Douglas_Knight comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 April 2009 06:30AM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 21 April 2009 03:44:07AM 4 points [-]

The cost of underconfidence is an opportunity cost. This is easy to miss, so it will be underweighted--salience bias. This is not a rebuttal, but it is a reason to expect people will falsely conclude that overconfidence is costlier.

Comment author: Annoyance 21 April 2009 01:43:06PM 0 points [-]

I approve of your response, Douglas_Knight, but think that it is both incomplete and somewhat inaccurate.

The cost of underconfidence isn't necessarily or always an opportunity cost. It can be so, yes. But it can also be not so. You are making a subtle and mostly implicit claim of universality regarding an assertion that is not universally the case.

A strategy doesn't need to work in every possible contingency to be useful or valid.