I actually engaged with this exercise, though perhaps not as fully as I could have.
The graph format was at first an amusing treat, then exhausting as I realized I was going to have to keep decoding graphs without a break (I’m not good at decoding graphs), and then I either got used to it or perhaps, um, a little bit gave up on it and started going too quickly and being somewhat dismissive. Probably a bit of both.
I picked “only suffering once”, as opposed to also suffering from my expectation to suffer again in the future. (“I’m sad now, and what’s even worse is that since I have been sad before, this will probably happen to me again, oh no!”)
I spent most of the post feeling perplexed about why anyone would ever want to focus on “confidence”, even though I simultaneously expected I’d be able to reasonably answer that question if I tried. I seem to have some kind of epistemic immune response going on that encounters a thought like, “Maybe I should increase my confidence independently of my best guess about my competence,” and responds by shouting “WHAT NO ARE YOU CRAZY STOP”. As I considered your “improv” example, I found myself working pretty hard to fabricate the details of the story where as your competence increases, you lean more into the things you would be getting by focusing exclusively on confidence if you, like, didn’t care about believing true things.
For my own example with “suffering only once”, my responses to the graphs kept being “confidence increases with competence, confidence increases with competence, of course I want confidence and competence to be locked together”.
I could not figure out what graph with the fuzzy green bar means.
I did at least notice that I don’t think it matters very much if I fail to recognize my competence in this skill, so long as I keep performing it well, since I’m not exactly dumping a lot of resources into deliberately improving, which might have caused some relaxation that wasn’t already there.
At the end, I wondered what the heck is going on in your head, and whether you mean completely different things than I do by “confidence”.
I seem to have some kind of epistemic immune response going on that encounters a thought like, “Maybe I should increase my confidence independently of my best guess about my competence,” and responds by shouting “WHAT NO ARE YOU CRAZY STOP”.
Yeah, If “confident” means “I think I’m good at something”, it’s weird to say “I’m good at X, but I think I’m not good at X”.
Perhaps it’s a bit of a system-1 vs system-2 distinction? I.e. you can consider yourself competent, but still viscerally anxious.
Imposter Syndrome is pretty common in a lot of fields, where an outsider observer can see that someone is quite competent at a skill (and the person can see that in objective metrics), but from the inside view there is a lot of self-doubt and they have low confidence. I know that it’s common in software engineering, especially in people who come from an unusual background for the field (eg. women and people of color).
I actually engaged with this exercise, though perhaps not as fully as I could have.
The graph format was at first an amusing treat, then exhausting as I realized I was going to have to keep decoding graphs without a break (I’m not good at decoding graphs), and then I either got used to it or perhaps, um, a little bit gave up on it and started going too quickly and being somewhat dismissive. Probably a bit of both.
I picked “only suffering once”, as opposed to also suffering from my expectation to suffer again in the future. (“I’m sad now, and what’s even worse is that since I have been sad before, this will probably happen to me again, oh no!”)
I spent most of the post feeling perplexed about why anyone would ever want to focus on “confidence”, even though I simultaneously expected I’d be able to reasonably answer that question if I tried. I seem to have some kind of epistemic immune response going on that encounters a thought like, “Maybe I should increase my confidence independently of my best guess about my competence,” and responds by shouting “WHAT NO ARE YOU CRAZY STOP”. As I considered your “improv” example, I found myself working pretty hard to fabricate the details of the story where as your competence increases, you lean more into the things you would be getting by focusing exclusively on confidence if you, like, didn’t care about believing true things.
For my own example with “suffering only once”, my responses to the graphs kept being “confidence increases with competence, confidence increases with competence, of course I want confidence and competence to be locked together”.
I could not figure out what graph with the fuzzy green bar means.
I did at least notice that I don’t think it matters very much if I fail to recognize my competence in this skill, so long as I keep performing it well, since I’m not exactly dumping a lot of resources into deliberately improving, which might have caused some relaxation that wasn’t already there.
At the end, I wondered what the heck is going on in your head, and whether you mean completely different things than I do by “confidence”.
This was cool. I hope you do more of it.
Yeah, If “confident” means “I think I’m good at something”, it’s weird to say “I’m good at X, but I think I’m not good at X”.
Perhaps it’s a bit of a system-1 vs system-2 distinction? I.e. you can consider yourself competent, but still viscerally anxious.
Imposter Syndrome is pretty common in a lot of fields, where an outsider observer can see that someone is quite competent at a skill (and the person can see that in objective metrics), but from the inside view there is a lot of self-doubt and they have low confidence. I know that it’s common in software engineering, especially in people who come from an unusual background for the field (eg. women and people of color).
How’d you feel about ‘dancing’, or ‘flirting’ as skills where confidence matters separately from competence?