First, it wasn’t immediately clear that you meant within a range of [-1, 1], perhaps adding that to the graphic would help?
Second, this sounds like it generalizes as “trust your own opinion on any topic sigmoidally, scaling with your personal knowledge of it”—in other words, actively notice and reject your initial bias, until you have enough background to be truly informed, at which point you should trust your own judgment.
Thanks, I tried putting rough axis labels on it to get at the point better. The point goes one step beyond, to say that once you can trust your own object-level judgment, you can also better trust your own proxy-level judgment.
For example, if you’re a great programmer, you know good code when you see it. Because of that, you know good programmers, and so when they tell you that Jackie is a good programmer, you trust them. That means you no longer have to scrutinize Jackie’s code in order to know whether or not to hire her onto your team.
But if you’re just starting out, and don’t know how to judge code, then you should actively ignore it when people try to tell you that so-and-so is a good programmer. Such claims abound, and how will you know which to accept and which to ignore? They’re a distraction at best, and at worst you’ll be uniquely vulnerable to status-gamers.
Two thoughts.
First, it wasn’t immediately clear that you meant within a range of [-1, 1], perhaps adding that to the graphic would help?
Second, this sounds like it generalizes as “trust your own opinion on any topic sigmoidally, scaling with your personal knowledge of it”—in other words, actively notice and reject your initial bias, until you have enough background to be truly informed, at which point you should trust your own judgment.
Thanks, I tried putting rough axis labels on it to get at the point better. The point goes one step beyond, to say that once you can trust your own object-level judgment, you can also better trust your own proxy-level judgment.
For example, if you’re a great programmer, you know good code when you see it. Because of that, you know good programmers, and so when they tell you that Jackie is a good programmer, you trust them. That means you no longer have to scrutinize Jackie’s code in order to know whether or not to hire her onto your team.
But if you’re just starting out, and don’t know how to judge code, then you should actively ignore it when people try to tell you that so-and-so is a good programmer. Such claims abound, and how will you know which to accept and which to ignore? They’re a distraction at best, and at worst you’ll be uniquely vulnerable to status-gamers.