I love the idea of adding a section on good things that imposter syndrome’s trying to protect :) I’d love your help writing it if you’re up for it! I’ll DM you :)
Here’s some thoughts from DM with Luisa. She said she agreed with these and suggested I just post these now in comments. So here goes!
It might be dangerous to talk too much about ‘the good things imposter syndrome may be trying to protect’ unless/until we have sufficiently crushed imposter syndrome (ie convinced the readers that it doesn’t serve where it doesn’t serve). So I think the fact that the intuition to add this section came up for me is a sign that I feel like your article crushed it!
In my mind, the purpose of this section would not be to be a counter-argument, or a reason to have imposter syndrome. It would be to help people keep their eyes open as they take any interventions against imposter syndrome so that they don’t accidentally throw some babies out with the bath water.
Some good things that seem to sometimes cause imposter syndrome:
This meant so much <3
I love the idea of adding a section on good things that imposter syndrome’s trying to protect :) I’d love your help writing it if you’re up for it! I’ll DM you :)
Here’s some thoughts from DM with Luisa. She said she agreed with these and suggested I just post these now in comments. So here goes!
It might be dangerous to talk too much about ‘the good things imposter syndrome may be trying to protect’ unless/until we have sufficiently crushed imposter syndrome (ie convinced the readers that it doesn’t serve where it doesn’t serve). So I think the fact that the intuition to add this section came up for me is a sign that I feel like your article crushed it!
In my mind, the purpose of this section would not be to be a counter-argument, or a reason to have imposter syndrome. It would be to help people keep their eyes open as they take any interventions against imposter syndrome so that they don’t accidentally throw some babies out with the bath water.
Some good things that seem to sometimes cause imposter syndrome:
Protecting honesty in self and community
Defense against overconfidence/delusion
Overcoming the unilateralist curse
General caution (e.g. the precautionary principle)
Incentivizing people to gain better contact with reality, like you did!
OK, I’ll stop there, though I’m guessing we can come up with more? Obviously a lot of these are overlapping.