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I agree on the parts about being more willing to share ideas and healthily accept criticism about them, but in general this article feels like it's presenting a

I agree on the parts about being more willing to share ideas and healthily accept criticism about them, but in general this article feels like it's presenting a false dichotomy: that you must either state things metter-of-fact or stay silent. It's possible to share a belief while expressing an appropriate level of uncertainty about it, and this is something I really wish more people did rather than blurting out falsehoods with confidence all the time. There's no harm in adding "I think ... is likely" or "AFAIK ... seems the most probable" etc. Reserve direct assertions for things you are actually sure about. And then if you're wrong about those things, reflect on what led you to be more certain than you should have been and try to prevent it from happening again. I think everyone should strive to never be 100% certain about things that end up being wrong.

bigbinary 3y ago
I think interestingly enough, AI confidence percentages have encouraged more developers I work with to give me confidence percentages. Even for myself, I think it’s helpful, as I’ve been told more than once that someone thought I was confident because of “the way I said it”. Even if those percentages are a guess, saying “60% sure” or “90% sure” changes how people act with that information.
jskherman 3y ago
I wish people do this more often. However it so happens that most of the time when someone says "I think..." and other similar statements, people perceive it as you being quite uncertain and less trustworthy just because you're being honest about how likely truthful a statement is. People have a bias for certainty and simplicity (and security), which sadly works against this, and those that are more "confident" and take advantage of this bias are seen more favorably. This is, disappointingly, why we have overconfident but undeserving people like Elizabeth Holmes succeeding (and many more that fly below the radar).
- camjohnson26 3y ago
  It’s also why cults are so seductive to so many, turning over control and decision making does wonders for peace of mind, until the false basis for that confidence gets exposed.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    And often even afterwards.
  - jskherman 3y ago
    Sadly. Can such tendencies perhaps be remedied, or at least mitigated to some effective degree, over a large population by learning and practicing more critical thinking? I think it's simply a matter of habitualizing and getting better at critical thinking and establishing more helpful cultural norms. However both of which are, of course, difficult to do, just like anything that has anything to do with network effects.
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  This is also why women are generally underheard. Women are primed to not rock the boat and 'be nice', so in these kinds of discussions women are more likely to 'hide' 100% truthful statements behind these softening 'I think...' statements. And the bias you mention will therefore reject their opinions.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > Women are primed to (...) Your comment sounds awfully prejudiced. I've worked with women in leadership roles that were more assertive than all the men in the room, and I also worked with men who went out of their way to avoid any semblance of confrontation. That hardly justifies bigoted views towards men or women.
    - a_bonobo 3y ago
      ??? perhaps it's some kind of ESL issue, but here are some similar articles I'm talking about: https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/shut-that-b-up-why-speaking-up-for-ourselves-as-women-is-so-hard-6d0762d14581 https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/shut-that-b-up-why-spe... https://janicetomich.com/women-speaking-while-female/ https://janicetomich.com/women-speaking-while-female/ I don't see how my makes me prejudiced? Society wants women to be quiet and primes them (i.e., [1]), which is one of the main ways male power dominates. How does that make me bigoted? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silence-powerlessness-womens-voices-rebecca-solnit https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silenc... Edit: I think I see the misunderstanding; I meant 'primed by society starting from birth', you seem to have read 'primed by nature'
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > which is one of the main ways male power dominates That in itself is not a true belief, but a complex piece of bigoted propaganda. I think GP understood you well, they're just questioning the assumptions underlying what you said.
lsofzz 3y ago
Yep agree. Be. Wrong. More. Corollary: Be right less. Being, wrong is a humble space to be in! Mind you, you can be the smartest chipmunk in the room; But, i think being curious _and_ being inquisitive is more important than *trying* to be right and turning out to be wrong.
foobarbecue 3y ago
I often say things like "I'm 76% sure that this operation will work well in this mode." It started as a joke, but actually it's extremely useful. I work in spacecraft operations, where differences in opinion often need to be resolved quickly. If the other person says "I'm 98% sure you're wrong," then I'll cede the point, but if we disagree at comparable certainly levels then we'll need to make an effort (spending value time) to check, e.g. running simulations.
jancsika 3y ago
> And then if you're wrong about those things, reflect on what led you to be more certain than you should have been and try to prevent it from happening again. This is counterproductive for people who have a fear of being wrong, which is what the article is about. Those people are already spending too much time reflecting on wrongness. Trying to prevent overconfident wrongness from happening is very likely to land them back in the camp of not speaking up, which is where they started. In fact, I'd be willing to bet there's a statistical advantage to being a flat-out narcissist and quickly convincing oneself that a correction was just an interlocutor's misapprehension of what the narcissist already knew.[1] Something like how Heads-Tails-Tails beats Heads-Tails-Heads in random coin toss sequences. If ending up wrong can double as the first step of being right, it accelerates the learning process. Meanwhile, students of your teachings would either: 1) fall behind as they speculate about the nature of recurring cognitive bias and overconfidence, and/or 2) introduce communication problems through compulsive hedging (probably compounded by said fear of being wrong) 1: I know a few non-narcissists who, for whatever reason, use this method. It's at most a mild annoyance, and they are vastly easier to communicate with than compulsive hedgers. (And obviously easier to communicate with than people who don't speak up at all for fear of being wrong.)
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
Oh man god bless ya. I said exactly this to an interviewer once when they asserted with complete certainty that copying a value from a register to another MUST be faster than copying from a pointer. I said "I agree that it's probably true for mostly every piece of hardware you'll ever touch but I think it's theoretically possible to design a digital circuit in which for certain cases they take the same amount of time" To which the interviewer said "No it is impossible" The guy just didn't wanna hear me out.
Jensson 3y ago
When someone says "A is B" you should hear "I think A is B", that makes everything much simpler since there are very few things people are certain about. When making a stronger statement people say "I'm certain A is B". Edit: Take your post as an example, it is about twice as long as it has to be since you add so much padding to mark uncertainty. Humans are uncertain about most things, if you say something I'll assume that is what you think and it isn't the whole truth, that is what everyone does, just learn to not be afraid of being wrong and just do the simple thing that is easy to read.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  I find that tends not to be true, although this may be a cultural thing. When people say "A is B", what I find they usually mean is "I think that A is B, but I have not questioned this opinion particularly strongly and do not have a confidence level attached to this belief". And very often the default confidence level people attach to their unquestioned opinions is relatively high, which means for them it typically lies relatively close to the "I am certain" mark. This is why I find it's really helpful to purposefully indicate when I'm saying things that are merely my opinions, when I'm saying things that I'm certain about, and when I'm somewhere in-between. Partly, it indicates to the to the other person the degree to which I hold a given opinion, but it mainly just helps me hold myself accountable about the assumptions I'm making: is this something I have sincerely thought about and formulated a belief about, or is this just an intuition that I've not tested yet?
  - Jensson 3y ago
    > When people say "A is B", what I find they usually mean is The important part is what confidence levels people are used that you have when you say "A is B", not what the person who said it is thinking. As you said here, you know people are wrong a lot when they say it, so that is what "A is B" means, it means "I think A is B". The exception is if you are saying it from a place of authority like being a teacher or writing a manual. If you are an authority then you should hedge what you say if you aren't confident, but HN comments aren't an authority, there is no need to hedge what you say here, everyone knows you are just saying what you think. If someone was an authority they would start the comment with it.
shelika 3y ago
Author here. I really hope it doesn't come across as "blurt out falsehoods with confidence all the time"- I do mention in the conclusion that this is no substitute for working hard and thinking critically. Definitely agree with all you said.
- mcny 3y ago
  One thing I have a problem with in the workplace is what goes unsaid because everyone in the (chat) room already understands the premise and are on the same page versus things they have not even thought about. For example, let's say there is an azure function that does something but is failing some of the time. I'll say something like hey me sending a message to the service bus again fixed this issue for me. Three people will yell at me and say sending this message doesn't do what I think it does. I'm sorry how do you know what I'm thinking? A week or so goes while we struggle with this problem. It isn't even a big problem because we can all clearly see the code and can read what it does but people are so confidently incorrect about their own code. Finally about a week later someone else has a revelation. Oh resending the failed message seems to fix the problem. And I'm thinking how did you not get that conclusion from what I said. I feel like I'm missing some context because I feel like the senior developers in the room want to manufacture a crisis so they can rewrite the whole function but how do I ask this question out loud? I mean I fully support that the code needs a rewrite. It is difficult to read and frankly the approach isn't very good but it feels like we are hesitant to making small incremental improvements today lest management thinks it is good enough and refuses to pay for a rewrite? Am I overthinking this?
Sakos 3y ago
Also, have the grace to admit when you're wrong and to adapt to new information.
- Jensson 3y ago
  That is a part of "don't be afraid to be wrong".
  - Sakos 3y ago
    I think it needs to be said explicitly.
    - lsofzz 3y ago
      Here's the thing: Imagine you are in a boxing match, and your opponent looses the fight. The person who wins the fight would tell the opponent that they did well regardless; It's a courtesy. A sane person does not go around the ring saying "Ha ha you lost the fight". Is that right? Similarly, I disagree that things need to be __that__ explicit.
      - Sakos 3y ago
        What the fuck are you talking about? What does that have to do with what we're talking about? These things are not fucking comparable. We're talking about something and I think it's helpful to have everything explicitly stated instead of just implicitly hoping everybody draws the same interpretation. It's one thing to be willing to be wrong, but it's an entirely different thing to have the grace to accept being wrong when you're in that situation, which can take a level of emotional regulation and acceptance that isn't automatic. That's something most of us have to work at. That's why it needs to be explicitly mentioned. I've been willing to be wrong and stated things I was reasonably sure was correct, but felt frustrated and embarrassed leading to me being unnecessarily combative. Over time, I've worked on that emotional response so I'm able to say "yes, you're entirely right" and not take it personally when I am wrong. So yes, it needs to be explicitly stated and discussed and cannot be glossed over.
stringtoint 3y ago
"Reserve direct assertions for things you are actually sure about." is something I keep saying as well. I wish more people would follow this approach.

bigbinary 3y ago

I think interestingly enough, AI confidence percentages have encouraged more developers I work with to give me confidence percentages. Even for myself, I think it’s helpful, as I’ve been told more than once that someone thought I was confident because of “the way I said it”. Even if those percentages are a guess, saying “60% sure” or “90% sure” changes how people act with that information.

jskherman 3y ago

I wish people do this more often. However it so happens that most of the time when someone says "I think..." and other similar statements, people perceive it as you being quite uncertain and less trustworthy just because you're being honest about how likely truthful a statement is. People have a bias for certainty and simplicity (and security), which sadly works against this, and those that are more "confident" and take advantage of this bias are seen more favorably. This is, disappointingly, why we have overconfident but undeserving people like Elizabeth Holmes succeeding (and many more that fly below the radar).

camjohnson26 3y ago
It’s also why cults are so seductive to so many, turning over control and decision making does wonders for peace of mind, until the false basis for that confidence gets exposed.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  And often even afterwards.
- jskherman 3y ago
  Sadly. Can such tendencies perhaps be remedied, or at least mitigated to some effective degree, over a large population by learning and practicing more critical thinking? I think it's simply a matter of habitualizing and getting better at critical thinking and establishing more helpful cultural norms. However both of which are, of course, difficult to do, just like anything that has anything to do with network effects.
a_bonobo 3y ago
This is also why women are generally underheard. Women are primed to not rock the boat and 'be nice', so in these kinds of discussions women are more likely to 'hide' 100% truthful statements behind these softening 'I think...' statements. And the bias you mention will therefore reject their opinions.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > Women are primed to (...) Your comment sounds awfully prejudiced. I've worked with women in leadership roles that were more assertive than all the men in the room, and I also worked with men who went out of their way to avoid any semblance of confrontation. That hardly justifies bigoted views towards men or women.
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    ??? perhaps it's some kind of ESL issue, but here are some similar articles I'm talking about: https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/shut-that-b-up-why-speaking-up-for-ourselves-as-women-is-so-hard-6d0762d14581 https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/shut-that-b-up-why-spe... https://janicetomich.com/women-speaking-while-female/ https://janicetomich.com/women-speaking-while-female/ I don't see how my makes me prejudiced? Society wants women to be quiet and primes them (i.e., [1]), which is one of the main ways male power dominates. How does that make me bigoted? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silence-powerlessness-womens-voices-rebecca-solnit https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silenc... Edit: I think I see the misunderstanding; I meant 'primed by society starting from birth', you seem to have read 'primed by nature'
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > which is one of the main ways male power dominates That in itself is not a true belief, but a complex piece of bigoted propaganda. I think GP understood you well, they're just questioning the assumptions underlying what you said.

lsofzz 3y ago

Yep agree. Be. Wrong. More. Corollary: Be right less. Being, wrong is a humble space to be in! Mind you, you can be the smartest chipmunk in the room; But, i think being curious _and_ being inquisitive is more important than *trying* to be right and turning out to be wrong.

foobarbecue 3y ago

I often say things like "I'm 76% sure that this operation will work well in this mode." It started as a joke, but actually it's extremely useful. I work in spacecraft operations, where differences in opinion often need to be resolved quickly. If the other person says "I'm 98% sure you're wrong," then I'll cede the point, but if we disagree at comparable certainly levels then we'll need to make an effort (spending value time) to check, e.g. running simulations.

jancsika 3y ago

> And then if you're wrong about those things, reflect on what led you to be more certain than you should have been and try to prevent it from happening again. This is counterproductive for people who have a fear of being wrong, which is what the article is about. Those people are already spending too much time reflecting on wrongness. Trying to prevent overconfident wrongness from happening is very likely to land them back in the camp of not speaking up, which is where they started. In fact, I'd be willing to bet there's a statistical advantage to being a flat-out narcissist and quickly convincing oneself that a correction was just an interlocutor's misapprehension of what the narcissist already knew.[1] Something like how Heads-Tails-Tails beats Heads-Tails-Heads in random coin toss sequences. If ending up wrong can double as the first step of being right, it accelerates the learning process. Meanwhile, students of your teachings would either: 1) fall behind as they speculate about the nature of recurring cognitive bias and overconfidence, and/or 2) introduce communication problems through compulsive hedging (probably compounded by said fear of being wrong) 1: I know a few non-narcissists who, for whatever reason, use this method. It's at most a mild annoyance, and they are vastly easier to communicate with than compulsive hedgers. (And obviously easier to communicate with than people who don't speak up at all for fear of being wrong.)

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

Oh man god bless ya. I said exactly this to an interviewer once when they asserted with complete certainty that copying a value from a register to another MUST be faster than copying from a pointer. I said "I agree that it's probably true for mostly every piece of hardware you'll ever touch but I think it's theoretically possible to design a digital circuit in which for certain cases they take the same amount of time" To which the interviewer said "No it is impossible" The guy just didn't wanna hear me out.

Jensson 3y ago

When someone says "A is B" you should hear "I think A is B", that makes everything much simpler since there are very few things people are certain about. When making a stronger statement people say "I'm certain A is B". Edit: Take your post as an example, it is about twice as long as it has to be since you add so much padding to mark uncertainty. Humans are uncertain about most things, if you say something I'll assume that is what you think and it isn't the whole truth, that is what everyone does, just learn to not be afraid of being wrong and just do the simple thing that is easy to read.

MrJohz 3y ago
I find that tends not to be true, although this may be a cultural thing. When people say "A is B", what I find they usually mean is "I think that A is B, but I have not questioned this opinion particularly strongly and do not have a confidence level attached to this belief". And very often the default confidence level people attach to their unquestioned opinions is relatively high, which means for them it typically lies relatively close to the "I am certain" mark. This is why I find it's really helpful to purposefully indicate when I'm saying things that are merely my opinions, when I'm saying things that I'm certain about, and when I'm somewhere in-between. Partly, it indicates to the to the other person the degree to which I hold a given opinion, but it mainly just helps me hold myself accountable about the assumptions I'm making: is this something I have sincerely thought about and formulated a belief about, or is this just an intuition that I've not tested yet?
- Jensson 3y ago
  > When people say "A is B", what I find they usually mean is The important part is what confidence levels people are used that you have when you say "A is B", not what the person who said it is thinking. As you said here, you know people are wrong a lot when they say it, so that is what "A is B" means, it means "I think A is B". The exception is if you are saying it from a place of authority like being a teacher or writing a manual. If you are an authority then you should hedge what you say if you aren't confident, but HN comments aren't an authority, there is no need to hedge what you say here, everyone knows you are just saying what you think. If someone was an authority they would start the comment with it.

shelika 3y ago

Author here. I really hope it doesn't come across as "blurt out falsehoods with confidence all the time"- I do mention in the conclusion that this is no substitute for working hard and thinking critically. Definitely agree with all you said.

mcny 3y ago
One thing I have a problem with in the workplace is what goes unsaid because everyone in the (chat) room already understands the premise and are on the same page versus things they have not even thought about. For example, let's say there is an azure function that does something but is failing some of the time. I'll say something like hey me sending a message to the service bus again fixed this issue for me. Three people will yell at me and say sending this message doesn't do what I think it does. I'm sorry how do you know what I'm thinking? A week or so goes while we struggle with this problem. It isn't even a big problem because we can all clearly see the code and can read what it does but people are so confidently incorrect about their own code. Finally about a week later someone else has a revelation. Oh resending the failed message seems to fix the problem. And I'm thinking how did you not get that conclusion from what I said. I feel like I'm missing some context because I feel like the senior developers in the room want to manufacture a crisis so they can rewrite the whole function but how do I ask this question out loud? I mean I fully support that the code needs a rewrite. It is difficult to read and frankly the approach isn't very good but it feels like we are hesitant to making small incremental improvements today lest management thinks it is good enough and refuses to pay for a rewrite? Am I overthinking this?

Sakos 3y ago

Also, have the grace to admit when you're wrong and to adapt to new information.

Jensson 3y ago
That is a part of "don't be afraid to be wrong".
- Sakos 3y ago
  I think it needs to be said explicitly.
  - lsofzz 3y ago
    Here's the thing: Imagine you are in a boxing match, and your opponent looses the fight. The person who wins the fight would tell the opponent that they did well regardless; It's a courtesy. A sane person does not go around the ring saying "Ha ha you lost the fight". Is that right? Similarly, I disagree that things need to be __that__ explicit.
    - Sakos 3y ago
      What the fuck are you talking about? What does that have to do with what we're talking about? These things are not fucking comparable. We're talking about something and I think it's helpful to have everything explicitly stated instead of just implicitly hoping everybody draws the same interpretation. It's one thing to be willing to be wrong, but it's an entirely different thing to have the grace to accept being wrong when you're in that situation, which can take a level of emotional regulation and acceptance that isn't automatic. That's something most of us have to work at. That's why it needs to be explicitly mentioned. I've been willing to be wrong and stated things I was reasonably sure was correct, but felt frustrated and embarrassed leading to me being unnecessarily combative. Over time, I've worked on that emotional response so I'm able to say "yes, you're entirely right" and not take it personally when I am wrong. So yes, it needs to be explicitly stated and discussed and cannot be glossed over.

stringtoint 3y ago

"Reserve direct assertions for things you are actually sure about." is something I keep saying as well. I wish more people would follow this approach.