My take on self-confidence and innocence has several parts to it, and I think it’s one of the most important things I want to communicate, for many reasons I don’t go into here. But with self-confidence, you don’t need to be falsely sure that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer, but you can be very confident that trying is the right way to go. Confidence-in-path rather than confidence-in-results.
I know I’m following a trail that I know also goes to crazytown at some crossroad, and I see the skulls, but I’m pretty confident it’s the right way to go for me rn, so I’ll continue onwards at full speed until I learn that it’s not the right path.
At no point in your journey, no matter how uncertain you are, no matter how numerous be the options before you, will dragging your feet help you faster get to where you want to go.
Sometimes I call it “hubris”, but it’s not really about that. If you make a bet on that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer or whatever, you don’t need to be certain of the outcome to think it’s good EV. But to others who see you betting on it, they might mistake it for certainty—it’s as if they forgot that probabilities exist for a moment.
This is one of the most important reasons why hubris is so undervalued. People mistakenly think the goal is to generate precise probability estimates for frequently-discussed hypotheses (a goal in which deference can make sense). In a common-payoff-game research community, what matters is making new leaps in model space, not converging on probabilities. We (the research community) are bottlenecked by insight-production, not marginally better forecasts or decisions. Feign hubris if you need to, but strive to install it as a defense against model-dissolving deference.
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Oh, and it was nice to meet you in Berlin! Stay awesome. ^^
My take on self-confidence and innocence has several parts to it, and I think it’s one of the most important things I want to communicate, for many reasons I don’t go into here. But with self-confidence, you don’t need to be falsely sure that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer, but you can be very confident that trying is the right way to go. Confidence-in-path rather than confidence-in-results.
I know I’m following a trail that I know also goes to crazytown at some crossroad, and I see the skulls, but I’m pretty confident it’s the right way to go for me rn, so I’ll continue onwards at full speed until I learn that it’s not the right path.
Sometimes I call it “hubris”, but it’s not really about that. If you make a bet on that you’ll do more good than Peter Singer or whatever, you don’t need to be certain of the outcome to think it’s good EV. But to others who see you betting on it, they might mistake it for certainty—it’s as if they forgot that probabilities exist for a moment.
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Oh, and it was nice to meet you in Berlin! Stay awesome. ^^
Nicely said.
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See you at GatherTown soon!