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>seventh might be they believe implicitly they are the smartest person in the room As a person with contrarian tendencies who has occasionally been accused of
by scythe 8y ago
>seventh might be they believe implicitly they are the smartest person in the room
As a person with contrarian tendencies who has occasionally been accused of "implicitly believing" I'm the smartest guy in the room, I think it's important to recognize there's a difference between trusting your own reasoning and thinking you're smarter than everybody else. You can mostly avoid the latter by learning strategies that help you estimate the confidence level you should have in your beliefs. A couple of "am I wrong?" mnemonics I've learned to apply include:
- What kind of evidence are my ideas based on? Is it observation, hearsay, case studies, or something more substantial?
- How many silly/unrealistic counterexamples can I think of? Often these will contain hints of a more complicated, realistic objection.
- (if you have time to use the Web) Are there any professional researchers whose conclusion resembles my argument? What can I learn from/about them?
- Am I at risk of wishful thinking, availability/selection bias, or defending a position I previously implicitly committed to? If so, try to apply the same reasoning to a similar situation where the fallacy won't apply.
- dabbledash 8y agoLove these. Another thing I find useful is asking myself “what evidence would make me change my mind?”
- ggm 8y agoYes, I listen for words like "clearly" or "obviously" or "unquestionably" and invert them to test the mental water. But I think you missed that the leaders in this space, get so few contradictory signals that apart from hired geniuses, and they can always fall back on "I have higher social smarts" -these aside, I think they get positive confirmation bias. I often believe I'm the smartest person in the room right up until I open my mouth...
- cam_l 8y agoWhat if you believe you are the smartest person in the room because you are the only one that questions their own ideas? What then?!
- ggm 8y agoWhy are you even in the room dumb-ass!!
- cam_l 8y ago..meta, and just enough so I am not totally sure I got the joke, or that it even was a joke. There was also a serious side to my question though, that we all have flaws in our reasoning, even in the reasoning we use to question our reasoning. Using heuristics to judge, just never turns out right all the time.
- Confusion 8y agoA piece of advice often given to people is "don't be the smartest person in your team", because then you don't have anyone to learn from. I think that advice is wrong, because: 1) there are many different skills you can improve and you are probably not the most skilled one in the team in all of them 2) even if you are the most skilled, it doesn't mean you can't learn from less skilled people 3) 'smartest' is a strange criterion, because if there is one thing you can't learn, it's becoming more intelligent However, if you truly believe there isn't much you can learn in your current work any more, possibly because of the skill levels of your teammates, switching to a different job is probably a good idea.