I feel like certain populations (particularly women) tend to underestimate their abilities, so I find this comment pretty discouraging. My current take is that a lot of people think they aren’t good enough for XYZ, but if they take a good stab at XYZ in an environment that is encouraging they may realize that they might be able to do XYZ after all.
I think that a lot of people naturally think that they are “not math people” when they could actually be much better at math.
And I don’t think that you don’t have to be the best at math or XYZ to contribute. I think that as long as you’re willing to put some effort and are open-minded and willing to grow, you’ll probably surprise yourself at how much you’re able to do.
@Olivia I’m honestly very impressed with you because you’ve shown a lot of good traits by making this post. It’s clear that you deeply care about making a difference. You were bold and took the initiative to open up about your insecurities. You were agentic in posting this on the forum. You’re willing to take feedback from the audience Keep it up!
My reason is that the opposite problem usually occurs called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where dumb people or low IQ vastly overestimate what good they can do (in the EA worldview or perspective, not other perspectives) due to not realizing just how bad they are, while High IQ people underestimate themselves due to not realizing how good they are, and IQ/g-factor is both important at the statstical or group level and mostly genetic, so that’s why it can be discouraging to be in an EA job.
But adopting the just-world fallacy helps us nothing here. They can still be psychologically healthy, but they need to recognize their limits and not believe they can do anything they wish they can do.
I feel like certain populations (particularly women) tend to underestimate their abilities, so I find this comment pretty discouraging. My current take is that a lot of people think they aren’t good enough for XYZ, but if they take a good stab at XYZ in an environment that is encouraging they may realize that they might be able to do XYZ after all.
I think that a lot of people naturally think that they are “not math people” when they could actually be much better at math.
And I don’t think that you don’t have to be the best at math or XYZ to contribute. I think that as long as you’re willing to put some effort and are open-minded and willing to grow, you’ll probably surprise yourself at how much you’re able to do.
@Olivia I’m honestly very impressed with you because you’ve shown a lot of good traits by making this post. It’s clear that you deeply care about making a difference. You were bold and took the initiative to open up about your insecurities. You were agentic in posting this on the forum. You’re willing to take feedback from the audience Keep it up!
Thank you so much! I really appreciate this—it can definitely be challening to see good qualities I have sometimes...so thank you for posting this.
My reason is that the opposite problem usually occurs called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where dumb people or low IQ vastly overestimate what good they can do (in the EA worldview or perspective, not other perspectives) due to not realizing just how bad they are, while High IQ people underestimate themselves due to not realizing how good they are, and IQ/g-factor is both important at the statstical or group level and mostly genetic, so that’s why it can be discouraging to be in an EA job.
But adopting the just-world fallacy helps us nothing here. They can still be psychologically healthy, but they need to recognize their limits and not believe they can do anything they wish they can do.
I think Dunning-Kruger is overrated. Don’t have a canonical source for this but here are some posts.
I’ll provisionally retract all comments on this thread, because I think I got it majorly wrong, except this one.