Well, you’ve pretty clearly stated the sort of terrifying insecurity that most people wouldn’t say out loud and confront. But you can’t actually solve a problem by musing on that, whether to be afraid of it, or to develop arguments against your fears; the whole thing is just a wasted motion from the perspective of actual problem-solving. Time spent reading a math paper will always be better spent, once it’s been determined that you are going to take the problem as a goal.
If you’ve already decided that trying to solve a given problem is the best use of your time (and this belief is as updated as it can be) then yes continuing to worry is unhelpful. (Though worries can motivate honest assessments of how one is spending their time.) We agree.
Upvoted, but FYI, it’s really hard for people to know whether or not that sort of thing is humor or malice—I was actually trying to guess that (thinking that it would be funny/rational as humor/look-into-the-dark), and ended up leaning toward malice by prior probability (guess I should have realized prior frequencies are skewed on this particular website, but I’d been reading older OBLW posts and looking at the lower-quality comments there, that may have skewed my intuitive estimate).
You’ve got to go further over the top to make it clear that it’s humor—talk about my gasping dying breath, “If only… I’d been.. less… overconfident” or something like that. (Actually, even that might not be over-the-top enough. “If only I’d been… less confident… about my own relative meta-rationality...” would do it, that tells everyone you’re an insider.)
Well, you’ve pretty clearly stated the sort of terrifying insecurity that most people wouldn’t say out loud and confront. But you can’t actually solve a problem by musing on that, whether to be afraid of it, or to develop arguments against your fears; the whole thing is just a wasted motion from the perspective of actual problem-solving. Time spent reading a math paper will always be better spent, once it’s been determined that you are going to take the problem as a goal.
If you’ve already decided that trying to solve a given problem is the best use of your time (and this belief is as updated as it can be) then yes continuing to worry is unhelpful. (Though worries can motivate honest assessments of how one is spending their time.) We agree.
Anyway, I just thought I was being funny.
Upvoted, but FYI, it’s really hard for people to know whether or not that sort of thing is humor or malice—I was actually trying to guess that (thinking that it would be funny/rational as humor/look-into-the-dark), and ended up leaning toward malice by prior probability (guess I should have realized prior frequencies are skewed on this particular website, but I’d been reading older OBLW posts and looking at the lower-quality comments there, that may have skewed my intuitive estimate).
You’ve got to go further over the top to make it clear that it’s humor—talk about my gasping dying breath, “If only… I’d been.. less… overconfident” or something like that. (Actually, even that might not be over-the-top enough. “If only I’d been… less confident… about my own relative meta-rationality...” would do it, that tells everyone you’re an insider.)