This may be either in addition to or as an alternative to other ways of communicating how confident we are about our ideas.
Time spent by you thinking about a question doesn’t necessarily allow other people to make meaningful conclusions about whether the conclusion is reasonable. Maybe you are brilliant at X, and two minutes’ thinking produces reliably correct conclusions, but you are confused about Y, and several months’ thinking shouldn’t be trusted to be adequate.
Once you are introspective enough to consider the advice of this post, you should also be in a better position to make the corresponding correction in your level of confidence. Overall, it’s easier to communicate only the level of confidence that takes into account the appropriate factors, rather than communicating the factors themselves, such as the time spent thinking. This is also polite, like including a link to a discussed article in a post, instead of giving the readers hints on how to find it themselves using a search engine.
So, the advice I can draw from this post is, in estimating your confidence in conclusions you’ve made about X, take the time spent thinking about X into account, and don’t forget to signal your confidence in the assertions you make.
Time spent by you thinking about a question doesn’t necessarily allow other people to make meaningful conclusions about whether the conclusion is reasonable. Maybe you are brilliant at X, and two minutes’ thinking produces reliably correct conclusions, but you are confused about Y, and several months’ thinking shouldn’t be trusted to be adequate.
Once you are introspective enough to consider the advice of this post, you should also be in a better position to make the corresponding correction in your level of confidence. Overall, it’s easier to communicate only the level of confidence that takes into account the appropriate factors, rather than communicating the factors themselves, such as the time spent thinking. This is also polite, like including a link to a discussed article in a post, instead of giving the readers hints on how to find it themselves using a search engine.
So, the advice I can draw from this post is, in estimating your confidence in conclusions you’ve made about X, take the time spent thinking about X into account, and don’t forget to signal your confidence in the assertions you make.
P.S. This post should link to Hold Off On Proposing Solutions.