This exact thought, from my diary in ~June 2022: “I advocate keeping a clear separation between how confident you are that your plan will work with how confident you are that pursuing the plan is optimal.”
I think perhaps I don’t fully advocate alieving that your plan is more likely to work than you actually believe it is. Or, at least, I advocate some of that on the margin, but mostly I just advocate keeping a clear separation between how confident you are that your plan will work with how confident you are that pursuing the plan is optimal. As long as you tune yourself to be inspired by working on the optimal, you can be more ambitious and less risk-averse.
Unfortunately, if you look like you’re confidently pursuing a plan (because you think it’s optimal, but your reasons are not immediately observable), other people will often mistake that for confidence-in-results and perhaps conclude that you’re epistemically crazy. So it’s nearly always socially safer to tune yourself to confidence-in-results lest you risk being misunderstood and laughed at.
You also don’t want to be so confident that what you’re doing is optimal that you’re unable to change your path when new evidence comes in. Your first plan is unlikely to be the best you can do, and you can only find the best you can do by trying many different things and iterating. Confidence can be an obstacle to change.
On the other hand, lack of confidence can also be an obstacle to change. If you’re not confident that you can do better than you’re currently doing, then you’ll have a hard time motivating yourself to find alternatives. Underconfidence is probably underappreciated as a source of bias due to social humility being such a virtue.
To use myself as an example (although I didn’t intend for this to be about me rather than about my general take on mindset): I feel pretty good about the ideas I’ve come up with so far. So now I have a choice to make: 1) I could think that the ideas are so good that I should just focus on building and clarifying them, or 2) I could use the ideas as evidence that I’m able to produce even better ideas if I keep searching. I’m aiming for the latter, and I hold my current best ideas in contempt because I’m still stuck with them. In some sense, confidence makes it easier to Actually Change My Mind.
I guess the recipe I might be advocating is: 1. separate between confidence-in-results and confidence-in-optimality 2. try to hold accurate and precise beliefs about the results of your plans/ideas, mistakes here are costly 3. try to alieve that you’re able to produce more optimal ideas/plans than the ones you already have, mistakes here are less costly, and gains in positive alief are much higher
I’m going to call this the Way of Aisi because it reminds me of an old friend who just did everything better than everyone else (including himself) because he had faith in himself. :p
I think this is a useful model. If I understand correctly what you’re saying, then it is that for any particular thing we can think about whether that thing is optimal to do, and whether I could get this thing to work seperately.
I think what I was saying is different. I was advocating confidence not at the object level of some concrete things you might do. Rather I think being confident in the overall process that you engage in to make process is a thing that you can have confidence in.
Imagine there is a really good researcher, but now this person forgets everything that they ever researched, except for their methodology. It some sense they still know how to do research. If they fill in some basic factual knowledge in their brain, which I expect wouldn’t take that long, I expect they would be able to continue being an effective researcher.
I wrote the entry in the context of the question “how can I gain the effectiveness-benefits of confidence and extreme ambition, without distorting my world-model/expectations?”
I had recently been discovering abstract arguments that seemed to strongly suggest it would be most altruistic/effective for me to pursue extremely ambitious projects; both because 1) the low-likelihood high-payoff quadrant had highest expected utility, but also because 2) the likelihood of success for extremely ambitious projects seemed higher than I thought. (Plus some other reasons.) I figured that I needn’t feel confident about success in order to feel confident about the approach.
This exact thought, from my diary in ~June 2022: “I advocate keeping a clear separation between how confident you are that your plan will work with how confident you are that pursuing the plan is optimal.”
I think this is a useful model. If I understand correctly what you’re saying, then it is that for any particular thing we can think about whether that thing is optimal to do, and whether I could get this thing to work seperately.
I think what I was saying is different. I was advocating confidence not at the object level of some concrete things you might do. Rather I think being confident in the overall process that you engage in to make process is a thing that you can have confidence in.
Imagine there is a really good researcher, but now this person forgets everything that they ever researched, except for their methodology. It some sense they still know how to do research. If they fill in some basic factual knowledge in their brain, which I expect wouldn’t take that long, I expect they would be able to continue being an effective researcher.
I wrote the entry in the context of the question “how can I gain the effectiveness-benefits of confidence and extreme ambition, without distorting my world-model/expectations?”
I had recently been discovering abstract arguments that seemed to strongly suggest it would be most altruistic/effective for me to pursue extremely ambitious projects; both because 1) the low-likelihood high-payoff quadrant had highest expected utility, but also because 2) the likelihood of success for extremely ambitious projects seemed higher than I thought. (Plus some other reasons.) I figured that I needn’t feel confident about success in order to feel confident about the approach.