I think within EA, people should report their accurate levels of confidence, which in some cultures and situations will come across as underconfident and in other cultures and situations will come across as overconfident.
I’m not sure what the practical solution is to this level of precision bleeding outside of EA; I definitely felt like there were times where I was socially penalized for trying to be accurate in situations where accuracy was implicitly not called for. If I was smarter/more socially savvy the “obvious” right call would be to quickly codeswitch between different contexts, but in practice I’ve found it quite hard.
___
Separate from the semantics used, I agree there is a real issue where some people are systematically underconfident or overconfident relative to reality, and this hurts their ability to believe true things or achieve their goals in the long run. Unfortunately this plausibly correlates with demographic differences (eg women on average less confident than men, Asians on average less confident than Caucasians), which seems worth correcting for if possible.
I didn’t downvote your comment, but I did feel a bit like it wasn’t really addressing the points Chi was making, so if I had to guess, I’d say that might be why.
I think within EA, people should report their accurate levels of confidence, which in some cultures and situations will come across as underconfident and in other cultures and situations will come across as overconfident.
I’m not sure what the practical solution is to this level of precision bleeding outside of EA; I definitely felt like there were times where I was socially penalized for trying to be accurate in situations where accuracy was implicitly not called for. If I was smarter/more socially savvy the “obvious” right call would be to quickly codeswitch between different contexts, but in practice I’ve found it quite hard.
___
Separate from the semantics used, I agree there is a real issue where some people are systematically underconfident or overconfident relative to reality, and this hurts their ability to believe true things or achieve their goals in the long run. Unfortunately this plausibly correlates with demographic differences (eg women on average less confident than men, Asians on average less confident than Caucasians), which seems worth correcting for if possible.
Why is this comment downvoted? :)
I didn’t downvote your comment, but I did feel a bit like it wasn’t really addressing the points Chi was making, so if I had to guess, I’d say that might be why.
If my comment didn’t seem pertinent, I think I most likely misunderstood the original points then. Will reread and try to understand better.