I agree that high confidence is realistic and justified in many situations. Maybe I didn’t emphasize that strongly enough. I think people are often justified in their confidence on narrowly scoped questions. But that tends to bleed out toward overconfidence on the larger, more important questions to which scoped questions contribute.
Strong disagreement between experts sounds like exactly the situation I’m talking about, where you’re probably overconfident. Perhaps you’re thinking of cases where one side of the disagreement is making arguments that are pretty obviously bad or irrelevant, so the other side’s confidence is justified?
I think this happens, but I think people claim it a lot more than it’s true. It’s pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I don’t think it can be dismissed on an outside view. Experts are fallible and conflict creates tons of confusion and motivated reasoning, leading to very bad arguments.
I am saying you should be quite suspicious and expect others’ to be as well when you’re making an argument that a bunch of equally expert people are just being foolish, while you’ve got the whole picture properly in your model.
Perhaps you’re thinking of cases where one side of the disagreement is making arguments that are pretty obviously bad or irrelevant, so the other side’s confidence is justified?
Yeah, cases where you actually deeply understand the arguments made on all sides and see the flaws (even if they’re non-obvious flaws).
I agree that this is rare, and almost all of the time when people think they’re in this situation they are not. But at the same time it’s often worth trying to be in this situation rather than giving up and sticking with uncertainty. It’s possible to succeed and it’s possible at the meta-level to be reasonably confident you’ve succeeded. (It’s rare, and one should be very suspicious every time this happens, but not infinitely suspicious).
bunch of equally expert people are just being foolish
I agree that if this should invoke even more suspicion, but the central cases I’m thinking about only involve non-foolish mistakes by experts.
I think we’re fully in agreement, we both think one should be quite suspicious of oneself if you’re more confident than experts on a controversial question. And I agree that this is the main thing to emphasize. I just think it’s important to nitpick that this isn’t a fully general argument, the amount of suspicion is finite and can occasionally be overcome by object-level considerations.
I agree that high confidence is realistic and justified in many situations. Maybe I didn’t emphasize that strongly enough. I think people are often justified in their confidence on narrowly scoped questions. But that tends to bleed out toward overconfidence on the larger, more important questions to which scoped questions contribute.
Strong disagreement between experts sounds like exactly the situation I’m talking about, where you’re probably overconfident. Perhaps you’re thinking of cases where one side of the disagreement is making arguments that are pretty obviously bad or irrelevant, so the other side’s confidence is justified?
I think this happens, but I think people claim it a lot more than it’s true. It’s pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I don’t think it can be dismissed on an outside view. Experts are fallible and conflict creates tons of confusion and motivated reasoning, leading to very bad arguments.
I am saying you should be quite suspicious and expect others’ to be as well when you’re making an argument that a bunch of equally expert people are just being foolish, while you’ve got the whole picture properly in your model.
Yeah, cases where you actually deeply understand the arguments made on all sides and see the flaws (even if they’re non-obvious flaws).
I agree that this is rare, and almost all of the time when people think they’re in this situation they are not. But at the same time it’s often worth trying to be in this situation rather than giving up and sticking with uncertainty. It’s possible to succeed and it’s possible at the meta-level to be reasonably confident you’ve succeeded. (It’s rare, and one should be very suspicious every time this happens, but not infinitely suspicious).
I agree that if this should invoke even more suspicion, but the central cases I’m thinking about only involve non-foolish mistakes by experts.
I think we’re fully in agreement, we both think one should be quite suspicious of oneself if you’re more confident than experts on a controversial question. And I agree that this is the main thing to emphasize. I just think it’s important to nitpick that this isn’t a fully general argument, the amount of suspicion is finite and can occasionally be overcome by object-level considerations.