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diegocaleiro comments on Confession Thread: Mistakes as an aspiring rationalist - Less Wrong
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Arrogance: I caution you not to take this as advice for you to your own life, because frankly, arrogance goes a long, long loooooong way. Most rationalists are less arrogant in person than they should about their subject areas, and rationalist women who identify as females and are straight are even less frequently arrogant than the already low base rate. But some people are over-arrogant, and I am one of these. Over arrogance isn't about the intensity of arrogance, it is about the non-selectivity. The problem I have always had and been told again and again isn't generalized arrogance, it is leaking the arrogance into domains I'm not actually worth a penny. To see this with full clarity: that one should have a detailed model of when to be confident, when arrogant, and when humble took me a mere fourteen days, eleven months and twenty eight years, and counting.
Would you mind sharing examples? It'd help me to understand/internalize the idea your talking about. I too am sort of arrogant. Idk. I like to think that assign appropriate confidence levels based on the domain/information/situation, but I probably don't.
You're joking, right? We're arrogant as all hell, most of us are. I know I am. And it needs to fucking stop, because arrogance is ugly even when you're knowledgeable.
Dunning-Kruger - learn it, fear it. So long as you are aware of that effect, and aware of your tendency to arrogance (hardly uncommon, especially among the educated), you are far less likely to have it be a significant issue. Just be vigilant.
I have similar issues - I find it helpful to dive deeply into things I am very inexperienced with, for a while; realizing there are huge branches of knowledge you may be no more educated in than a 6th grader is humbling, and freeing, and once you are comfortable saying "That? Oh, hell - I don't know much about that, and will never find the time to", you can let it go and relax a bit. Or - I have. (my favorites are microbiology, or advance mathematics. I fancy myself smart, but it is super easy to be so totally over my head it may as well be mystic sorcery they're talking about. Humbles you right out.)
Big chunks of this board do that as well, FWIW.