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ciphergoth comments on Calibrate your self-assessments - LessWrong
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I've noticed that I have a particular form of calibration problem, for which I don't know if there is a specific term. Tentatively, I'm calling it "pernicious sliding selective self-assessment."
What I mean by this is that all of my achievements become diminished in my own eyes, because my frame of reference for comparison gradually excludes people who haven't reached at least an equal level of achievement:
-- When I started working out, I gradually came to ignore the 80% (or whatever it is) of the population that is sedentary and could only compare myself to the people I see at the gym, a disproportionate number of whom make me look weak by comparison.
-- Similarly, when I took up a martial art, I ended up comparing myself not to the population as a whole, but to the more advanced practitioners, thus feeling incompetent.
-- I have a lot of academic accomplishments, including a degree summa cum laude from a competitive university and a Fulbright fellowship. Yet I suffer horribly from imposter syndrome, in part because my frame of reference for comparison gradually weans out anyone who isn't also academically accomplished.
Unfortunately, the fact that I am aware this is happening doesn't seem to help overcome it.
I remember the shock of going to my first crypto conference and realizing that I was nowhere near being the smartest person in the room. From there, it seemed to me that unless you were at the very top of your profession, you were always going to compare yourself to your immediate superiors and feel bad. However, I'm reliably informed that in at least one instance, being at the very pinnacle of a world-respected field of endeavour is not enough to feel good about your abilities.
It occurs to me that I also neglected to include participating on Lesswrong in my list. It's a slightly different phenomenon, but here the local sample is so skewed in terms of intelligence that even those of us with IQs 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean can be quietly nursing the humiliating thought that maybe we are idiots after all.
That is especially so for those of us who excel more in verbal intelligence than in math and programming capabilities.
So I'm not the only one who's found that!
When I was younger, for reasons that I don't understand well now, I really didn't want to be defined by "intelligence." People often told me that I was smart, and that because I was smart, I ought to do x, y, z (be a biologist, be a physicist, whatever, and if it was a teacher, it was usually the subject they taught.) Which prompted me not to want to do x, y, z even though I found pretty much all subjects fascinating.
So I went into nursing, where a lot of the material (practical skills and empathy-based skills) involves stuff I'm not naturally good at...and all of the sudden intelligence is something I want to prove, and the fact that most people on LW are smarter than I am bothers me way more than it should.
I have found that LessWrong has the opposite effect on me. While I think that I am less rational and less intelligent than the average person here (or perhaps the availability-weighted average?), my main cognitive response has been an increase in self-esteem.
Strangely, in college, where there was also an abundance of people smarter than me, I and my response was a general feeling of inferiority.
I would hypothesize (~40% confidence) that the source of this difference is a sense of competing with my college classmates for jobs vs. aspiring to gain the abilities that others here have.