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ialdabaoth comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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How do you convince yourself to have self-confidence in a given situation, even in the face of direct empirical evidence that such confidence would be misplaced in that situation?
This seems to be a thing that many successful people are very good at - shrugging and acting like they're good at whatever task is at hand, even when they're clearly not - and then getting people to "buy in" to them because of that confidence rather than because of any evidence of actual skilled performance.
How do you kickstart that process?
(EDIT: was this a bad question to ask?)
Think how you would perform the role of a self-confident character when acting in a play?
I guess... I'm not sure how well I can visualize the answer to that. I can visualize self-confident characters in plays, I just can't visualize being one; as soon as I imagine me as the actor, imagining self-confidence immediately breaks suspension of disbelief. (Like imagining Danny DeVito as a leading man in a straightforward, non-subversive romcom).
Screw suspension of disbelief. You're really into theater now, you want to figure out all about how acting works, and so you want to learn out how to do all sorts of characters to develop a good range, no matter if you're actually good for casting into one or not. So now you're trying to figure how to do the confident self-affirmed character, starting from the nuts and bolts. Figure out how they use their voice, how they move themselves, what body language and stereotypical interactions they use in various stock situations and so on. You're not being in a social situation yourself here, you're figuring out the mechanics for making a theater scene come together, with yourself as one part of it.
Also maybe look into some actual books on improv theater that have been recommended here occasionally?
Hmm. My emotional reactions as I attempt to push myself towards doing this seem to indicate that I don't actually want to learn these things - or at the very least, that I anticipate that trying to learn these things will be unsuccessful and embarrassing.
Doing a wide range of tasks I'm not familiar with, and learning them well and quickly, has done wonders for my ability to just say, 'Fuck it, I'm me and I can do whatever I'm paid to. I've done stuff I didn't know how to do before.'
It also helps to know what the complexity of the task is have little self-affirming narratives - if you know that people who you don't consider smarter than yourself have done something, and have some idea about stacked complexity, then it becomes a lot easier to say something like "This really isn't that complicated, I just don't know how to do it yet, but that guy does it and he's an idiot - and he probably didn't spend years really learning it."
If you can draw parallels with what you already know, that can help too.