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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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The level of certainty is not up for grabs. You are as confident as you happen to be, this can't be changed. You can change the appearance, but not your actual level of confidence. And changing the apparent level of confidence is equivalent to lying.
But it isn't perceived as so by the general public - it seems to me that the usual perception of "confidence" has more to do with status than with probability estimates.
The non-technical people I work with often say that I use "maybe" and "probably" too much (I'm a programmer - "it'll probably work" is a good description of how often it does work in practice) - as if having confidence in one's statements was a sign of moral fibre, and not a sign of miscalibration.
Actually, making statements with high confidence is a positive trait, but most people address this by increasing the confidence they express, not by increasing their knowledge until they can honestly make high-confidence statements. And our culture doesn't correct for that, because errors of calibration are not immediatly obvious (as they would be if, say, we had a widespread habit of betting on various things).
That a lie is likely to be misinterpreted or not noticed doesn't make it not a lie, and conversely.
Oh, I fully agree with your point; it's a pity that high confidence on unusual topics is interpreted as arrogance.
Try this: I prefer my leaders to be confident. I prefer my subordinates to be truthful.