In one sense, this is straightforwardly true: there is an incentive in some (but not all) circumstances to project more confidence than you’d have if you were reasoning correctly based on the evidence, and following that incentive means emitting untrue information. But there are two pushbacks I want to give.
First, a minor pedantic point: There are environments where everyone is both signaling overconfidence all the time, and compensating for it in their interpretation of everyone else’s communication. You could interpret this as dialects having certain confidence-related words calibrated differently. Unilaterally breaking from that equilibrium would also be deceptive.
But second, much more importantly: I think a lot of people, when they read this post, will update in the direction of socially attacking confidence rather than attacking overconfidence. This is already a thing that happens; the usual shape of the conversation is that someone says something confidently, because they have illegible sources of relevant expertise. Several times early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I got substantial social attacks, explicitly citing overconfidence on matters in which I was in fact correct. The outcome of which was that I ultimately burned out for a while and did less than I could have. This failure mode does a lot of damage, and I don’t think this post is adequately caveated around it.
In one sense, this is straightforwardly true: there is an incentive in some (but not all) circumstances to project more confidence than you’d have if you were reasoning correctly based on the evidence, and following that incentive means emitting untrue information. But there are two pushbacks I want to give.
First, a minor pedantic point: There are environments where everyone is both signaling overconfidence all the time, and compensating for it in their interpretation of everyone else’s communication. You could interpret this as dialects having certain confidence-related words calibrated differently. Unilaterally breaking from that equilibrium would also be deceptive.
But second, much more importantly: I think a lot of people, when they read this post, will update in the direction of socially attacking confidence rather than attacking overconfidence. This is already a thing that happens; the usual shape of the conversation is that someone says something confidently, because they have illegible sources of relevant expertise. Several times early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I got substantial social attacks, explicitly citing overconfidence on matters in which I was in fact correct. The outcome of which was that I ultimately burned out for a while and did less than I could have. This failure mode does a lot of damage, and I don’t think this post is adequately caveated around it.