= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
teageegeepea comments on That other kind of status - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (108)
Speaking of self-esteem, check out Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart and Joseph M. Boden's "Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem".
Bryan Caplan uses the fact that people rarely have delusions of mediocrity or obscurity to argue for a Szaszian conception of mental illness.
I had delusions of relative mediocrity for years, though I don't see them as mental illness, just morality tinged former belief, my equivalent of having been a theist perhaps. OTOH, it might be more accurate to say that such delusions also have an element of laziness and of desire to avoid responsibility. Arguably I didn't think that I was less capable than I was. More like I didn't see the opportunities to take risks, work harder, seek diverse experiences, challenge assumptions and take on more responsibility, etc that I now do see and which lead to more ability growth.
Nick Bostrom, seems to me to still be held back by similar delusions, and I see them as his major weakness.
Are there any specific things you did to overcome your delusions of mediocrity, or was it more of an undirected change over time (or something else again)?
If a person has delusions of mediocrity or obscurity, how would we know? Most people aren't Extremely Impressive, and someone who actually is Extremely Impressive but insists otherwise is "just being modest".
Well, there's also this.
"Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be."
I would say it is common for people to think this for the simple reason that it is commonly true. I know it is true about myself.
I'd never heard of that, thanks for the pointer. Something seems suspicious about it being found most "among graduate students". Aren't grad students a major source for psych experiment data due to availability?
Anecdotally, the high prevalence among grad students strikes me as quite correct; about half of the grad students I know have these worries, while my friends outside of academia seem to feel good about their performance when praised and reserve their self-doubt for actual occasions of criticism.
In my own case, I started getting those feelings in college, almost exactly when (for the first time I know of) I met someone indisputably smarter than me.
Yes, seconded. Especially among women.
I think it's more undergrads, actually, who are a) more numerous and b) very likely to take an intro psych course no matter their major, in which courses it's possible to issue a requirement: either participation in a psych study, or a long paper nobody wants to write. (They can't outright require study participation, but they can make the alternative very unappealing.)
It is a sad fact about this world that most people are mediocre and obscure, so how can they be deluded about that?
Funny, I always thought of delusions of mediocrity as self-fulfilling prophecies.
Both interpretations could be simultaneously true...
The non-mediocre may be.