Yeah, it's a heuristic. People who know what they're doing will over time become more confident. People who don't know what they're doing will over time becom

Yeah, it's a heuristic. People who know what they're doing will over time become more confident. People who don't know what they're doing will over time become more desperate as they run out of places to fail at. You could do a lot of work to figure out the difference between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who doesn't. But it's a lot easier to just notice if they look confident or desperate. Unfortunately, being confident is actually super easy if you're willing to practice it. Much easier than actually being good at anything. Also unfortunately, being confident is really hard if you don't know how to practice it. And the skill is orthogonal to most other skills. So if you're good at something, it might actually be harder to control how confident you appear to others.