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We Are All Confident Idiots

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Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#101

Post by byEngineer »

vectorpush wrote: post #92
innguest wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see someone here that understands what is going on. Did you really move out of the US because of the coming crisis? I'm really curious about this. I understand there will be riots and it will be unstable for a while but how much chaos are you expecting?

The smug, self-certain, self-congratulatory attitude seems ironic in the context of the posted article.

Reading 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel at the moment. I think we have had too much of uncertainty in the West from economy thinking to social thinking to medicine.

Peter claims in his book that no CEO looks beyond 3 months timeframe running their Company anymore. Why? Because market knows better anyway. Why to plan, when market will determine what the market is going to be? Uncertainty.

Medical: we can't control genes right? They determine everything, so why to care, why to plan?

Social: cultural marxism. Pessimistic culture -- everything is wrong because we are capitalist society. As long as it exists we can't be certain of anything.

If you have debt to gdp ratio of 600%, what do you expect? Flourishing economy? Things will go down south. You are like a six year old pissed of that two and two is four every time. Some things are certain. Like 600% debt to gdp aren't pretty. Not positive. Not uncertain. Fucking shit. OK?

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#102

Post by byEngineer »

innguest wrote: post #87
byEngineer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for…

Glad to see someone here that understands what is going on. Did you really move out of the US because of the coming crisis? I'm really curious about this. I understand there will be riots and it will be unstable for a while but how much chaos are you expecting?

It might as well all end not too bad. It might be that the rest of the world will finish in much worse shape than the US. I keep my options open. Can live in the US, but also can live in EU. Would be nice to be able to stay in HK for a while too.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#103

Post by wglb »

Swizec wrote: post #15
atmosx wrote: post #3

"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare Act 5, Scene 1: [...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...] I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.

This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect[1], the cognitive bias that unskilled individuals overestimate their ability and skilled individuals underestimate it. "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in two principal ways: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate thei…

Written with a tremendous amount of confidence.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#104

Post by vectorpush »

byEngineer wrote: post #97
gone35 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, this is interesting. From the article: "For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil's advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect . It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls 'considering the opposite.' To do this, I often imagine myself in a future…

Yes, certainly. Many things can go differently. For one the US President, Obama, might go there on TV and tell: "My fellow Americans. Starting tomorrow we are raising taxes by 10-25%. We cut social security. We cut military. We cut across the board. Why? Because the Chinese demand their money!" Possible? Of course! Probable? Your call. Inflating the monetary base is actually doing the same, but without the need to ra…

Ask them if they can imagine bubble in Treasuries! They certainly couldn't see one in housing or the .com one even though they both were straight in their faces. They laughed off anyone talking about bubbles then

You can proudly proclaim that the bubbles were obvious now that the pops have come to pass, but talk is cheap, and if you're wrong, it's always "just around the corner" until one day, you saw it coming all along. If it takes 30 years for the bubble to pop, then god damn, check out this HN thread from 2014 where you predicted this exact outcome THREE DECADES in advance, but nobody listened!

I'm not dismissing the consequences of running up absurd levels of debt, I just think it's sort of funny that in a thread regarding the failings of human certitude, you felt it necessary to demonstrate your certainty in outcomes regarding, of all things, macroeconomics, perhaps the least reliable science from which to model precise predictions.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#105

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

sakri wrote: post #99
brazzy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all limited to law - accepting facts/stories/statements that fit one's worldview or even just seem interesting or important, and passing them on without ever checking or even doubting their correctness is a mistake that I see very frequently (and occasionally in myself despite conscious efforts to avoid it).

I see this with developers: The young gun who assumes he understands architectural concepts without reading up on them, and re-invents the wheel (often producing a wheel that's tough to turn). Then there's the cocky senior who doesn't need the latest and greatest because he already "knows" they do the same thing as his solution from 15 years ago (and when he's fired he can't find work because he's a dinosaur). I know…

Do dinosaur managers just talk slower?

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#106

Post by drblast »

Bahamut wrote: post #94

This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing. Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes…

Projecting confidence is an invaluable skill to have when you're trying to get people to charge up a heavily defended hill or take a building by force.

Anything else, not so much. I've witnessed many Marines try and fail to do something complex with ultimate confidence that brute force would solve the problem. The dedication is admirable but the range of situations in which it's sufficient for success is small.

In many non-military cases, doing nothing is a completely viable option that should always be considered. I'd venture to say that the most successful person is good at recognizing what deserves a Marine-level amount of effort and what can slide.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#107

Post by wglb »

Very well written article. Very amusing commentary threads.

But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.)

There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous who said that he would keep a list of his mistakes in his wallet and refer to it from time to time. A boss of mine who was adventurous about experimenting with new technology said "I don't know very much about it, but I do know 50 ways that wont't work". This has led me to asking someone who claims to be an expert "Tell me three (or five) things that won't work" in their field of expertise.

The advice from the article For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect seems spot on.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#108

Post by sliverstorm »

Bahamut wrote: post #94

This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing. Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes…

I imagine confidence & morale can, in their line of work, tip the scales and make something impossible, eminently possible.

The small troupe of British soldiers who recently repelled a militant attack with only bayonets comes to mind. Outnumbered, outgunned, the subject of an ambush, it seems to me that a combination of resolve and confidence was the deciding factor.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#109

Post by tsunamifury »

byEngineer wrote: post #20
lucio wrote: post #12

"epic housing bubble stoked by the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers" Isn't he being prey of his own effect? So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)" If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?

The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for…

This sounds a lot like Chinese astroturfing. As you read his comments further down it becomes more apparent.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#110

Post by sakri »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #105
sakri wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this with developers: The young gun who assumes he understands architectural concepts without reading up on them, and re-invents the wheel (often producing a wheel that's tough to turn). Then there's the cocky senior who doesn't need the latest and greatest because he already "knows" they do the same thing as his solution from 15 years ago (and when he's fired he can't find work because he's a dinosaur). I know…

Do dinosaur managers just talk slower?

Godzilla like dorsal spikes become a characteristic feature of these unfortunate individuals.
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