I would guess that this sort of reasoning happens a lot. In concrete terms:
A person (call her Alice) forms a heuristic — “I am good at X” — where X isn’t perfectly defined. (“I am good at real-world reasoning”; “I am good at driving”; “I am a good math teacher”.) She forms it because she’s good at X on a particular axis she cares about (“I am good at statistical problem solving”; “I drive safely”; “My algebraic geometry classes consistently get great reviews”).
5. You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Suppose each doctor makes errors at the same rate, but about different things. I will often catch other doctors’ errors. But by definition I don’t notice my own errors; if I did, I would stop making them! By “errors” I don’t mean stupid mistakes like writing the wrong date on a prescription, I mean fundamentally misunderstanding how to use a certain treatment or address a certain disease. Every doctor has studied some topics in more or less depth than others. When I’ve studied a topic in depth, it’s obvious to me where the average doctor is doing things slightly sub-optimally out of ignorance. But the topics I haven’t studied in depth, I assume I’m doing everything basically okay. If you go through your life constantly noticing places where other doctors are wrong, it’s easy to think you’re better than them. [...]
7. You do a good job satisfying your own values. [Every doctor] wants to make people healthy and save lives, but there are other values that differ between practitioners. How much do you care about pain control? How much do you worry about addiction and misuse? How hard do you try to avoid polypharmacy? How do you balance patient autonomy with making sure they get the right treatment? How do you balance harms and benefits of a treatment that helps the patient’s annoying symptom today but raises heart attack risk 2% in twenty years? All of these trade off against each other: someone who tries too hard to minimize use of addictive drugs may have a harder time controlling their patients’ pain. Someone who cares a lot about patient autonomy might have a harder time keeping their medication load reasonable. If you make the set of tradeoffs that feel right to you, your patients will do better on the metrics you care about than other doctors’ patients (they’ll do better on the metrics the other doctors care about, but worse on yours). Your patients doing better on the metrics you care about feels a lot like you being a better doctor.
Relevant Scott Alexander (again):