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Something in our evolution must have rewarded people who listened to that guy in the cave who was a big talker. Seriously.

• CPLX 7y ago
  That's plausible. A good explanation would be that in general consequences back then were a lot more lethal. So the guy who was overconfident beyond their abilities and rushed into battle, or into a hunting situation, or a conflict with a neighbor, would probably end up dead pretty quickly. So if they were expressing confidence, and still around, it would likely be pretty directly correlated with actual ability. It's a bit of a just-so story but it has some resonance to it.
  • SerLava 7y ago
    That makes sense but maybe we don't need that explanation. It could really be possible that the best-designed decision making robot would use confidence as a heuristic. It would fail in the same ways we fail, but it would probably perform worse in general if you removed that bias.
  • sgift 7y ago
    Or the guy who was good at convincing others that it is foolproof got to live another day if it wasn't while they died. Survival by bullshitting.