While reading this I kind of forgot you were talking about multiple agents and was thinking instead about subagents a la a multi-agent theory of mind. In this sense optimism can come up from the inside as parts of the mind claim higher confidence predictions and win out over lower confidence predictions, gradually replacing lower, perhaps accurate, confidence perceptions, beliefs, etc. with higher, perhaps inaccurate, ones. Then when you ask to know something about the world, you just get back the high confidence answers, have too much confidence yourself, and have to struggle to stay humble. The modern depression pandemic withstanding, this would seem to offer a possible explanation about why humans are generally over confident rather than under confident (or at least I think it’s true that humans are more over than under confident, but I could be mistaken about this, but I except I am right given virtue training historically almost always included “humility” but rarely something like “confidence”).
While reading this I kind of forgot you were talking about multiple agents and was thinking instead about subagents a la a multi-agent theory of mind. In this sense optimism can come up from the inside as parts of the mind claim higher confidence predictions and win out over lower confidence predictions, gradually replacing lower, perhaps accurate, confidence perceptions, beliefs, etc. with higher, perhaps inaccurate, ones. Then when you ask to know something about the world, you just get back the high confidence answers, have too much confidence yourself, and have to struggle to stay humble. The modern depression pandemic withstanding, this would seem to offer a possible explanation about why humans are generally over confident rather than under confident (or at least I think it’s true that humans are more over than under confident, but I could be mistaken about this, but I except I am right given virtue training historically almost always included “humility” but rarely something like “confidence”).