I’m working on a brand of modesty based on the hypothesis that if you’re really good at something, people will often notice it even if you don’t signal it, and a need to signal it is just costly nonsense that biases you and gets in the way of your peace of mind
People are also good at ignoring things that are inconvenient for them. Consider an office politics situation where being good at your job may mean that someone else’s status gets lowered. You may have to signal that you’re good at your job in order to get noticed at all.
There’s also the problem that even if it’s obvious, obvious+signal is still going to beat out your obvious+no signal. By your reasoning you don’t need to walk into a job interview wearing a suit, because your resume should speak for itself. But then the next guy with an equally good resume and a suit comes in and gets hired over you.
More generally: If you’ve “rationally” deduced that you don’t really need to follow pointless social conventions, you’re almost certainly wrong and have failed to consider something. Chesterton’s Fence applies, at least.
Indeed. Like I mentioned briefly in my footnote, I understand that this is not an approach that you can apply that generally, in any situation. Particularly if you actually somehow depend on other people’s impressedness for something that matters to you, actively putting effort into impressing them (if done right) will probably get you more reliable results. If you really need people to think you’re amazing, I guess my approach would be a pretty big gamble. The whole point of being subtle is to accept the risk that people won’t notice, which works well for art but not for traffic signs.
That’s not really my purpose with this, though. The purpose of this idea is mainly to liberate yourself from the urge to impress people at all. Again, you can’t always afford to do that—we all know a job interview is not the moment for modesty—so the scope would have to be limited to those situations where looking clever really isn’t all that important, but I think that still covers a sizeable proportion of them. Including, very much, writing comments on LessWrong that may or may not contain the word ‘obviously’.
People are also good at ignoring things that are inconvenient for them. Consider an office politics situation where being good at your job may mean that someone else’s status gets lowered. You may have to signal that you’re good at your job in order to get noticed at all.
There’s also the problem that even if it’s obvious, obvious+signal is still going to beat out your obvious+no signal. By your reasoning you don’t need to walk into a job interview wearing a suit, because your resume should speak for itself. But then the next guy with an equally good resume and a suit comes in and gets hired over you.
More generally: If you’ve “rationally” deduced that you don’t really need to follow pointless social conventions, you’re almost certainly wrong and have failed to consider something. Chesterton’s Fence applies, at least.
Indeed. Like I mentioned briefly in my footnote, I understand that this is not an approach that you can apply that generally, in any situation. Particularly if you actually somehow depend on other people’s impressedness for something that matters to you, actively putting effort into impressing them (if done right) will probably get you more reliable results. If you really need people to think you’re amazing, I guess my approach would be a pretty big gamble. The whole point of being subtle is to accept the risk that people won’t notice, which works well for art but not for traffic signs.
That’s not really my purpose with this, though. The purpose of this idea is mainly to liberate yourself from the urge to impress people at all. Again, you can’t always afford to do that—we all know a job interview is not the moment for modesty—so the scope would have to be limited to those situations where looking clever really isn’t all that important, but I think that still covers a sizeable proportion of them. Including, very much, writing comments on LessWrong that may or may not contain the word ‘obviously’.