8 ms·

I think this is a general cultural phenomenon not specific to the sciences- people are told they need to be aggressively confident to be taken seriously. Even a

• bigs 2y ago
  Agree. At least in my western country, it has become almost expected that everyone is fully confident all the time. I’m someone who likes to deliberate on thoughts, take my time, listen to opinions and assess them, then provide my opinion (which may also change over time with more information or changing circumstances). I am humble, a listener, and don’t believe I know everything. I feel a little out of place in current society.
• bigs 2y ago
  Agree. At least in my western country, it has become almost expected that everyone is fully confident all the time. I’m someone who likes to deliberate on thoughts, take my time, listen to opinions and assess them, then provide my opinion (which may also change over time with more information or changing circumstances). I am humble, a listener, and don’t believe I know everything. I feel a little out of place in current society.
  • randomNumber7 2y ago
    These are just characteristics of high intelligence. You would have always felt out of place with society.
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      I think there’s personality traits at play here also- simply being introverted means you are more focused on if your ideas make sense to you, than how they will be received or what they will make other people think about you. I think there are intelligent extroverts that just aren’t really that worried about if their opinions are correct or not except in rare cases where the consequences of being wrong would be severe.
  • chucksmash 2y ago
    Your account is dead but none of the posts in your history look bad. You can email hn@ycombinator.com and if there has been a mistake they'll sort it out.
    • bigs 2y ago
      Thanks I’m not sure what happened but it seems to be fixed…
  • Tanoc 2y ago
    When I was younger I had a bad habit of taking what information I did know and then piecing it together to try and fill in what I didn't know, then stating that confidently. Many times I was wrong. In fact, most times I was wrong and not even close. But I was expected to be that way in order for people to listen to me. I was doing this almost until I was twenty because of that expectation. The one good thing that came out of this maladapted behaviour is that I learned to take my hunch, piece together the information, and then use that to go looking for what I didn't know. In a way it got me addicted to constantly learning, something I never managed in school.
    • stonethrowaway 2y ago
      That is very much a normal human condition honestly. In my experience what I’m seeing from time to time is younger folks have way more confidence in things they’re wrong about than I did when I was their age. I had some confidence no doubt but ample room for error where I would run a “trust but verify” pattern on my own bullshit regularly. I learned from who knows what that it’s bon ton to say “I don’t know” so I got into the habit of withholding my theories in favour of yielding to the other parties. Of course it helps in tech and business to be discerning. But I’m seeing less of this and way more of baseless, unfounded conclusions that have not stemmed from deductive reasoning, conflicting research and so on but rather just-so statements and single-dimension emotional reflexes. It’s clear the presenter wholly lacks experience, but we play along because it’s amusing. The hard part is articulating to someone to slow down because we run the risk of them being offended. But that’s a different thread altogether.
  • amarcheschi 2y ago
    One of my professor at uni (he managed to talk to Bill gates to get Microsoft to fund his startup, which is now an established research center) told us that if we don't know something, being honest and saying you don't know it is usually a good sign. Be it at an oral exam, be it when you're answering question at a startup pitch (...) I really appreciated when a professor, when asked with a question he doesn't know, stops trying to answer and says something in the lines of "I actually don't know the exact answer, I'll try to find and answer and tell you next lesson"
    • gwervc 2y ago
      In a way the school system teach people to fear not knowing something, because at an exam it mean getting a bad grade. At work, it is also often frown upon. This is indeed a problem in science since the goal is precisely to find more about unknowns.
      • amarcheschi 2y ago
        I had another enlightened professor that also founded a startup that talked about how much is it frowned upon to admit to be wrong at work. Bear in mind in his opinion this is especially true for Italian workplaces, but I can imagine it can be somewhat true for other places as well. Knowing why things went wrong is much more useful than knowing who did it and pointing fingers to him/her
  • karmakurtisaani 2y ago
    Here's an idiot's guide to sounding smart: - use big words - speak with utmost confidence - if you can't convince, confuse
  • poincaredisk 2y ago
    >it has become almost expected that everyone is fully confident all the time I still remember my first discussion with a CEO in my first job as a programmer (not even out of uni yet). My project was delayed because of a buggy installer and I had problems reproducing the issue. I was am repeatedly asked "how long until the fix" and I kept saying "I don't know, it's a bug, can take 2 hours can take a week". We both left this conversation frustrated. Though of course for her it was business as usual, and for me it's still awkward and stressful when I think back to it. Anyway this taught me to confidently state something like "this will take three days" instead of trying to convey uncertainty to the higher management.
• jampekka 2y ago
  Also e.g. MS Word suggests getting rid of qualifiers. With papers and especially grant applications it's ridiculous that everybody knows they are overpromising but still they don't go through of they don't overpromise.
  • sandworm101 2y ago
    Before i send something i make sure each paragraph has at least one it of green underline. The day that Word and I agree on grammar is the day i switch back to pencil and paper!
    • mondobe 2y ago
      Including HN comments, I see...
• kleiba 2y ago
  > Even as a kid parents and teachers will suggest to kids to edit words expressing uncertainty out of their writing. They are coached to talk like that when public speaking, at job interviews, and even dating. That's the first time I'm hearing this and it's certainly not something I've ever observed. In this broad generally, I cannot believe that this statement is true.
  • mmooss 2y ago
    I was going to write the same thing as the GP, fwiw. Look at how many public figures embrace the extreme overconfidence as a mark of tactical genius: SBF, Musk, lots of other SV figures, Trump, etc. Humbleness, humility used to be admired. Can you imagine someone saying that now?
    • dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Humbleness, humility used to be admired. They are generally praised in the abstract, but in concrete terms of actual people in terms of attracting a contemporary following (and not distant, historical, and academic respect), boldness has usually trumped humility. The idea that there was a time when people didn't flock to the overcompetent people presenting strong-leader images over people with genuine humility is just one of the many ways people create a mythical past to paint the manifestation of long-present aspects of human culture as novel degeneracy into which the world has recently fallen.
      • mmooss 2y ago
        > in concrete terms of actual people in terms of attracting a contemporary following (and not distant, historical, and academic respect), boldness has usually trumped humility I don't think that's true: Confucious, Jesus, George Washington, Lincoln, MLK ... Eisenhower, every president before Trump, the New England culture of looking down on ostentation and displays of wealth, .... I read a New Yorker article several years ago about a culture of Wall Street leaders in the 1980s who purposely wore cheap watches, had homes with low fences, etc.
• jackcviers3 2y ago
  As one teacher and several profs told me, "You don't need to say, 'I think', because the fact that you are saying or writing it means that you think it". In other words, if you are uncertain, don't express the idea, because no amount of verbal hedging will protect you if you express something that is incorrect. However, the best way to get the correct idea if you are wrong and unsure is to confidently propose your idea as if it is correct - Cunningham's law applied to everything.
  • rcxdude 2y ago
    And yet one of the best ways to lose respect in a technical context, especially as a junior, is to be confidently incorrect. Showing humility helps a hell of a lot for all concerned if you've in fact misunderstood something.
  • gryn 2y ago
    writing 'I think X', 'there a chance that X' instead of 'X is', 'I know that X' > if you are uncertain, don't express the idea, because no amount of verbal hedging will protect you if you express something that is incorrect. The problem with this is with the target audience of your writing, if you're assuming an adversarial audience vs a cooperative one. the bigger and less self-filtered the audience is the more likely it is to become of the first kind. > the best way to get the correct idea if you are wrong and unsure is to confidently propose your idea as if it is correct - Cunningham's law applied to everything. Personally when I see someone being confidently incorrect consistently I just filter them out and their opinions instead of correcting them because a lot of time it's a lost cause. for example Reddit and twitter, the sheer amount of people that are overly confidently incorrect, it made conversations not worth having there so I just stopped many years ago.
    • jackcviers3 2y ago
      Everyone has their threshold for how many times you are allowed to be incorrect within a given context, sure. > adversarial audience... Yes. Even if the audience you target is small and on your side today, a successful piece of writing will gain an adversarial audience, eventually. > If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu (apocryphal paraphrase from hearsay apparently but still a great quote).
• energy123 2y ago
  Part of it is the English language doesn't have tools to express uncertainty without adding verbosity. For example, take what I said here, my sentence length increased by 25% by saying "part of it is" to communicate uncertainty. This gets tiring quickly for both the writer and reader. It becomes boilerplate.
  • jimkleiber 2y ago
    Fair, we at least have the subjunctive, we just don't use it very often. If I were to start a sentence like this, I would be using the subjunctive. (Which I believe has been confirmed by Gemini): > Yes, the sentence "If I were to start a sentence like this, I would be using the subjunctive" uses the subjunctive mood correctly. > The subjunctive mood is used to express hypothetical or unreal situations, wishes, suggestions, or demands. In this sentence, "If I were to start a sentence like this" presents a hypothetical situation, and "were" is the correct form of the verb "to be" in the subjunctive mood." But yeah, it doesn't get at the uncertainty expressed in other languages. Is there another mood for that or how do other languages handle it?
  • euroderf 2y ago
    > the English language doesn't have tools to express uncertainty without adding verbosity Well, there's always irony quotes. For example: The new Apple lineup will "amaze".
    • Thertzlor 2y ago
      [dead]
  • kovac 2y ago
    That's a good point. As a non-native speaker, I use Grammarly to improve my writing. But often, when I add clauses that indicate uncertainty, grammarly complaints about how I can be more concise by dropping those parts.
• DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Yes and no. Often being trapped in indecision is a sign of fear and insecurity rather than calm consideration. But sometimes people go into things headstrong and lose because they didn't make any calculations beforehand. There's a balance, or maybe a dialectic, between thinking and non-thinking action.
• nickpsecurity 2y ago
  I think it’s a newer culture pushed by the media and universities to accept scientific claims without questioning them. They usually cite whatever they say without evidence. What a scientific consensus or even unnamed scientist say can be used to dismiss others’ points. It’s almost like they’re the clergy of today. Some are calling this “scientism.” We need to go back to treating any claims with healthy skepticism, reviewing them, and phrasing things carefully to show the degree of certainty uncertainty involved. We need to protect the integrity of both science and scientific reporting. That’s better for us in the long-term.
  • shadowmanifold 2y ago
    There is a problem too that scientism has a dual meaning. There is the belief in science as the best means to get at the truth and then the pejorative of using science as a type of orthodox religion. So for the true believer in the pejorative you can't even use the term. Personally, I think this is a lost cause. Scientism in the pejorative sense is a new religion and most likely we are at the very early stages. Even when it comes to lifting weights, every youtube video pretends to be "based on science". I might be too old to see it happen but I fully expect at some point in the future instead of a movie getting 5 stars, the commercial will say this is scientifically proven to be great movie. A restaurant will claim to have the best tacos based on science. This is clearly the road we are on and I don't see a way back. Actual scientist will have to be more and more certain in their language because that is what scientism in the pejorative sense is to the true believer and the cult of the true believer in pejorative scientism is growing. "SCIENCE IS REAL"
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      As a scientist this stuff irks me more than the openly anti-science people- because it deprives science of the whole point- to be able to question and understand things yourself. I dislike how every food item, exercise, etc. is now “scientifically proven to be optimal.” And if you look at the actual research it will show that some biomarker was higher in some comparison… but who is to say having that higher is better, and that they were actually measuring the only relevant factor out of thousands of possibilities to measure? We simply don't know nearly enough about biology to measure one biomarker and conclude that it proves something is "optimal" for the health of every member of an entire species of complicated organisms over their entire lives. If I'm going to lift weights I don't care how it modulated some level of some immunological molecule the authors were studying because it's what they happened to get funded to measure- I just care if when other people tried it if they got stronger, and didn't get hurt... something I can learn from word of mouth rather than peer reviewed literature. And you will get called “anti science” if you question it… as if questioning things that don’t make sense wasn’t the main point of science. /rant
• hansvm 2y ago
  An explanation some teachers beat into me over the years is that everyone already knows you're only stating a thing because it's your opinion. It's discourteous to waste time repeating something so basic, so such hedging language should only be used when it actually adds something to the conversation -- warning the reader of something with an unexpected level of certainty. On some level, that makes even more sense in scientific writing. You already have method sections, experimental results, .... If you haven't been overconfident in those sections then the reader really ought to have all the tools they need to appropriately examine the paper.
  • MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Huh? People sometimes state things that are the genuine facts, as far as anyone has been able to prove, but that are not entirely possible to be 100% verified. This isn’t some obscure niche case either, it happens every day on HN.
    • hansvm 2y ago
      If we're interpreting what I wrote charitably, it's implicit that "obvious" facts will extremely rarely have hedging language, so the anti-hedging conversation can focus elsewhere. I _knew_ somebody was going to nitpick that phrase and rejected the urge to write a few extra paragraphs in the format of a HN comment expressing the idea more completely... If we want to look at it a bit less charitably though, even things that are true "as far as anyone has been able to prove" are usually not perceived to be true for a significant fraction of the human race, so in interactions with randos (like this current thread) it's still reasonable to assume that we're talking about opinions rather than facts. Even when talking about "facts" (as you partially defined them), the core idea still holds -- your _opinion_ (maybe a very well validated opinion) is that those facts are true, and hedging language is discourteous to the reader.
      • MichaelZuo 2y ago
        It also happens from the opposite direction. Seemingly random claims, that no one has been able to provide proof for so far, but the person has some special reasons to strongly believe it is true. E.g. ‘Back channel’ communication in diplomacy.
• xanderlewis 2y ago
  Relevant (and enjoyable): https://youtu.be/OV5J6BfToSw https://youtu.be/OV5J6BfToSw [particularly 13:44~]
• noobermin 2y ago
  As a grad student it was beaten out of me to be honest about my misgivings about my own results. But now that I'm in the system I don't know how we change this system. I get the sense sometimes there are actual psychopaths amongst us who do mean it, however and they often do rise in the ranks, and those folks are essentially the other nuke holders in this MAD sort of situation. Amongst other things that need structural reform in science, I don't know what it takes to fix it.
• bitcraft 2y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. This issue comes up in job interviews and forces people into faking confidence in spite of not knowing. Honest people be damned if they give the impression of anything less than absolute confidence.