Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws. This is akin to the principle of not taking pride in confessing your ignorance; for if your ignorance is a source of pride to you, you may become loathe to relinquish your ignorance when evidence comes knocking. Likewise with our flaws—we should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess.
There’s something to what Eliezer is saying here: when people are too strongly committed to the idea that humans are fallible this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where humans give up on trying to improve things and as a consequence remain fallible when they could have improved.
I actually read this as a literal, technical statement about when to let the reward modules of our minds trigger, and not a statement about whether low or high confidence is desirable. Finding a flaw in oneself is only valuable if it’s followed by further investigation into details and fixes, and, as a purely practical matter, that investigation is more likely to happen if you feel good about having found a fix, than if you feel good about having found a flaw.
I actually read this as a literal, technical statement about when to let the reward modules of our minds trigger, and not a statement about whether low or high confidence is desirable. Finding a flaw in oneself is only valuable if it’s followed by further investigation into details and fixes, and, as a purely practical matter, that investigation is more likely to happen if you feel good about having found a fix, than if you feel good about having found a flaw.