I cannot express too strongly my utter opposition to the thesis of this post.
And I enjoyed reading both the article and this reply.
Perhaps the Law of Equal and Opposite Advice applies here; depending on how much of your actual feelings of insecurity is just an awareness of your actual lack of skills, and how much is a result of manipulation by others. Manipulators exist, but lack of skills exists, too.
(In my opinion, going ahead and trying stuff is better than listening to your insecurity: maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong, once in a while you break something, but you will learn something in either case. But I can imagine a person/situation for whom the balance could be the other way round.)
In my opinion, going ahead and trying stuff is better than listening to your insecurity
Part of what I was trying to say was that these are not mutually exclusive. You can listen to your insecurity, note that it’s giving you a warning signal, and then act and see whether the signal was in fact correct or whether it was just oversensitive.
“Listening to your insecurity” means “don’t throw away data that your system 1 is giving you; take seriously the possibility that it’s picking up on something real”. But you can acknowledge the data while also integrating other data sources to your final decision, or test the data to see when it seems to be reliable. If you do that, then you will become better calibrated over time, your insecurity warning you in precisely those situations where you would in fact be making a mistake.
But if you try to just ignore the warning signal and disregard it completely, then there’s a good chance that this will be actively harmful for the goal of going ahead and trying stuff. Worst case, as social failures accumulate, your system 1 will ramp up the intensity of the warning signal to ensure that it must be heard—even if that means making it so overwhelmingly loud that acknowledging it and trying stuff anyway ceases to be an option.
And I enjoyed reading both the article and this reply.
Perhaps the Law of Equal and Opposite Advice applies here; depending on how much of your actual feelings of insecurity is just an awareness of your actual lack of skills, and how much is a result of manipulation by others. Manipulators exist, but lack of skills exists, too.
(In my opinion, going ahead and trying stuff is better than listening to your insecurity: maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong, once in a while you break something, but you will learn something in either case. But I can imagine a person/situation for whom the balance could be the other way round.)
Part of what I was trying to say was that these are not mutually exclusive. You can listen to your insecurity, note that it’s giving you a warning signal, and then act and see whether the signal was in fact correct or whether it was just oversensitive.
“Listening to your insecurity” means “don’t throw away data that your system 1 is giving you; take seriously the possibility that it’s picking up on something real”. But you can acknowledge the data while also integrating other data sources to your final decision, or test the data to see when it seems to be reliable. If you do that, then you will become better calibrated over time, your insecurity warning you in precisely those situations where you would in fact be making a mistake.
But if you try to just ignore the warning signal and disregard it completely, then there’s a good chance that this will be actively harmful for the goal of going ahead and trying stuff. Worst case, as social failures accumulate, your system 1 will ramp up the intensity of the warning signal to ensure that it must be heard—even if that means making it so overwhelmingly loud that acknowledging it and trying stuff anyway ceases to be an option.