Ok, giving it another go. Let’s say you had to perform a set of experiments. You didn’t know much about, nor studied a lot of, the background science. The results, and the data that can be extrapolated from those, are weak, and it’s in part your fault. How would you keep going, without failing either your overall experimental work (which should be the only important matter at hand), neither your co workers’ trust in your capabilities ?
The first most important thing would be to put things back into context. Being intellectually honest, with a genuine will towards truth, about just how much your work so far is worth, what you are capable of, how motivated you are, and what you can expect to achieve next. Putting confidence bounds on things like “this experiment set will be done by next week”, “I’ll falsify this hypothesis with this experiment”, “this theory seems to apply here”, “I’ll assume this explanation to be the right one”, etc. Planning your future work based on that.
Mostly in a bad case, it amounts to admitting “I don’t know”. Having admitted to that, you can start working towards better results, improving yourself at your own pace, and eventually accomplish your work.
Now I don’t usually trust people to accept that I’ll work at my own pace. In quite a few cases it seems like there’s a gap I can’t cross in explaining to them how working that way will be optimal (on a case by case basis, and for me). I especially don’t expect it when I am working well under what I know is my normal work output, or even below what is the average, expected work output for anyone who’d be in my shoes.
The next step—which was quite automatic most of the time—would be where I’d for instance explain my work or present results—the powerpoint presentations given to the team, or informal meeting with the lab director—where I’d include the meta information about how I rationally evaluated my work, and planned the next steps. But only selectively so. In order to show that I was intellectually honest, but not so much as to shoot my own foot in the process. Casually throwing here and there information which while correct would still draw on affect heuristics, halo effects, anchoring, and probably others I don’t even remember, to make it sound even better than it would have otherwise. Is that similar to what is called “becoming a more sophisticated arguer” ?
Some of the comments I’d receive then were like “ok you need to work more on that, but you seem to understand the problem well” “your presentation was very good, very easy to understand, it put everything back in place” etc. when my own estimate told me that not only my work wasn’t all that good, but that what was being praised wasn’t the right thing, and missed the point. I didn’t ever mention those doubts though.
I can’t tell how much of my final “success” was deserved. I don’t know how much of my final marks were due to the value of the science done, how much for the intellectual honesty, and how much for how I played on those to help it seem better than it was. I personally think my work wasn’t worth that much, and I know I underperformed. That I had good reasons to underperform myself at that time, doesn’t change the fact that I was graded better than I would have expected, or graded myself, even with benefit from hindsight.
As a caveat, I maybe shouldn’t have said “x-rationality” in that first comment. A small part of what I used was x-rationality. Most of the rest was normal rationality. But I learned about both at the same time. About the latter, I could throw more examples in. For instance, I only understood what science, and the scientific method was really about, on my last year, not as a result of my courses, but as a result of reading from the sl4 mailing list as well as some of your other writings. This helped me succeed too, a lot.
Ok, giving it another go. Let’s say you had to perform a set of experiments. You didn’t know much about, nor studied a lot of, the background science. The results, and the data that can be extrapolated from those, are weak, and it’s in part your fault. How would you keep going, without failing either your overall experimental work (which should be the only important matter at hand), neither your co workers’ trust in your capabilities ?
The first most important thing would be to put things back into context. Being intellectually honest, with a genuine will towards truth, about just how much your work so far is worth, what you are capable of, how motivated you are, and what you can expect to achieve next. Putting confidence bounds on things like “this experiment set will be done by next week”, “I’ll falsify this hypothesis with this experiment”, “this theory seems to apply here”, “I’ll assume this explanation to be the right one”, etc. Planning your future work based on that.
Mostly in a bad case, it amounts to admitting “I don’t know”. Having admitted to that, you can start working towards better results, improving yourself at your own pace, and eventually accomplish your work.
Now I don’t usually trust people to accept that I’ll work at my own pace. In quite a few cases it seems like there’s a gap I can’t cross in explaining to them how working that way will be optimal (on a case by case basis, and for me). I especially don’t expect it when I am working well under what I know is my normal work output, or even below what is the average, expected work output for anyone who’d be in my shoes.
The next step—which was quite automatic most of the time—would be where I’d for instance explain my work or present results—the powerpoint presentations given to the team, or informal meeting with the lab director—where I’d include the meta information about how I rationally evaluated my work, and planned the next steps. But only selectively so. In order to show that I was intellectually honest, but not so much as to shoot my own foot in the process. Casually throwing here and there information which while correct would still draw on affect heuristics, halo effects, anchoring, and probably others I don’t even remember, to make it sound even better than it would have otherwise. Is that similar to what is called “becoming a more sophisticated arguer” ?
Some of the comments I’d receive then were like “ok you need to work more on that, but you seem to understand the problem well” “your presentation was very good, very easy to understand, it put everything back in place” etc. when my own estimate told me that not only my work wasn’t all that good, but that what was being praised wasn’t the right thing, and missed the point. I didn’t ever mention those doubts though.
I can’t tell how much of my final “success” was deserved. I don’t know how much of my final marks were due to the value of the science done, how much for the intellectual honesty, and how much for how I played on those to help it seem better than it was. I personally think my work wasn’t worth that much, and I know I underperformed. That I had good reasons to underperform myself at that time, doesn’t change the fact that I was graded better than I would have expected, or graded myself, even with benefit from hindsight.
As a caveat, I maybe shouldn’t have said “x-rationality” in that first comment. A small part of what I used was x-rationality. Most of the rest was normal rationality. But I learned about both at the same time. About the latter, I could throw more examples in. For instance, I only understood what science, and the scientific method was really about, on my last year, not as a result of my courses, but as a result of reading from the sl4 mailing list as well as some of your other writings. This helped me succeed too, a lot.