Richard Feynman's experiences investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion are very, very good reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_People_Think%3F

In a very concise and abstract form: http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html

I wonder if the decline of apprenticeships has made overconfidence and underconfidence more common and more severe.

I'm not a history expert, but it seems to me that a blacksmith's apprentice 700 years ago wouldn't have had to worry about over/underconfidence in his skill. (Gender-neutral pronouns intentionally not used here!) He would have known exactly how skilled he was by comparing himself to his master every day, and his master's skill would have been a known quantity, since his master had been accepted by a guild of mutually recognized masters.

Nowadays, because of several factors, calibrating your judgement of your skill seems to be a lot harder. Our education system is completely different, and regardless of whatever else it does, it doesn't seem to be very good at providing reliable feedback to its students, who properly understand the importance of the feedback and respond accordingly. Our blacksmith's apprentice (let's call him John) knows when he's screwed up - the sword or whatever that he's made breaks, or his master points out how it's flawed. And John knows why this is important - if he doesn't fix the problem, he's not going to be able to earn a living.

Whereas a modern schoolkid (let's call him Jaden) may be absolutely unprepared to deal with math, but he doesn't know exactly how many years he's behind (it's hard enough to get this information in aggregate, and it seems to be rarely provided to the students themselves on an individual basis - no one is told "you are 3 years behind where you ought to be"). And Jaden has absolutely no clue why that matters, since the link between math and his future employment isn't obvious to him, and no one's explaining it to him. (School isn't for learning; as Paul Graham has explained, "Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.")

Another modern schoolkid (let's call her Jaina) may be really skilled at math, but testing won't indicate this strongly enough (it works both ways; tests saturate at the high end - especially if they're targeting a low level of achievement for the rest of the class - and "you are 3 years ahead of everyone else in this room" is not feedback that is commonly given). And there's a good chance it won't be obvious to her how important this is, and how important becoming even more skilled is. And if she ends up being underconfident in her ability, and the feedback loop ("I know how skilled I am, I know why becoming stronger is important, and I know what I need to do") isn't established, then instead of learning plasma physics and working on ITER or DEMO, she goes into marketing or something. Maybe doing worthy things, but not being as awesome as she could have been.

My point, after this wondering, is that I agree with this post, and want to elaborate: structuring what you do so that you test yourself in the process of doing it is a good way to establish a feedback loop that increases your skill and the accuracy of your confidence in it. I find nothing wrong with the debating example in this post, but I worry that it makes self-testing sound like something that you should go out and do, separate from your everyday work. (Part of this, I think, is due to Eliezer's very unusual occupation.) My usual self-testing example is something like "can I write this program correctly on the very first try?". That's a hard challenge, integrated into my everyday work. Successfully completing it, or coming close, has allowed me to build up my skill ("the compiler in my head") and avoid the danger of underconfidence.

This is where the martial arts analogy shows some of it's power.

I do Aikido. My dojo enjoys a nice diversity of genders, ages, and body types. We don't all practice the same; our styles are as diverse as our backgrounds.

However, it's not a free-for-all. Some people in the dojo are clearly better at this than others, and people find others to look up to, people to follow. And there is a very strong agreement on who the best people in the dojo are.

This strong agreement comes from the fact that Aikido is a martial art, and we train with each other. On a regular basis we throw each other around and this constant interaction is how we learn from each other.

So while my Aikido is probably a bit more male, I learn from the women every time I practice with them, and I can point to parts of my practice that are more feminine and even tell you which women I learned those bits from. And the converse for the women I practice with.

It's okay for a teacher or leader to express their identity in the practice of the art. It is up to the student to integrate that style into their own practice. This requires judgment, so we usually tell beginners "Don't try to interpret just yet. Just mimic Sensei as closely as you can. You'll branch out and improvise later". This is a common teaching in many practices, I think.

So then, ideal is a diversity of teachers, so students can see a diversity of styles, and integrate them into something suitable to them.

this was a basic leadership lesson in boy scouts. never address a group when asking for actual action.

Some thoughts from my experience in a martial arts dojo:

1. We avoid lots of failure modes by making sure (as far as reasonably possible) that people are there to train first and everything else second. One consequence of this is that we don't attach a whole lot of our progress to any particular instructor; we're blessed with a number of people who are really good at aikido, and we learn from all of them, and from each other.

2. On setting the bar too high for instructors: Most martial arts rely on a hierarchy of instructors, where the average dojo head is a reasonably normal person who is expert but not necessarily elite at the discipline. The "famous" people in the art travel around and deliver seminars to everybody else. Dojo head type people will also travel to attend more seminars than the average junior student, for obvious reasons.

All sorts of human enterprises work this way (although the formality of the hierarchy varies widely); everything from yoga to religions to Linux Users Groups. It's a good system.

I'm moving to Ottawa on May 1st.

How many people do we need to have quorum?