7 ms·

Encouraging Self-Doubt

49 points by zdw 5y ago

recursivedoubts 5y ago
"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism." ~ G. K. Chesterton
- philosopher1234 5y ago
  Extremely self critical people can be extremely hateful. Its hard to keep self criticism contained to the self. And if you're already self critical, its hard to handle others criticism of you.
  - _moof 5y ago
    There are two kinds of criticism: the kind that seeks to tear down, and the kind that seeks to build up. When people talk about being "self-critical" it's usually the tear-down kind, or what therapists call negative self-talk. I think in this case though it's being used as an antonym for arrogance.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    +5. I wanted to +1 but I really liked what you said. Someone said to me the other day they were afraid to tell me how they speak to themself and much they hate themself. I'm getting much better at recognizing when someone says something to me about my life and it pisses me off, it's often because I've been saying that same thing to myself 10x. "You should just get a stable job" when someone else says that, I get angry at them saying it, only to (hopefully sooner rather than later) realize "ah it's because I've already heard that message 10 times today in my own head."
    - recursivedoubts 5y ago
      Self-hatred and self-criticism are separate things: the former an emotion the latter a rational process. We live in an emotional age and thus it is easy to conflate the two. But they are different.
      - jimkleiber 5y ago
        Personally I don't believe "self-criticism" and "self-hatred" are mutually exclusive, just as I don't believe emotion and rationality are mutually exclusive...but perhaps you do, and that's OK.
        ScoobleDoodle 5y ago
        I think they meant they are distinct. Not that they are mutually exclusive. Not necessarily orthogonal, but the idea is along the similar lines.
        jimkleiber 5y ago
        Haha I mean, yeah, at some point language abstracts and becomes more and more imprecise. Do I believe they're distinct? Sure. I think they can also blend together in one person and also that one person's self-hatred could be another's self-criticism. I could see it as a mutually agreed upon spectrum from self-hatred to self-love with different steps between, I could see self-criticism and self-hatred as separate, where criticism focuses on the actions and hatred on the person, I could see self-criticism as compared to self-curiosity, which may have an axis of certainty, from certain to uncertain and wanting to know. I often talk of critical vs curious vs connected, where curious is I don't know but I want to know, critical is I don't know and I need to know, and connected is I don't know and I don't need to know. But critical could also be I know vis-a-vis the others. But I don't know if these are necessarily true and universal and objective, but rather linguistic tools I've found to help me. I think there's a certain subjectivity to many of these things and I notice I have somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction when I hear someone ascribe an objectivity to something I believe has much more subjectivity.
        recursivedoubts 5y ago
        self-criticism can cause self-hatred (appropriate or not) milk can cause a sour stomach milk is not a sour stomach
  - recursivedoubts 5y ago
    Broadly, I don't notice a surfeit of self-criticism in today's world.
drewcoo 5y ago
Encouraging Self-doubt? Cognitive dissonance. I don't think questioning a thing is the same as doubting it. In fact questioning it can make me a more ardent believer.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  "we should encourage self doubt" not "Self doubt that is encouraging". I don't see the dissonance. It's just a less controversial way to say "Let's discourage confidence " which is what I probably would have said, because I'm not a fan of confidence culture.
- ohwellhere 5y ago
  I think the author is right in his points, but his choice of phrasing may not be as accurate as possible. Rather than "encouraging self-doubt", I think he is suggesting a culture of introspection, self-awareness, process-oriented thinking, and especially humility. Rather than discouraging "confidence", I think he is discouraging hubris, pride, arrogance, and results-oriented thinking.
svilen_dobrev 5y ago
don't always believe yourself. but always believe in yourself.
andai 5y ago
This seems like trying to harness Dunning-Kruger (high ability leads to self-doubt) backwards: self-doubt leading to higher ability? As others have clarified below, this may work in the sense that reflecting on experiences increases your wisdom. The amount of reflection done seems to be largely a function of personality, but maybe it can also be a function of culture. I'm not sure what that would look like though, can reflection be institutionalized or just encouraged on a personal level?
- stuu99 5y ago
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
I don't know, I just don't think encouraging self-doubt in general is a great idea for the industry as a whole (right now). If anything, people lack confidence given the omnipresence of imposter syndrome. >Excessive confidence seems to work to impress some people early on, but total belief in your own abilities and eventual world domination is going to make you think you can do anything, and that gets in the way of making good decisions. Really, how many people truly reach that stage? The far majority of professional tech people I meet are so humble they barely even question management on technical decisions. Maybe that's just my experience with primarily passive people, but it certainly doesn't reflect what I tend to see here, on Twitter and on Reddit.
- keynesyoudigit 5y ago
  IME, "Excessive confidence" is usually a shield for insecurity anyway.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Can also be a cover for bullshit artists. Some people take "fake it until you make it" as some kind of design for life, especially those with narcissistic tendencies. I personally like to see a touch of humility in people I deal with. That, too, can be faked, but at least it leaves you with some idea about whether a job is going to get done.
    - paskozdilar 5y ago
      > Some people take "fake it until you make it" as some kind of design for life, especially those with narcissistic tendencies. The worst part is that it actually works - at least on scale. Bullshit artists thrive on the "they look like they know what they're doing" vibe, because for most people, that level of confidence can only be achieved through hard work and dedication to the craft, so we assume that the person that confident must be very hardworking and very dedicated, or simply knows something that we don't. It's a perceptional shortcut that we use because it works for us most of the time. In an unknown room full of unknown people, we instinctively search for someone who doesn't look lost.
dav_Oz 5y ago
"Encouraging Self-Doubt" in someone who is over-confident? I can encourage self-doubt when I begin to harbour some doubts but when I'm already over-confident - per definition - I am not able to do that. Actually psychologically it is way more nuanced. Overly confident people by suppressing any doubts can get caught in a trap - a negative feedback loop - where even trivial questions "How was your day?" can cast suspicion. [in the (extreme) edge case of stimulant (mis-)use full-blown paranoia is common]. For someone with a lack of confidence being on the opposite side of that spectrum encouraging self-doubt defeats the purpose [interestingly the edge case can also lead to paranoia]. Normally, most people find themselves neither on the one nor the other extreme (it is simply not sustainable). When someone has a tendency to be overconfident, yeah a cue like "encouraging self doubt" might help but a more sustainable approach would be to take a step back and ask yourself: Where does my tendency to be at times overconfident come from? Our "traits" are a complex result of adaptations to our environment (limited of course by our genetic contingencies) but by the time we become adults some of those get misaligned (in our "artificial" and fast-changing environment). So asking the question in which way did my overconfidence now served me as a good strategy before it morphed into "over"-confidence is a more constructive way forward because it takes into account both where "I" come from and where I "now" want to successfully go. That's what our prefrontal cortex simplistically speaking is all about. Not easy, it takes patience and long planning in advance but worth the effort to build up the resources. It gets way harder once you are older. This is something I mostly "encourage" young people (<25 yr: before the brain/prefrontal cortex is fully developed) to take into account.
yawnxyz 5y ago
In terms of people thinking startup founders being over-confident to the point of being caricatures — There's a huge amount of survivorship bias. For any one successful startup, let alone momentarily "successful" ones like WeWork and Fast, there are probably thousands of startups that don't go anywhere (mine included). Maybe founders of startups that don't go anywhere fall within the self-doubter camp? They don't survive, so the world never hears about them. Only the successful, over-confident ones.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Or maybe it's more of a feedback loop? When one of the "survivor" founders starts to experience success, their confidence goes up. In absence of failure, it keeps rising and rising to the point of mania.
young_unixer 5y ago
Funny. I'm on a personal journey to reduce self-doubt. Maybe there's a time and place for self-doubt, and some people certainly lack it severely, but my extreme levels of self-doubt have always stopped me from trying things and now I realize how much it has cost me. Maybe instead of "self doubt vs no self doubt" the questions should be: - Is my project in the 95th percentile, or higher, compared to all projects in this given context? - Is my project in the 70th percentile or higher, compared to all successful projects in this given context? - Am I in the 95th percentile or higher, compared to all people in this given context? For me, it's much easier to answer "Yes" to these questions (and the answer is usually "Yes") than to answer "Yes" to an ambiguous "Is the project going to succeed?" or "Am I going to succeed?" Some may find this contradictory: If you think that you're above the 95th percentile, then how do you have self-doubt at the same time? Self-doubt is not always logical. For me, self-doubt is more psychological than rational. I think I'll do a better job than most people, but I still think I'm going to fail, even when I see less capable people succeed.
incomingpain 5y ago
The author of this blog is 100% for sure in the north america. The dalai lama last year was asked about this and he was befuddled and left unsure what to say. Not a translation issue as far as I know. It's not something the rest of the world struggles with. If anything, the rest of the world has the opposite problem. It has something to do with how young north america is compared to the rest of the world. The fake it till you make it stuff, the imposter syndrome stuff. No true stability in knowing who you are. The author is going down a very bad path.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Doubt is good. I am allergic to certainty. When I interact with people who 100% believe that they are correct about something, that is unsettling. As I rapidly approach my 71st birthday, I know that I make mistakes and sometimes misunderstand things based on a lifetime of self observation. It is also so very much more important to examine our own lives and decisions rather than those of other people. I think problems occur when people view their own self worth as dependent on their intelligence or being “right.” Self worth comes from being a loving person.

49 points by zdw 5y ago

recursivedoubts 5y ago

"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism." ~ G. K. Chesterton

philosopher1234 5y ago
Extremely self critical people can be extremely hateful. Its hard to keep self criticism contained to the self. And if you're already self critical, its hard to handle others criticism of you.
- _moof 5y ago
  There are two kinds of criticism: the kind that seeks to tear down, and the kind that seeks to build up. When people talk about being "self-critical" it's usually the tear-down kind, or what therapists call negative self-talk. I think in this case though it's being used as an antonym for arrogance.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  +5. I wanted to +1 but I really liked what you said. Someone said to me the other day they were afraid to tell me how they speak to themself and much they hate themself. I'm getting much better at recognizing when someone says something to me about my life and it pisses me off, it's often because I've been saying that same thing to myself 10x. "You should just get a stable job" when someone else says that, I get angry at them saying it, only to (hopefully sooner rather than later) realize "ah it's because I've already heard that message 10 times today in my own head."
  - recursivedoubts 5y ago
    Self-hatred and self-criticism are separate things: the former an emotion the latter a rational process. We live in an emotional age and thus it is easy to conflate the two. But they are different.
    - jimkleiber 5y ago
      Personally I don't believe "self-criticism" and "self-hatred" are mutually exclusive, just as I don't believe emotion and rationality are mutually exclusive...but perhaps you do, and that's OK.
      - ScoobleDoodle 5y ago
        I think they meant they are distinct. Not that they are mutually exclusive. Not necessarily orthogonal, but the idea is along the similar lines.
        jimkleiber 5y ago
        Haha I mean, yeah, at some point language abstracts and becomes more and more imprecise. Do I believe they're distinct? Sure. I think they can also blend together in one person and also that one person's self-hatred could be another's self-criticism. I could see it as a mutually agreed upon spectrum from self-hatred to self-love with different steps between, I could see self-criticism and self-hatred as separate, where criticism focuses on the actions and hatred on the person, I could see self-criticism as compared to self-curiosity, which may have an axis of certainty, from certain to uncertain and wanting to know. I often talk of critical vs curious vs connected, where curious is I don't know but I want to know, critical is I don't know and I need to know, and connected is I don't know and I don't need to know. But critical could also be I know vis-a-vis the others. But I don't know if these are necessarily true and universal and objective, but rather linguistic tools I've found to help me. I think there's a certain subjectivity to many of these things and I notice I have somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction when I hear someone ascribe an objectivity to something I believe has much more subjectivity.
        recursivedoubts 5y ago
        self-criticism can cause self-hatred (appropriate or not) milk can cause a sour stomach milk is not a sour stomach
- recursivedoubts 5y ago
  Broadly, I don't notice a surfeit of self-criticism in today's world.

drewcoo 5y ago

Encouraging Self-doubt? Cognitive dissonance. I don't think questioning a thing is the same as doubting it. In fact questioning it can make me a more ardent believer.

eternityforest 5y ago
"we should encourage self doubt" not "Self doubt that is encouraging". I don't see the dissonance. It's just a less controversial way to say "Let's discourage confidence " which is what I probably would have said, because I'm not a fan of confidence culture.
ohwellhere 5y ago
I think the author is right in his points, but his choice of phrasing may not be as accurate as possible. Rather than "encouraging self-doubt", I think he is suggesting a culture of introspection, self-awareness, process-oriented thinking, and especially humility. Rather than discouraging "confidence", I think he is discouraging hubris, pride, arrogance, and results-oriented thinking.

svilen_dobrev 5y ago

don't always believe yourself. but always believe in yourself.

andai 5y ago

This seems like trying to harness Dunning-Kruger (high ability leads to self-doubt) backwards: self-doubt leading to higher ability? As others have clarified below, this may work in the sense that reflecting on experiences increases your wisdom. The amount of reflection done seems to be largely a function of personality, but maybe it can also be a function of culture. I'm not sure what that would look like though, can reflection be institutionalized or just encouraged on a personal level?

stuu99 5y ago

BlargMcLarg 5y ago

I don't know, I just don't think encouraging self-doubt in general is a great idea for the industry as a whole (right now). If anything, people lack confidence given the omnipresence of imposter syndrome. >Excessive confidence seems to work to impress some people early on, but total belief in your own abilities and eventual world domination is going to make you think you can do anything, and that gets in the way of making good decisions. Really, how many people truly reach that stage? The far majority of professional tech people I meet are so humble they barely even question management on technical decisions. Maybe that's just my experience with primarily passive people, but it certainly doesn't reflect what I tend to see here, on Twitter and on Reddit.

keynesyoudigit 5y ago
IME, "Excessive confidence" is usually a shield for insecurity anyway.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Can also be a cover for bullshit artists. Some people take "fake it until you make it" as some kind of design for life, especially those with narcissistic tendencies. I personally like to see a touch of humility in people I deal with. That, too, can be faked, but at least it leaves you with some idea about whether a job is going to get done.
  - paskozdilar 5y ago
    > Some people take "fake it until you make it" as some kind of design for life, especially those with narcissistic tendencies. The worst part is that it actually works - at least on scale. Bullshit artists thrive on the "they look like they know what they're doing" vibe, because for most people, that level of confidence can only be achieved through hard work and dedication to the craft, so we assume that the person that confident must be very hardworking and very dedicated, or simply knows something that we don't. It's a perceptional shortcut that we use because it works for us most of the time. In an unknown room full of unknown people, we instinctively search for someone who doesn't look lost.

dav_Oz 5y ago

"Encouraging Self-Doubt" in someone who is over-confident? I can encourage self-doubt when I begin to harbour some doubts but when I'm already over-confident - per definition - I am not able to do that. Actually psychologically it is way more nuanced. Overly confident people by suppressing any doubts can get caught in a trap - a negative feedback loop - where even trivial questions "How was your day?" can cast suspicion. [in the (extreme) edge case of stimulant (mis-)use full-blown paranoia is common]. For someone with a lack of confidence being on the opposite side of that spectrum encouraging self-doubt defeats the purpose [interestingly the edge case can also lead to paranoia]. Normally, most people find themselves neither on the one nor the other extreme (it is simply not sustainable). When someone has a tendency to be overconfident, yeah a cue like "encouraging self doubt" might help but a more sustainable approach would be to take a step back and ask yourself: Where does my tendency to be at times overconfident come from? Our "traits" are a complex result of adaptations to our environment (limited of course by our genetic contingencies) but by the time we become adults some of those get misaligned (in our "artificial" and fast-changing environment). So asking the question in which way did my overconfidence now served me as a good strategy before it morphed into "over"-confidence is a more constructive way forward because it takes into account both where "I" come from and where I "now" want to successfully go. That's what our prefrontal cortex simplistically speaking is all about. Not easy, it takes patience and long planning in advance but worth the effort to build up the resources. It gets way harder once you are older. This is something I mostly "encourage" young people (<25 yr: before the brain/prefrontal cortex is fully developed) to take into account.

yawnxyz 5y ago

In terms of people thinking startup founders being over-confident to the point of being caricatures — There's a huge amount of survivorship bias. For any one successful startup, let alone momentarily "successful" ones like WeWork and Fast, there are probably thousands of startups that don't go anywhere (mine included). Maybe founders of startups that don't go anywhere fall within the self-doubter camp? They don't survive, so the world never hears about them. Only the successful, over-confident ones.

AussieWog93 5y ago
Or maybe it's more of a feedback loop? When one of the "survivor" founders starts to experience success, their confidence goes up. In absence of failure, it keeps rising and rising to the point of mania.

young_unixer 5y ago

Funny. I'm on a personal journey to reduce self-doubt. Maybe there's a time and place for self-doubt, and some people certainly lack it severely, but my extreme levels of self-doubt have always stopped me from trying things and now I realize how much it has cost me. Maybe instead of "self doubt vs no self doubt" the questions should be: - Is my project in the 95th percentile, or higher, compared to all projects in this given context? - Is my project in the 70th percentile or higher, compared to all successful projects in this given context? - Am I in the 95th percentile or higher, compared to all people in this given context? For me, it's much easier to answer "Yes" to these questions (and the answer is usually "Yes") than to answer "Yes" to an ambiguous "Is the project going to succeed?" or "Am I going to succeed?" Some may find this contradictory: If you think that you're above the 95th percentile, then how do you have self-doubt at the same time? Self-doubt is not always logical. For me, self-doubt is more psychological than rational. I think I'll do a better job than most people, but I still think I'm going to fail, even when I see less capable people succeed.

incomingpain 5y ago

The author of this blog is 100% for sure in the north america. The dalai lama last year was asked about this and he was befuddled and left unsure what to say. Not a translation issue as far as I know. It's not something the rest of the world struggles with. If anything, the rest of the world has the opposite problem. It has something to do with how young north america is compared to the rest of the world. The fake it till you make it stuff, the imposter syndrome stuff. No true stability in knowing who you are. The author is going down a very bad path.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Doubt is good. I am allergic to certainty. When I interact with people who 100% believe that they are correct about something, that is unsettling. As I rapidly approach my 71st birthday, I know that I make mistakes and sometimes misunderstand things based on a lifetime of self observation. It is also so very much more important to examine our own lives and decisions rather than those of other people. I think problems occur when people view their own self worth as dependent on their intelligence or being “right.” Self worth comes from being a loving person.