parlance, this should not be confused with "epistemic modesty" / "modest epistemology". While Eliezer lists "humility" as a virtue, he provides many arguments against modesty (most extensively, in the book Inadequate Equilibria; but also in many earlier sources.) Humilityhumility is based on the general idea that you are fallible (and should expecttry to be fallible. Modest Epistemology is specifically the view that, due tocalibrated and realistic about this), modest epistemology makes stronger claims such as:
In contrast, Yudkowsky has argued:
I try to be careful to distinguish the virtue of avoiding overconfidence, which I sometimes call “humility,” from the phenomenon I’m calling “modest epistemology.” But even so, when overconfidence is such a terrible scourge according to the cognitive bias literature, can it ever be wise to caution people against underconfidence?
Yes. First of all, overcompensation after being warned about a cognitive bias is also a recognized problem in the literature; and the literature on that talks about how bad people often are at determining whether they’re undercorrecting or overcorrecting. Second, my own experience has been that while, yes, commenters on the Internet are often overconfident, it’s very different when I’m talking to people in person. My more
typical views.
Humility should also notrecent experience seems more like 90% telling people to beconfused withless underconfident, to reach higher, to be more ambitious, to test themselves, and maybe 10% cautioning people against overconfidence. And yes, this ratio applies to men as well as women and nonbinary people, and to people considered high-status as well as people considered low-status.
social modestyThe Sin of Underconfidence, or (2009) argues that underconfidence is one of the "three great besetting sins of rationalists" (the others being motivated reasoning / motivated skepticism (aka disconfirmation biasand "cleverness").
In Taboo "Outside View" (2021), Daniel Kokotajlo notes that the original meaning of "outside view" (reference class forecasting) has become eroded as EAs have begun using "outside view" to refer to everything from reasoning by analogy, to trend extrapolation, to foxy aggregation, to bias correction, to "deference to wisdom of the many", to "anti-weirdness heuristics", to priors, etc.
Additionally, proponents of outside-viewing often behave as though there is a single obvious reference class to use -- "the outside view", as opposed to "an outside view" -- and tend to neglect the role of detailed model-building in helping us figure out which reference classes are relevant.
The lesson of this isn't "it's bad to ever use reference class forecasting, trend extrapolation, etc.", but rather that these tools are part and parcel of building good world-models and deriving good predictions from them, rather than being a robust replacement for world-modeling.
Likewise, the lesson isn't "it's bad to ever worry about overconfidence", but rather that overconfidence and underconfidence are both problems, neither is a priori worse than the other, and fixing them requires doing a lot of legwork and model-building about your own capabilities -- again, there isn't a royal road to 'getting the right answer without having to figure things out'.
Related Pages:pages
The beginning still seems to make this mistake. Enough that I wondered if someone came after you and made new edits that were wrong (no one did, it's the original text).
Also don't confuse humilityHumility should also not be confused with social modesty, or motivated skepticism (aka disconfirmation bias).
Related Sequences: Inadequate Equilibria
Related Tags:Pages: Calibration, Chesterton's Fence, Underconfidence, Modest Epistemology, Modesty, Fallacy of Gray
Also don't confuse humility with social modesty, or motivated skepticism (aka disconfirmation bias).
Related Tags: Calibration, Chesterton's Fence, Underconfidence, Modest Epistemology, Modesty, Fallacy of Gray
Fixed, sorta, but now this tag needs to be merged with "humility". (I've named it "epistemic humility" in the meantime, but I think it should just be called "humility" -- no one says "epistemic humility" I think.)
Nice! It's much better now. I made a few more small edits so the beginning works better as an excerpt and to add some links.