From a nomenclature perspective, yes of course, in worry / anxiety or similarly, sadness / depression pairs, the latter ones are meant to refer to the pathologic version of the affect. I’m sorry for the sloppiness in my language.
With attribution though, I was intending to mean that affects that are triggered by unconscious mental states are often (wrongly) attrubuted to available external events as causes after the fact, rather than the more common meaning of cogitatively attributing some cause to an effect, as a way of explaining (and potentially coming t
...The right question to ask depends on what you want to know. “Success”, “contribution”, “greatness” are in themselves not quantifiable. You have to change these terms into something quantifiable, that will necessarily come with a different meaning. I do not pretend that I can provide a quantifiable, universal definition for these terms that will satisfy everyone. For example, a measure of success is remuneration, so you may want to ask whether higher paid scientists have correlated higher IQ, and the answer to this would be yes (this is true to almost all o
...While I find your solution thought provoking, I am not sure I agree with your conclusions. Suffering from chronic anxiety myself, I know it not to be a cognitive process. My problem is not that I spend effort cogitating on a solution to a non-existent threat, but rather that the constant feeling of dread poisons my everiday existence. False attributions are a typical byproduct of this state: one rarely experiences such feelings without also being compelled to find an explanation as to why they came about, arguably, because in a healthy mind, one would expe
...Your question is not well defined. Who are “best scientists”? What is “academic success”? How do you qualify “contribution”? Academia is a social institution as much as a scientific one, recognized success depends on power structures and social skills as much IQ. As far as contributions go, a relevant contribution does not necessarily require high intelligence: for example, the matrix equations used today in quantum electro-dynamics were found by someone remembering that they saw a mathematical formula somewhere that fit the experimental results. Also ther
...
I think what you have done here is pinpoint the difference between true belief and knowledge. It is indeed a very important distinction. I would be wary of using the word “confidence” though, because in US parlance it usually denotes a state of mind (which can be unsubstantiated) rather than express the measure by which your prediction can be considered well-founded.