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MrHen comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong
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Comments (176)
Overconfidence and underconfidence both imply a non-optimal amount of confidence. It's a little oxymoronic to claim that underconfidence is an excellent strategy - if it's an excellent strategy then it's presumably not underconfidence. I assume what you are actually claiming is that in general most people would get better results by being less confident than they are? Or are you claiming that relative to accurate judgements of probability of success it is better to consistently under rather than over estimate?
You claim that overconfidence is usually costlier than underconfidence. There are situations where overconfidence has potentially very high cost (overconfidently thinking you can safely overtake on a blind bend perhaps) but in many situations the costs of failure are not as severe as people tend to imagine. Overconfidence (in the sense of estimating greater probability of success than is accurate) can usefully compensate for over estimating the cost of failure in my experience.
You seem to have a pattern of responding to posts with unsupported statements that appear designed more to antagonize than to add useful information to the conversation.
I am replying here instead of higher because I agree with mattnewport, but this is addressed to Annoyance. It is hard to for me to understand what you mean by your post because the links are invisible and I did not instinctively fill them in correctly.
As best as I can tell, this is situational. I think mattnewport's response is accurate. More on this below.
It seems that the two paths from this statement are to stay inaccurate or start getting more efficient at optimizing your accuracy. It sounds too similar to saying, "It is too hard. I give up," for me to automatically choose inaccuracy. I want to know why it is so hard to become more accurate.
It also seems situational in the sense that it is not always, just often. This is relevant below.
In addition to mattnewport's comment about underconfidence implying non-optimal confidence, I think that building this statement on two situational principles is dangerous. Filling out the (situational) blanks leads to this statement:
This seems to work just as well as saying this:
Which can really be generalized to this:
Which just leads us back to mattnewport's comment about optimal confidence. It also seems like it was not the point you were trying to make, so I assume I made a mistake somewhere. As best as I can tell, it was underemphasizing the two situational claims. As a result, I fully understand the request for more support in that area.
Acting overconfident is another form of bluffing. Also, acting one way or the other is a little different than understanding your own limits. How does it help if you bluff yourself?