We Are All Confident Idiots • Hacker News Board

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#121

Post by jerf » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:06 PM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #115

tokenadult wrote: post #73

This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand…

I'm a perfect example. My wife was telling me that her sister's workplace required women to wear skirts. I told her that was absurd and could not possibly be legal. I was wrong. I believe in nutshell that all that is required is a consistently applied dress code (pun intended I guess) and not violating religious beliefs. I was stunned.

Bear in mind the rules cover all workplaces. Of course workplaces can enforce dress rules, even ones as specific as that, because workplaces are also allowed to enforce the wearing of uniforms.

It doesn't make it a good idea for a specific place, but, well, the purpose of the law is not to provide "good idea" guidelines for every scenario, or to prevent people from making bad decisions. It's only supposed to prevent them from making illegal ones, and that's not the same in any way.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#122

Post by Real_S » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

adwf wrote: post #39

I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persis…

"Death of the weakest" leads to a better understanding of evolution. However, fitness (or its antipode, weakness) is usually measured with average reproductive rate. Averages can be misleading.

Better yet, think of evolution as the loss of strategies that go extinct. Strategies with a low risk of extinction are favored. Importantly, strategies with a high average reproductive rate can sometimes be very risky. Therefore, sometimes the "fittest" strategies are evolutionarily unfavorable, and consequently the "weakest" strategies survive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433879

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#123

Post by freshflowers » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

Bargs wrote: post #90

mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the article: "The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often p…

There is a world of difference between being ignorant of your own ignorance and just making shit up when confronted with your ignorance.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#124

Post by gwern » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #36

>whether his appearance as a judge on America’s Got Talent would damage his legacy. “No,” said one woman to this last question. “It will make him even more popular.” Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie. (The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovab…

'would' is ambiguous because the author is describing something in the past. For example, you would write 'would' regardless of whether the original question was "Ma'am, do you think Clinton's appearance yesterday on America's Got Talent will damage his legacy?" or if the question had actually been "Miss, do you think Clinton accepting his recent invitation to appear on AGT would damage his legacy?" But either way, the question is false...

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#125

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#126

Post by Florin_Andrei » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:48 PM UTC

leeber wrote: post #119

I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know. Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about. For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these typ…

> I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.

I don't think that's true in practice. For proof, just watch any academic debate, ever.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#127

Post by Florin_Andrei » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:53 PM UTC

mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

In most common, trivial real life situations, you have an advantage if you keep spewing forth nonsense and adjust for mistakes as you go along and keep pushing forward semi-blindly - compared to being forever hesitant in search for perfect truth.

The "confident idiot" basically applies a Monte Carlo search over the range of possibilities, and may eventually fall onto a good-enough solution.

I suspect that's the explanation for the D-K effect. If that's the case, then the "idiot" actually uses a pretty sophisticated overall strategy that works well in a fluid world (so not so much an idiot actually).

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#128

Post by Florin_Andrei » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:56 PM UTC

nkozyra wrote: post #93

mironathetin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … " I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about…

Is this even necessarily a bad thing? Aside from the cover-your-ass aspect of it, I find this tends to spark healthy debate, even if someone's ego gets bruised in the mean time. The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard. I've worked really hard in the past few years to say "I don't know" even when I'm supposed to project expertise. I haven't encountered any real resistance to it, th…

> The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard.

If I had a penny for every time I've seen that, I'd have a pretty big pile of coins.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#129

Post by Florin_Andrei » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

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…

> 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

Real life situations are usually a bit squishy. They're often not set in stone, like pure logic is. If that's the case, being confident actually creates your own reality, by molding the existing one into a different shape.

So yes, in real life confidence works pretty well.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#130

Post by shimfish » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 7:00 PM UTC

I often reply "I don't know" when asked about things I don't know. It's invariably met with an explicit or implicit questioning of my worth. I can see why people learn never to admit ignorance.