Why not just set all of your self-beliefs to “strongly positive”, to the extent that you can get away with it? . . . Why not just go the whole hog and believe you’re very kind, very generous, very witty, very honorable, very trustworthy, etc...
Arrogance and a pervasive positive self-image are strong signals of high status. People will respond positively to them.
It would probably be better for our civilization IMHO if individuals were much less arrogant and much less self-confident. Existential risks for example would probably be lower IMHO if the scientists and technologists in certain fields were less confident of the moral goodness of their actions and their skill at avoiding terrible mistakes. And risks would be reduced if their opinion of their own status (which of course is highly correlated with their actual status) were lower since lower-status people spend more time doubting the goodness or rightness of their effects on the world and IMHO are less prone to rationalization. It is hard to change the current over-confident equilibrium however because low-confidence individuals are at a competitive disadvantage at obtaining the resources (e.g., education, jobs, connections) needed to gain influence in our civilization.
[Two sentence that go way off on a tangent deleted because now that the parent comment has been deleted, they make no sense.]
It would probably be better for our civilization IMHO if individuals were much less arrogant and much less self-confident. Existential risks for example would probably be lower IMHO if the scientists and technologists in certain fields were less confident of the moral goodness of their actions and their skill at avoiding terrible mistakes. And risks would be reduced if their opinion of their own status (which of course is highly correlated with their actual status) were lower since lower-status people spend more time doubting the goodness or rightness of their effects on the world and IMHO are less prone to rationalization. It is hard to change the current over-confident equilibrium however because low-confidence individuals are at a competitive disadvantage at obtaining the resources (e.g., education, jobs, connections) needed to gain influence in our civilization.
[Two sentence that go way off on a tangent deleted because now that the parent comment has been deleted, they make no sense.]