I’ve noticed that I have a particular form of calibration problem, for which I don’t know if there is a specific term. Tentatively, I’m calling it “pernicious sliding selective self-assessment.”
What I mean by this is that all of my achievements become diminished in my own eyes, because my frame of reference for comparison gradually excludes people who haven’t reached at least an equal level of achievement:
-- When I started working out, I gradually came to ignore the 80% (or whatever it is) of the population that is sedentary and could only compare myself to the people I see at the gym, a disproportionate number of whom make me look weak by comparison.
-- Similarly, when I took up a martial art, I ended up comparing myself not to the population as a whole, but to the more advanced practitioners, thus feeling incompetent.
-- I have a lot of academic accomplishments, including a degree summa cum laude from a competitive university and a Fulbright fellowship. Yet I suffer horribly from imposter syndrome, in part because my frame of reference for comparison gradually weans out anyone who isn’t also academically accomplished.
Unfortunately, the fact that I am aware this is happening doesn’t seem to help overcome it.
I remember the shock of going to my first crypto conference and realizing that I was nowhere near being the smartest person in the room. From there, it seemed to me that unless you were at the very top of your profession, you were always going to compare yourself to your immediate superiors and feel bad. However, I’m reliably informed that in at least one instance, being at the very pinnacle of a world-respected field of endeavour is not enough to feel good about your abilities.
It occurs to me that I also neglected to include participating on Lesswrong in my list. It’s a slightly different phenomenon, but here the local sample is so skewed in terms of intelligence that even those of us with IQs 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean can be quietly nursing the humiliating thought that maybe we are idiots after all.
That is especially so for those of us who excel more in verbal intelligence than in math and programming capabilities.
When I was younger, for reasons that I don’t understand well now, I really didn’t want to be defined by “intelligence.” People often told me that I was smart, and that because I was smart, I ought to do x, y, z (be a biologist, be a physicist, whatever, and if it was a teacher, it was usually the subject they taught.) Which prompted me not to want to do x, y, z even though I found pretty much all subjects fascinating.
So I went into nursing, where a lot of the material (practical skills and empathy-based skills) involves stuff I’m not naturally good at...and all of the sudden intelligence is something I want to prove, and the fact that most people on LW are smarter than I am bothers me way more than it should.
I have found that LessWrong has the opposite effect on me. While I think that I am less rational and less intelligent than the average person here (or perhaps the availability-weighted average?), my main cognitive response has been an increase in self-esteem.
Strangely, in college, where there was also an abundance of people smarter than me, I and my response was a general feeling of inferiority.
I would hypothesize (~40% confidence) that the source of this difference is a sense of competing with my college classmates for jobs vs. aspiring to gain the abilities that others here have.
This is a VERY common form of anxiety. The good thing is, it is fairly well understood, and in vast majority of cases, the problem responds really, really well to CBT interventions. I’m familiar with cases where a dozen sessions (and a willing commitment to overcoming the issue) completely and permanently solved the problem. Have you tried something like that?
In case you haven’t, I highly recommend it. Even if you don’t want/can’t afford treatment right now, you could try basic CBT on your own (keeping thought records can be particularly helpful). It is likely to be less effective than guided therapy, but it is certainly cheaper.
I’ve noticed this trend myself. I also see it most frequently amongst my upper-middle-class friends (as opposed to lower-middle or working class friends). Amongst said group, just passing or even passing well isn’t enough—you have to be top of the class, or you aren’t anybody special.
It’s an extremely judgmental attitude and very difficult to live up to. I don’t know about the men, but it seems to makes for hyperactive, control freak women… or for early nervous breakdowns. Nasty destructive cycles crop up pretty often too.
Three books on common, inhumanly stringent standards.
Compassion and Self-Hate by Theodore Rubin. (Self-hatred as a semi-autonomous mental habit, with compassion as the only way out)
I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) by Brene Brown. (Women and shame, with a claim that women are haunted by incompatible standards, while men are haunted by a single unachievable standard—I’m not sure this is true, but I’m keeping an eye out for evidence one way or the other. )
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body by Courntey Martin (Eating disorders among high-achieving young women.)
I don’t see the problem. You have high standards. It would be crazy to compare yourself to an average person in each of these situations. Do you really want to feel good about lifting more weight than the average sedentary person as a gym-goer? In martial arts specifically I think you should always be comparing yourself to the person directly above you. It’s competitive and its self improvement. Slightly better is what you should be next week. A lot better is what you should be next year. The “impostor syndrome” (yes, those are scare quotes) seems like a seperate issue to me. Comparing yourself to those around you might make you feel insecure and untalented if you have a bias towards overrating others or if you are less talented but that only makes your achievements more impressive.
The scare quotes are because it seems to be assumed that anyone who has an accomplishment deserves it. Some people must luck out. If we’re not going to just reject the notion of deserving entirely there must be some people who don’t deserve their accomplishments and as a result feel like they don’t deserve their accomplishments. Additionally, feeling like you don’t deserve your accomplishment, even if most people feel like they do, doesn’t mean you’re pathological. People have different standards for considering themselves deserving. Some are way off one end of the bell curve but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. When you consider yourself competent or deserving is a personal judgement. There’s nothing inconsistent in an above average or even elite person thinking they are incompetent.
The change in your basis of comparison is probably quite common, and is probably part of the cause for the Dunning Kruger effect...
...a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.
It is worth pointing out that the effect is more dramatic and common in Americans relative to Europeans and actually appears to be reversed in people from East Asia. In other words: culture matters, and it wouldn’t surprise me if outlier-types (who consciously self modify) can exaggerate, reverse, or correct for the effect by exposing themselves to some kind of reminders, training, and/or social context.
I’ve noticed that I have a particular form of calibration problem, for which I don’t know if there is a specific term. Tentatively, I’m calling it “pernicious sliding selective self-assessment.”
What I mean by this is that all of my achievements become diminished in my own eyes, because my frame of reference for comparison gradually excludes people who haven’t reached at least an equal level of achievement:
-- When I started working out, I gradually came to ignore the 80% (or whatever it is) of the population that is sedentary and could only compare myself to the people I see at the gym, a disproportionate number of whom make me look weak by comparison.
-- Similarly, when I took up a martial art, I ended up comparing myself not to the population as a whole, but to the more advanced practitioners, thus feeling incompetent.
-- I have a lot of academic accomplishments, including a degree summa cum laude from a competitive university and a Fulbright fellowship. Yet I suffer horribly from imposter syndrome, in part because my frame of reference for comparison gradually weans out anyone who isn’t also academically accomplished.
Unfortunately, the fact that I am aware this is happening doesn’t seem to help overcome it.
I remember the shock of going to my first crypto conference and realizing that I was nowhere near being the smartest person in the room. From there, it seemed to me that unless you were at the very top of your profession, you were always going to compare yourself to your immediate superiors and feel bad. However, I’m reliably informed that in at least one instance, being at the very pinnacle of a world-respected field of endeavour is not enough to feel good about your abilities.
It occurs to me that I also neglected to include participating on Lesswrong in my list. It’s a slightly different phenomenon, but here the local sample is so skewed in terms of intelligence that even those of us with IQs 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean can be quietly nursing the humiliating thought that maybe we are idiots after all.
That is especially so for those of us who excel more in verbal intelligence than in math and programming capabilities.
So I’m not the only one who’s found that!
When I was younger, for reasons that I don’t understand well now, I really didn’t want to be defined by “intelligence.” People often told me that I was smart, and that because I was smart, I ought to do x, y, z (be a biologist, be a physicist, whatever, and if it was a teacher, it was usually the subject they taught.) Which prompted me not to want to do x, y, z even though I found pretty much all subjects fascinating.
So I went into nursing, where a lot of the material (practical skills and empathy-based skills) involves stuff I’m not naturally good at...and all of the sudden intelligence is something I want to prove, and the fact that most people on LW are smarter than I am bothers me way more than it should.
I have found that LessWrong has the opposite effect on me. While I think that I am less rational and less intelligent than the average person here (or perhaps the availability-weighted average?), my main cognitive response has been an increase in self-esteem.
Strangely, in college, where there was also an abundance of people smarter than me, I and my response was a general feeling of inferiority.
I would hypothesize (~40% confidence) that the source of this difference is a sense of competing with my college classmates for jobs vs. aspiring to gain the abilities that others here have.
Will it help if I congratulate you on your academic accomplishments?
This is a VERY common form of anxiety. The good thing is, it is fairly well understood, and in vast majority of cases, the problem responds really, really well to CBT interventions. I’m familiar with cases where a dozen sessions (and a willing commitment to overcoming the issue) completely and permanently solved the problem. Have you tried something like that?
In case you haven’t, I highly recommend it. Even if you don’t want/can’t afford treatment right now, you could try basic CBT on your own (keeping thought records can be particularly helpful). It is likely to be less effective than guided therapy, but it is certainly cheaper.
I’ve noticed this trend myself. I also see it most frequently amongst my upper-middle-class friends (as opposed to lower-middle or working class friends). Amongst said group, just passing or even passing well isn’t enough—you have to be top of the class, or you aren’t anybody special.
It’s an extremely judgmental attitude and very difficult to live up to. I don’t know about the men, but it seems to makes for hyperactive, control freak women… or for early nervous breakdowns. Nasty destructive cycles crop up pretty often too.
Three books on common, inhumanly stringent standards.
Compassion and Self-Hate by Theodore Rubin. (Self-hatred as a semi-autonomous mental habit, with compassion as the only way out)
I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) by Brene Brown. (Women and shame, with a claim that women are haunted by incompatible standards, while men are haunted by a single unachievable standard—I’m not sure this is true, but I’m keeping an eye out for evidence one way or the other. )
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body by Courntey Martin (Eating disorders among high-achieving young women.)
I don’t see the problem. You have high standards. It would be crazy to compare yourself to an average person in each of these situations. Do you really want to feel good about lifting more weight than the average sedentary person as a gym-goer? In martial arts specifically I think you should always be comparing yourself to the person directly above you. It’s competitive and its self improvement. Slightly better is what you should be next week. A lot better is what you should be next year. The “impostor syndrome” (yes, those are scare quotes) seems like a seperate issue to me. Comparing yourself to those around you might make you feel insecure and untalented if you have a bias towards overrating others or if you are less talented but that only makes your achievements more impressive.
The scare quotes are because it seems to be assumed that anyone who has an accomplishment deserves it. Some people must luck out. If we’re not going to just reject the notion of deserving entirely there must be some people who don’t deserve their accomplishments and as a result feel like they don’t deserve their accomplishments. Additionally, feeling like you don’t deserve your accomplishment, even if most people feel like they do, doesn’t mean you’re pathological. People have different standards for considering themselves deserving. Some are way off one end of the bell curve but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. When you consider yourself competent or deserving is a personal judgement. There’s nothing inconsistent in an above average or even elite person thinking they are incompetent.
The change in your basis of comparison is probably quite common, and is probably part of the cause for the Dunning Kruger effect...
It is worth pointing out that the effect is more dramatic and common in Americans relative to Europeans and actually appears to be reversed in people from East Asia. In other words: culture matters, and it wouldn’t surprise me if outlier-types (who consciously self modify) can exaggerate, reverse, or correct for the effect by exposing themselves to some kind of reminders, training, and/or social context.