14 ms·

We Are All Confident Idiots

285 points by r0h1n 12y ago

lucio 12y ago
"epic housing bubble stoked by the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers" Isn't he being prey of his own effect? So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)" If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?
- byEngineer 12y ago
  The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for 30 years at 4%. For 15 years at 3.5%. When the real inflation rate felt by consumers is at about 10%. Why nobody sees that? People don't like to think. They prefer imaginary fantasies where everything is just fine to brutal reality of the unproductive economy running from a bubble to bubble sponsored only by the USD being reserve currency of the world. Once the US Treasuries bubble bursts, the same moment, the bubble in the US Dollar and America will burst too. We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. So we have house prices in bubble territory, car loans in bubble territory, Wall Street in bubble territory, VCs/startup scene in bubble territory. Enjoy the ride! But you don't want to be there for the bubble burst of the world reserve currency. I'm already on the other side of the pond.
  - narag 12y ago
    We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. Wait to see space bubble. Space mining will need huge amounts of capital that will be invested in space ships and stations that for many years will give no positive returns. Still they'll be obviously valuable for the future, so we will have Internet-kind bubble thousands fold.
  - tomp 12y ago
    > People don't like to think. Well, that's a mostly empty statement, as it's unfalsifiable - even people who think, and see this happening, what can they do? Is there any way to profit from the mispricing of assets, when everything is overvalued? Well, you could short stuff, but that's a huge risk (since the central banks have an incentive to keep the bubble from bursting, so they can ramp the asset prices even higher), and only available to those with existing capital, not the "people". Move to a non-USD based economy? All economies depend on the USD, and if USD crashes, the whole world goes down with it. What are the "people" supposed to do other than to weather the upcoming storm?
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      Hypothetical scenario: US Treasuries go south, the bubble bursts. The next day Chinese announce they start selling their Treasuries on the open market. So instead of keeping your money with the most indebted Government on the face of the planet, you keep it with the biggest creditor in the world. Doesn't sound as a bad deal, huh? And as an extra bonus just to make sure everyone drops US Treasuries ASAP to buy the Chinese paper: tie the currency to gold. Guarantee that yuan is as good as gold. Why not? Yuan reserve currency of the world, so the same mistakes can be made all over again ;-) This what Keynsians call in this case problem for Chinese I call a huge win. Keynsians will tell you: oh, but now Chinese exports will get prohibitively expensive! And I say: BS! The yuan currency will go up in value up to 6 times. Why to export anywhere when you just got 1 billion new consumers worth 6 times more than before?! Next step: rest of the world starts producing again, including US. China stops being factory of the world as we can't afford their stuff anymore. We need to relearn how to build and assemble it again. Voila, here you have balance back in the system.
      - itchyouch 12y ago
        Except, isn't China working hard to keep the valuation of their currency as low as they possibly can?
        innguest 12y ago
        Only while they're still hoarding gold. Once they start noticing they've bought most of the gold they can get in the open market without causing prices to soar then they will change gears.
  - bostonpete 12y ago
    Do they have "Doomsday Preppers" on the other side of the pond?
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      They do. In mainstream. Things like possibility of US defaulting on its debt or going towards hyper inflationary root are mainstream over here.
  - gone35 12y ago
    Ok, this is interesting. From the article: "For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil's advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls 'considering the opposite.' To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions." So, can you do it? Can you think through what could be wrong with your own argument? And what possible lapses or biases could had led you to such (putatively) unwarranted certainty?
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      Yes, certainly. Many things can go differently. For one the US President, Obama, might go there on TV and tell: "My fellow Americans. Starting tomorrow we are raising taxes by 10-25%. We cut social security. We cut military. We cut across the board. Why? Because the Chinese demand their money!" Possible? Of course! Probable? Your call. Inflating the monetary base is actually doing the same, but without the need to raise taxes ex explicite. Everything gets more expensive year to year: tuition, insurance, services, etc. That's your hidden tax - inflation. We are paying off the Chinese by returning them money that's less valuable that the money we borrowed from them. Some things, like 600% debt to GDP ratio that currently the US has are just facts of life. Can I imagine reality without them? Sure! The media is full of them from CNBC to Bloomberg News. Why you insist on me providing you scenarios? Ask them if they can imagine bubble in Treasuries! They certainly couldn't see one in housing or the .com one even though they both were straight in their faces. They laughed off anyone talking about bubbles then. The same now they lough into faces of Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Kyle Bass, and others when they talk about bubble in the US Treasuries. In other words, you are asking wrong person to do the reality check. I'm the reality check to the mainstream camp blind to the obvious. 600% debt to gdp. Can FED raise the interest rates to stop all the bubbles in their tracks? Sure they can! They need to be cautious though. Because at interest rates at 7%, the US Government will be spending over 50% of the annual budget just to pay interest on the debt we have. Can we imagine the FED going to raise the rates to 20% as Volcker did in the early 1980s? Sure, but then well over 100% of the state income from taxes would need to be paid on the interest alone! This is how much we owe. Can I imagine reality where this is not true? Sure, but why would I ever do that? Why to imagine world where mistakes aren't happening when they are right in our faces? I'm not saying we don't have options. I'm just saying that taking into the account the dirty politics, we can't have the President have speech like that, can we? Another solution: war. In the state of war we don't repay. That's the rule ages old. So, yes there are plenty of scenarios: from bankruptcy, theory hyperinflation, ending on WW3. There is no positive outcome from debt to GDP ratio at 600%. Sorry. One could argue that we will just have "lost decades" as Japanese did. That the process will take forever and we will slowly decline and the rest of the world will follow suite. Might be that it will take 30 years. The thing is that looking at Russia, China, ISIS, I don't think they will just let us decline.
  - innguest 12y ago
    Glad to see someone here that understands what is going on. Did you really move out of the US because of the coming crisis? I'm really curious about this. I understand there will be riots and it will be unstable for a while but how much chaos are you expecting?
    - vectorpush 12y ago
      The smug, self-certain, self-congratulatory attitude seems ironic in the context of the posted article.
      - byEngineer 12y ago
        Reading 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel at the moment. I think we have had too much of uncertainty in the West from economy thinking to social thinking to medicine. Peter claims in his book that no CEO looks beyond 3 months timeframe running their Company anymore. Why? Because market knows better anyway. Why to plan, when market will determine what the market is going to be? Uncertainty. Medical: we can't control genes right? They determine everything, so why to care, why to plan? Social: cultural marxism. Pessimistic culture -- everything is wrong because we are capitalist society. As long as it exists we can't be certain of anything. If you have debt to gdp ratio of 600%, what do you expect? Flourishing economy? Things will go down south. You are like a six year old pissed of that two and two is four every time. Some things are certain. Like 600% debt to gdp aren't pretty. Not positive. Not uncertain. Fucking shit. OK?
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      It might as well all end not too bad. It might be that the rest of the world will finish in much worse shape than the US. I keep my options open. Can live in the US, but also can live in EU. Would be nice to be able to stay in HK for a while too.
  - tsunamifury 12y ago
    This sounds a lot like Chinese astroturfing. As you read his comments further down it becomes more apparent.
    - hindsightbias 12y ago
      Going to be lonely over there, all the rich Chinese are buying property in the US.
- protonfish 12y ago
  From the ground in 2008, it looked like the match was fuel prices. (Gasoline was around $4.50/gal in my recollection.) There were all these families barely squeaking by that could only tolerate a significant price hike in gas and electricity for so long until something had to give.
androidb 12y ago
I'm not confident!
atmosx 12y ago
"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare Act 5, Scene 1: [...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...] I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.
- robert_tweed 12y ago
  That certainly borrows from Socrates: "I know one thing: that I know nothing."
  - atmosx 12y ago
    Oh, my favorite Greek philosopher! :-)
  - gjm11 12y ago
    It's an idea that recurs throughout history. We've got Socrates and Shakespeare already mentioned in the thread, to which I'll add: W B Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Charles Darwin: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." the Tao Te Ching: "To know that you do not know is highest. To not know but think you know is flawed. ... The sages are without fault, because they recognize the fault as a fault". (Semi-interestingly, I can't find anything very close to this idea in the biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes -- the former sees certainty as something to aspire to, and the latter is just equally down on everyone, wise and foolish alike.)
    - PavlovsCat 12y ago
      Erich Fried wrote a poem called "Angst und Zweifel", it goes roughly like this: do not doubt the one who says he is afraid but be afraid of the one who says he knows no doubt
kevinwang 12y ago
I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees different questions and later edit in a different question that makes the original answer seem funny.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees different questions So, without evidence, you're confident of this?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  I don't know about that, what I am pretty sure of is that for every funny answer, they have at least ten other boring "That person doesn't even exist" or "I don't know" replies.
  - mistermann 12y ago
    I agree. Canadians love watching "the dumb Americans" on shows like this but you could get the exact same results going out onto Canadian streets. Many Canadians see themselves as intellectually superior to Americans because of our greater knowledge of their country, 80%+ of which knowledge I expect is from watching TV and movies.
praptak 12y ago
Anecdotal evidence from a fun show, plus the mandatory reference to Dunning-Kruger. "Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people." http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k...
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  > plus the mandatory reference to Dunning-Kruger. Well, the article was written by David Dunning, the one the effect is half-named for, so it is almost literally mandatory that it is mentioned.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    This is a very literal LOL moment.
prof_hobart 12y ago
> some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts Is it possible that this is at least partly down to the phrase "some knowledge"? Knowing what parallax or lipids are might be seen as having some knowledge of the concept.
- deleted 12y ago
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- d23 12y ago
  Honestly, even knowing they were made up my brain's first instinct was "yeah, those sound familiar." If they were just asking about "some knowledge" I can see how people might say, "hmm, yeah, that sounds like something I've heard before."
  - colomon 12y ago
    And even more so with people's names, at least for me. For every name I know solidly there are probably two that I vaguely sort of know. For instance, I probably know more about Irish traditional music than 99.9% of the American population. But if you came up with a real-sounding random name for an Irish musician and talked about him like he was real and of course I should know who he was, the odds that I would confuse that with someone I knew a bit about are substantial. Or (speaking of Irish music) remembering tunes. There are tunes I own, tunes I think I know, tunes that are familiar, and tunes I flat out don't know. In my experience, I have the most trouble playing are some of the tunes I think I know -- more even than playing the tunes that I would just describe as familiar! Most of those I thought I knew I could probably sort out later given time, but in the heat of the moment what comes out can be nonsense. I guess what I'm trying to say is, when I get in trouble is on the fuzzy boundary between knowing and not knowing. I don't mind saying "I don't know" when I know I don't know. But sometimes I don't know I don't know, and that's when the trouble starts.
lucio 12y ago
In the curved-tube image, clearly the ball will exit with a clockwise spinning, because it'll be rolling on the external wall of the tube (based on the "Newtonian principle" of inertia). I'll bet if you try it as a experiment (inside the atmosphere) the ball will follow "C"... Am I a confident idiot?
- spain 12y ago
  I was actually thinking the same, shame there wasn't an answer in the article.
  - lucio 12y ago
    The "right" (too simplistic) answer in the article is "B". "One group knew the right Newtonian principle: that the ball would continue in the direction it was going the instant it left the tube—Path B. Freed of the tube’s constraint, it would just go straight."
    - Ono-Sendai 12y ago
      This is why science works well - it can tell us what the actual answer is, not just the one that is 'obviously right'.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  That's a standard fallacy I often run into: over estimating second order effects. Yes, unless the ball is perfectly smooth or in a vacuum you will get slight curvature. But it would be so slight that it would look like B.
  - iconjack 12y ago
    Try it with a ping-pong ball (a natural choice). The curvature coming out of the tube will not be slight.
    - bryanlarsen 12y ago
waterlesscloud 12y ago
"Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all." This means YOU, person who thinks you see through it all. You don't. This applies to you too.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  I know intellectually it must apply to me as well... But it's an interesting illusion. I think that philosophically the correct lesson here is that being (slightly?!?) aware of your own mind doesn't actually give you super powers... you can't change it. (Or, at least, you can't change it by shallow awareness... it would require true efforts.)
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. " Yes, and an informed mind is the same, only all the junk is "lined" up to agree with whatever the prevailing wisdom is. People don't operate on facts. They operate on feelings, flimsly allegories, metaphors, and half-baked truths. This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It allows us to walk into a room we've never visited before, use a chair, and order from a menu without having to spend time verifying a lot of details. The brain is emotional and always wildly guessing and generalizing about things, no matter who we are or what we do. People wonder why prejudice and stereotyping hasn't gone away in society. Well heck, it's never going away until you replace people with robots. I was attacked by a clown as a kid, I hate and fear clowns. You saw your mom shrink from a tall person, you are afraid of tall people. That's how the brain works, and it's how we're able to function. At best we learn to deliberately struggle with this. It's never going to go away -- at least while we're still human.
century19 12y ago
> "Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate." This is a fantastic line. I guess getting to the age where we can procreate is all that's needed by our genes !
gsz 12y ago
It sounds like it's best to be doubtful and unsure about my knowledge. So as long as I can make sure I'm unsure, I'm good. But can I be confident that I'm unsure? It's turtles all the way down.
dlss 12y ago
If anyone is curious about the Kimmel clip, it's on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww The article makes a lot more sense after watching it IMO.
Dylan16807 12y ago
>whether his appearance as a judge on America’s Got Talent would damage his legacy. “No,” said one woman to this last question. “It will make him even more popular.” Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie. (The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovable, as a plausible future event.) Disclaimer: only talking about the quote in the article, if there was more context it shouldn't have been cut
- gwern 12y ago
  'would' is ambiguous because the author is describing something in the past. For example, you would write 'would' regardless of whether the original question was "Ma'am, do you think Clinton's appearance yesterday on America's Got Talent will damage his legacy?" or if the question had actually been "Miss, do you think Clinton accepting his recent invitation to appear on AGT would damage his legacy?" But either way, the question is false...
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Still not bluffing, because they are only speculating on the self-contained scenario, not bringing in fake details.
    - gwern 12y ago
      It is still bluffing because the scenario is not being presented as a hypothetical.
      - Dylan16807 12y ago
        If you don't pretend you've heard of it before, it's an abstract scenario that might as well be hypothetical. You're answering based on the question and only the question.
adwf 12y ago
I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persists as a meme. The problem is that "death of the weakest" is a much better way of describing it - although possibly not so PC to teach in the classroom. The reason why people think Cheetahs evolved to be fast is because they equate it with the ethic of hard work, rather than the real reason - slow cheetahs don't eat and therefore die before breeding, fast cheetahs eat and get to breed. Without meaning to start yet another internet debate/flamewar about evolution, I often wonder whether the strong protestant work ethic in the US is also the reason why evolution is so poorly understood there. Because "death to the weakest" involves no agency, no self-improvement or hard work. EDIT: Just to avoid to confusion (as there seems to be some!), I'm not talking about the mechanism of evolution, purely the actual phrase "survival" and what it means to people when it's mentioned, the implication of agency that goes along with the word.
- lucio 12y ago
  It is not just a spin? "survival of the fittest" is exactly the same as "death to the weakest". "survival of the fittest" = "not survival of the not-fit" And also "fit" it is not the same as "strong"
  - adwf 12y ago
    Yes it is spin, but not just spin. "Survive" often implies some sort of agency, that there is some sort of struggle that was overcome and the organism is still alive. We teach survival skills. Whereas if you drop some antibiotics on a bacteria culture, there is no struggle, the bacteria that aren't already resistant just die. That's why I think the inverted phrasing is clearer in meaning (although yes I meant "weakest fit / not fit").
    - lucio 12y ago
      There isnt a struggle?. Do the non-resistant bacteria "try" to survive and fail, then die? or it "just die"? The inverted phrase will be a PR disaster for Darwin ;)
qwerta 12y ago
"idiot" is well defined medical term, author probably meant "ignorant".
teekert 12y ago
In holland, a DJ called Giel Beelen has/had a part of his show called "Gaat ie mee of zegt ie nee.": "Will he join or will he say no." He asked a national politician about terrorist Jael Jablabla (http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam-stopt-vanwege-3fmradiospelletje.html http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam-stopt-...), about a non-existing band and about the coma of Sharon... The politician bluffed his way through, claiming he knew more about Jablabla than the DJ... and ended his career shortly afterwards.
- petercooper 12y ago
  We had a similar thing in the UK with a famous satirist called Chris Morris who convinced a wide array of celebrities, including politicians, to say all sorts of idiotic things in a series of spoof documentaries about things like drugs and, most controversially, pedophilia. For example, he got one of the UK's most famous DJs to say that pedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than other human beings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng .. in this case, the facts were fed to the celebs rather than them making them up though.
deleted 12y ago
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Shivetya 12y ago
I wonder where those of us who tend to self depreciating humor, who also in turn confess to not knowing much while being told we get things done, fall. I know some of what I am totally clueless about but revel in being told when I am factually wrong in something I thought otherwise. However there are areas where I just refuse to understand and worse I think I know what some of those are and still won't correct it.
piker 12y ago
TL;DR go with your gut--it's probably correct.
mathgenius 12y ago
It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
- Bargs 12y ago
  Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the article: "The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Not to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks. This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/ * with apologies to Pendleton Ward.
blinkingled 12y ago
One extreme is confident idiot. The other is the ever doubting fool. I keep thinking there is a happier middle ground - I know some things and I can't know some others. I will do my best with what I know. From personal experience #1 obviously leads to certain failures (unfortunate one if you are even a little wise and honest - you saw this coming and still decided to be a cocky idiot). #2 you lose out on motivation, don't get the credit you deserve and get more stressed than necessary. The happier middle ground works for me - actually look at everything, find out what you know, what you need to know and equally importantly what you are just not going to know. Then work a plan on the strengths of what you know. That's work though - heh! The extremes are just easier to acquire :)
tokenadult 12y ago
This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand their rights—and in areas like employment law, to wildly overestimate them. In 1997, Kim presented roughly 300 residents of Buffalo, New York, with a series of morally abhorrent workplace scenarios—for example, an employee is fired for reporting that a co-worker has been stealing from the company—that were nonetheless legal under the state’s 'at-will' employment regime. Eighty to 90 percent of the Buffalonians incorrectly identified each of these distasteful scenarios as illegal, revealing how little they understood about how much freedom employers actually enjoy to fire employees." I have seen this misconception here on Hacker News many times. (To be sure, here on Hacker News we have participants from many countries, not all of which have the same laws about employment, but I have seen plenty of Americans proclaim "facts" about rights of employees here in the United States that simply are not facts.) Basically, in our thoughtful discussions here, we all have to take care to check our facts. That's why I'm especially glad to upvote comments that ask earlier commenters to explain where they got their information, or to suggest further reading on a topic. I'll link a book here about employment law (mostly related to hiring procedures) as an example of the information I like to see in comments. I need to check my understanding of all issues, all the time, according to the article kindly submitted here, and I appreciate it when other HN participants help me find more information. http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment-Background/dp/1889150592/ http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment-Backgrou...
- brazzy 12y ago
  Not at all limited to law - accepting facts/stories/statements that fit one's worldview or even just seem interesting or important, and passing them on without ever checking or even doubting their correctness is a mistake that I see very frequently (and occasionally in myself despite conscious efforts to avoid it).
  - sakri 12y ago
vinceguidry 12y ago
The article makes a few generalizations about evolution that don't really hold up. The idea that evolution does not have agency needs to be re-examined in the light of the fact that animals themselves have far more agency than we realized. To use the author's example, cheetahs may well have all decided as a group to run faster, in the sort of 'social learning' way that we're just now starting to really get a grip on. I mean, adaptations don't just happen, beings have to use their abilities, and then the cells will respond by getting thicker, stronger, more responsive. Think about lifting weights. If agency isn't responsible for evolutionary advantages, then what is? Random differences? Really? Evolution is way more complex than we realize. Every year, we come across crazy things that happen in our own bodies that just totally blow our minds. Right now I think our broader understanding of how evolution works is hampered by the fact that we just don't know yet how genomes hold on to experiences and then pass them along to our offspring. So we assume that every life form is a blank slate, limited to just the same genetic code all their fellow life forms share. But just because we share the same template in one, specific way doesn't mean there can't be a ton of ways that fertilized zygotes can be different from each other too. And that those differences could result from the things our parents did in their lives.
- obitoo 12y ago
  "...we don't know how genomes hold on to experiences and then pass them along to our offspring. " Err they don't. That's Lamarckism theory, and I wasn't aware there was even a shred of evidence towards it. Sometimes when you don't know how something happens, its because it isn't actually happening
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    > Err they don't. That's Lamarckism theory, and I wasn't aware there was even a shred of evidence towards it. There is quite a bit from the last few years. Gene expression in particular is a field we continue to learn a lot about [0] and several studies have suggested Lamarckism might have some merit [1]. Saying there isn't a "shred of evidence" is just scientifically untrue. There is some legitimate evidence that limited information could be passed from mother to child prenatally. Your post is the classic Dunning–Kruger effect. Few in evolutionary biology would be as "sure" as you are, and you get less and less sure the more you learn. [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43787/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43787/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Epigenetic_inheritance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Epigenetic_inherita...
Bahamut 12y ago
This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing. Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes things more likely to happen your way, and people also like confidence more than uncertainty. For the Marine Corps, such a bad adage is useful since uncertainty is bad, and it often is better to choose an action, even if sub-optimal, than do nothing at all.
- drblast 12y ago
  Projecting confidence is an invaluable skill to have when you're trying to get people to charge up a heavily defended hill or take a building by force. Anything else, not so much. I've witnessed many Marines try and fail to do something complex with ultimate confidence that brute force would solve the problem. The dedication is admirable but the range of situations in which it's sufficient for success is small. In many non-military cases, doing nothing is a completely viable option that should always be considered. I'd venture to say that the most successful person is good at recognizing what deserves a Marine-level amount of effort and what can slide.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I imagine confidence & morale can, in their line of work, tip the scales and make something impossible, eminently possible. The small troupe of British soldiers who recently repelled a militant attack with only bayonets comes to mind. Outnumbered, outgunned, the subject of an ambush, it seems to me that a combination of resolve and confidence was the deciding factor.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    Morale is incredibly important in any type of effort. Think about how productive you are working on something that excites you vs grinding for dollars.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
wglb 12y ago
Very well written article. Very amusing commentary threads. But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.) There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous who said that he would keep a list of his mistakes in his wallet and refer to it from time to time. A boss of mine who was adventurous about experimenting with new technology said "I don't know very much about it, but I do know 50 ways that wont't work". This has led me to asking someone who claims to be an expert "Tell me three (or five) things that won't work" in their field of expertise. The advice from the article For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect seems spot on.
- jameshart 12y ago
  A coaching tip I always give to developers: you don't know enough about a topic if you can only think of one way to solve a problem. If you only know one way to do it, how do you know it's not the worst one? Take the time to sit back and enumerate a few ways of solving the problem and figure out which one's best in this situation. Why are you rejecting those other solutions? Are you sure those reasons are sound? Are you sure they don't apply equally to the solution you've selected?
leeber 12y ago
I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know. Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about. For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these types around. When a conversation comes up and the knowledge of the people involved is put to the test. Maybe your boss is asking who knows how to perform a certain task, or who has experience with certain hardware or software, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking what is the best TV they should buy, etc. There's the people who claim to know about topics XYZ when they really don't, and you, naturally, admit that you don't know. But you might still be the most knowledgeable person about the general topic, and best candidate to offer advice or take on said task. Doesn't matter, you get labeled as the uninformed person while the "idiot" who claims to know everything about XYZ appears to be knowledgable expert. And worst case scenario is when your boss, co-workers, friends, etc. are dumb enough not to catch it.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  > I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know. I don't think that's true in practice. For proof, just watch any academic debate, ever.
  - StandardFuture 12y ago
    The parent comment is stating a premise as a conclusion. Not having trouble admitting when you don't know something or understand something very well is actually a third attribute (commonly called humility), not the result of the first two. If more people focused on having it as an attribute then the scenario that the parent comment mentioned (and similar scenarios -- such as disappointing YouTube comments?) would be much rarer in occurrence. In fact, failing to have the third attribute affects the other two. Your confidence will quickly become overconfidence or pure hubris when faced with something you don't know much about. Also, in relationship to the second attribute, it is hard to convince yourself that you are not actually knowledgeable of something if you are not humble enough to consider that possibility.
shimfish 12y ago
I often reply "I don't know" when asked about things I don't know. It's invariably met with an explicit or implicit questioning of my worth. I can see why people learn never to admit ignorance.
ScottBurson 12y ago
"Master, what is knowledge?" "When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it -- this is knowledge." I don't remember where I read that, but I like it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ppereira 12y ago
  Analects of Confucius, Book II, Chapter XVII. https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/164/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/1...
nwatson 12y ago
I'm probably too late with this comment ... but if the diameter of the tube is significantly larger than the diameter of the ball, and the initial velocity of the ball is large enough, then the trajectory of the ball as it leaves the "curved tube" won't necessarily correlate well with the straightforward textbook answer you'd expect to see. Perhaps the original context for the question made this a bit more clear, but as presented in the article, the "real world" might intervene.
cowardlydragon 12y ago
The REAL problem is that confident incompetence in males is attractive to females.
jacobn 12y ago
And this is why software schedules are always off. Any schedule for that matter. If you're into this type of psychology, check out "Thinking Fast and Slow" by D. Kahnemann. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
reddytowns 12y ago
I would have liked this article more if they had left out the word "All" in the title
unknownBits 12y ago
I don't really mind people not realizing they are idiots, if they could at least stop trying to be in power and stop ruling over others. Most of our leaders/rulers are complete idiots without realizing it, that's the worse problem on this planet; if you try to convince them of their ignorance, they react with power, insolvable..

285 points by r0h1n 12y ago

lucio 12y ago

"epic housing bubble stoked by the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers" Isn't he being prey of his own effect? So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)" If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?

byEngineer 12y ago
The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for 30 years at 4%. For 15 years at 3.5%. When the real inflation rate felt by consumers is at about 10%. Why nobody sees that? People don't like to think. They prefer imaginary fantasies where everything is just fine to brutal reality of the unproductive economy running from a bubble to bubble sponsored only by the USD being reserve currency of the world. Once the US Treasuries bubble bursts, the same moment, the bubble in the US Dollar and America will burst too. We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. So we have house prices in bubble territory, car loans in bubble territory, Wall Street in bubble territory, VCs/startup scene in bubble territory. Enjoy the ride! But you don't want to be there for the bubble burst of the world reserve currency. I'm already on the other side of the pond.
- narag 12y ago
  We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. Wait to see space bubble. Space mining will need huge amounts of capital that will be invested in space ships and stations that for many years will give no positive returns. Still they'll be obviously valuable for the future, so we will have Internet-kind bubble thousands fold.
- tomp 12y ago
  > People don't like to think. Well, that's a mostly empty statement, as it's unfalsifiable - even people who think, and see this happening, what can they do? Is there any way to profit from the mispricing of assets, when everything is overvalued? Well, you could short stuff, but that's a huge risk (since the central banks have an incentive to keep the bubble from bursting, so they can ramp the asset prices even higher), and only available to those with existing capital, not the "people". Move to a non-USD based economy? All economies depend on the USD, and if USD crashes, the whole world goes down with it. What are the "people" supposed to do other than to weather the upcoming storm?
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    Hypothetical scenario: US Treasuries go south, the bubble bursts. The next day Chinese announce they start selling their Treasuries on the open market. So instead of keeping your money with the most indebted Government on the face of the planet, you keep it with the biggest creditor in the world. Doesn't sound as a bad deal, huh? And as an extra bonus just to make sure everyone drops US Treasuries ASAP to buy the Chinese paper: tie the currency to gold. Guarantee that yuan is as good as gold. Why not? Yuan reserve currency of the world, so the same mistakes can be made all over again ;-) This what Keynsians call in this case problem for Chinese I call a huge win. Keynsians will tell you: oh, but now Chinese exports will get prohibitively expensive! And I say: BS! The yuan currency will go up in value up to 6 times. Why to export anywhere when you just got 1 billion new consumers worth 6 times more than before?! Next step: rest of the world starts producing again, including US. China stops being factory of the world as we can't afford their stuff anymore. We need to relearn how to build and assemble it again. Voila, here you have balance back in the system.
    - itchyouch 12y ago
      Except, isn't China working hard to keep the valuation of their currency as low as they possibly can?
      - innguest 12y ago
        Only while they're still hoarding gold. Once they start noticing they've bought most of the gold they can get in the open market without causing prices to soar then they will change gears.
- bostonpete 12y ago
  Do they have "Doomsday Preppers" on the other side of the pond?
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    They do. In mainstream. Things like possibility of US defaulting on its debt or going towards hyper inflationary root are mainstream over here.
- gone35 12y ago
  Ok, this is interesting. From the article: "For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil's advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls 'considering the opposite.' To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions." So, can you do it? Can you think through what could be wrong with your own argument? And what possible lapses or biases could had led you to such (putatively) unwarranted certainty?
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    Yes, certainly. Many things can go differently. For one the US President, Obama, might go there on TV and tell: "My fellow Americans. Starting tomorrow we are raising taxes by 10-25%. We cut social security. We cut military. We cut across the board. Why? Because the Chinese demand their money!" Possible? Of course! Probable? Your call. Inflating the monetary base is actually doing the same, but without the need to raise taxes ex explicite. Everything gets more expensive year to year: tuition, insurance, services, etc. That's your hidden tax - inflation. We are paying off the Chinese by returning them money that's less valuable that the money we borrowed from them. Some things, like 600% debt to GDP ratio that currently the US has are just facts of life. Can I imagine reality without them? Sure! The media is full of them from CNBC to Bloomberg News. Why you insist on me providing you scenarios? Ask them if they can imagine bubble in Treasuries! They certainly couldn't see one in housing or the .com one even though they both were straight in their faces. They laughed off anyone talking about bubbles then. The same now they lough into faces of Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Kyle Bass, and others when they talk about bubble in the US Treasuries. In other words, you are asking wrong person to do the reality check. I'm the reality check to the mainstream camp blind to the obvious. 600% debt to gdp. Can FED raise the interest rates to stop all the bubbles in their tracks? Sure they can! They need to be cautious though. Because at interest rates at 7%, the US Government will be spending over 50% of the annual budget just to pay interest on the debt we have. Can we imagine the FED going to raise the rates to 20% as Volcker did in the early 1980s? Sure, but then well over 100% of the state income from taxes would need to be paid on the interest alone! This is how much we owe. Can I imagine reality where this is not true? Sure, but why would I ever do that? Why to imagine world where mistakes aren't happening when they are right in our faces? I'm not saying we don't have options. I'm just saying that taking into the account the dirty politics, we can't have the President have speech like that, can we? Another solution: war. In the state of war we don't repay. That's the rule ages old. So, yes there are plenty of scenarios: from bankruptcy, theory hyperinflation, ending on WW3. There is no positive outcome from debt to GDP ratio at 600%. Sorry. One could argue that we will just have "lost decades" as Japanese did. That the process will take forever and we will slowly decline and the rest of the world will follow suite. Might be that it will take 30 years. The thing is that looking at Russia, China, ISIS, I don't think they will just let us decline.
- innguest 12y ago
  Glad to see someone here that understands what is going on. Did you really move out of the US because of the coming crisis? I'm really curious about this. I understand there will be riots and it will be unstable for a while but how much chaos are you expecting?
  - vectorpush 12y ago
    The smug, self-certain, self-congratulatory attitude seems ironic in the context of the posted article.
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      Reading 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel at the moment. I think we have had too much of uncertainty in the West from economy thinking to social thinking to medicine. Peter claims in his book that no CEO looks beyond 3 months timeframe running their Company anymore. Why? Because market knows better anyway. Why to plan, when market will determine what the market is going to be? Uncertainty. Medical: we can't control genes right? They determine everything, so why to care, why to plan? Social: cultural marxism. Pessimistic culture -- everything is wrong because we are capitalist society. As long as it exists we can't be certain of anything. If you have debt to gdp ratio of 600%, what do you expect? Flourishing economy? Things will go down south. You are like a six year old pissed of that two and two is four every time. Some things are certain. Like 600% debt to gdp aren't pretty. Not positive. Not uncertain. Fucking shit. OK?
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    It might as well all end not too bad. It might be that the rest of the world will finish in much worse shape than the US. I keep my options open. Can live in the US, but also can live in EU. Would be nice to be able to stay in HK for a while too.
- tsunamifury 12y ago
  This sounds a lot like Chinese astroturfing. As you read his comments further down it becomes more apparent.
  - hindsightbias 12y ago
    Going to be lonely over there, all the rich Chinese are buying property in the US.
protonfish 12y ago
From the ground in 2008, it looked like the match was fuel prices. (Gasoline was around $4.50/gal in my recollection.) There were all these families barely squeaking by that could only tolerate a significant price hike in gas and electricity for so long until something had to give.

androidb 12y ago

I'm not confident!

atmosx 12y ago

"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare Act 5, Scene 1: [...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...] I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.

robert_tweed 12y ago
That certainly borrows from Socrates: "I know one thing: that I know nothing."
- atmosx 12y ago
  Oh, my favorite Greek philosopher! :-)
- gjm11 12y ago
  It's an idea that recurs throughout history. We've got Socrates and Shakespeare already mentioned in the thread, to which I'll add: W B Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Charles Darwin: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." the Tao Te Ching: "To know that you do not know is highest. To not know but think you know is flawed. ... The sages are without fault, because they recognize the fault as a fault". (Semi-interestingly, I can't find anything very close to this idea in the biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes -- the former sees certainty as something to aspire to, and the latter is just equally down on everyone, wise and foolish alike.)
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    Erich Fried wrote a poem called "Angst und Zweifel", it goes roughly like this: do not doubt the one who says he is afraid but be afraid of the one who says he knows no doubt

kevinwang 12y ago

I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees different questions and later edit in a different question that makes the original answer seem funny.

SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
> I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees different questions So, without evidence, you're confident of this?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
I don't know about that, what I am pretty sure of is that for every funny answer, they have at least ten other boring "That person doesn't even exist" or "I don't know" replies.
- mistermann 12y ago
  I agree. Canadians love watching "the dumb Americans" on shows like this but you could get the exact same results going out onto Canadian streets. Many Canadians see themselves as intellectually superior to Americans because of our greater knowledge of their country, 80%+ of which knowledge I expect is from watching TV and movies.

praptak 12y ago

Anecdotal evidence from a fun show, plus the mandatory reference to Dunning-Kruger. "Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people." http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k...

georgemcbay 12y ago
> plus the mandatory reference to Dunning-Kruger. Well, the article was written by David Dunning, the one the effect is half-named for, so it is almost literally mandatory that it is mentioned.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  This is a very literal LOL moment.

prof_hobart 12y ago

> some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts Is it possible that this is at least partly down to the phrase "some knowledge"? Knowing what parallax or lipids are might be seen as having some knowledge of the concept.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
d23 12y ago
Honestly, even knowing they were made up my brain's first instinct was "yeah, those sound familiar." If they were just asking about "some knowledge" I can see how people might say, "hmm, yeah, that sounds like something I've heard before."
- colomon 12y ago
  And even more so with people's names, at least for me. For every name I know solidly there are probably two that I vaguely sort of know. For instance, I probably know more about Irish traditional music than 99.9% of the American population. But if you came up with a real-sounding random name for an Irish musician and talked about him like he was real and of course I should know who he was, the odds that I would confuse that with someone I knew a bit about are substantial. Or (speaking of Irish music) remembering tunes. There are tunes I own, tunes I think I know, tunes that are familiar, and tunes I flat out don't know. In my experience, I have the most trouble playing are some of the tunes I think I know -- more even than playing the tunes that I would just describe as familiar! Most of those I thought I knew I could probably sort out later given time, but in the heat of the moment what comes out can be nonsense. I guess what I'm trying to say is, when I get in trouble is on the fuzzy boundary between knowing and not knowing. I don't mind saying "I don't know" when I know I don't know. But sometimes I don't know I don't know, and that's when the trouble starts.

lucio 12y ago

In the curved-tube image, clearly the ball will exit with a clockwise spinning, because it'll be rolling on the external wall of the tube (based on the "Newtonian principle" of inertia). I'll bet if you try it as a experiment (inside the atmosphere) the ball will follow "C"... Am I a confident idiot?

spain 12y ago
I was actually thinking the same, shame there wasn't an answer in the article.
- lucio 12y ago
  The "right" (too simplistic) answer in the article is "B". "One group knew the right Newtonian principle: that the ball would continue in the direction it was going the instant it left the tube—Path B. Freed of the tube’s constraint, it would just go straight."
  - Ono-Sendai 12y ago
    This is why science works well - it can tell us what the actual answer is, not just the one that is 'obviously right'.
bryanlarsen 12y ago
That's a standard fallacy I often run into: over estimating second order effects. Yes, unless the ball is perfectly smooth or in a vacuum you will get slight curvature. But it would be so slight that it would look like B.
- iconjack 12y ago
  Try it with a ping-pong ball (a natural choice). The curvature coming out of the tube will not be slight.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago

waterlesscloud 12y ago

"Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all." This means YOU, person who thinks you see through it all. You don't. This applies to you too.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
I know intellectually it must apply to me as well... But it's an interesting illusion. I think that philosophically the correct lesson here is that being (slightly?!?) aware of your own mind doesn't actually give you super powers... you can't change it. (Or, at least, you can't change it by shallow awareness... it would require true efforts.)

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. " Yes, and an informed mind is the same, only all the junk is "lined" up to agree with whatever the prevailing wisdom is. People don't operate on facts. They operate on feelings, flimsly allegories, metaphors, and half-baked truths. This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It allows us to walk into a room we've never visited before, use a chair, and order from a menu without having to spend time verifying a lot of details. The brain is emotional and always wildly guessing and generalizing about things, no matter who we are or what we do. People wonder why prejudice and stereotyping hasn't gone away in society. Well heck, it's never going away until you replace people with robots. I was attacked by a clown as a kid, I hate and fear clowns. You saw your mom shrink from a tall person, you are afraid of tall people. That's how the brain works, and it's how we're able to function. At best we learn to deliberately struggle with this. It's never going to go away -- at least while we're still human.

century19 12y ago

> "Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate." This is a fantastic line. I guess getting to the age where we can procreate is all that's needed by our genes !

gsz 12y ago

It sounds like it's best to be doubtful and unsure about my knowledge. So as long as I can make sure I'm unsure, I'm good. But can I be confident that I'm unsure? It's turtles all the way down.

dlss 12y ago

If anyone is curious about the Kimmel clip, it's on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww The article makes a lot more sense after watching it IMO.

Dylan16807 12y ago

>whether his appearance as a judge on America’s Got Talent would damage his legacy. “No,” said one woman to this last question. “It will make him even more popular.” Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie. (The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovable, as a plausible future event.) Disclaimer: only talking about the quote in the article, if there was more context it shouldn't have been cut

gwern 12y ago
'would' is ambiguous because the author is describing something in the past. For example, you would write 'would' regardless of whether the original question was "Ma'am, do you think Clinton's appearance yesterday on America's Got Talent will damage his legacy?" or if the question had actually been "Miss, do you think Clinton accepting his recent invitation to appear on AGT would damage his legacy?" But either way, the question is false...
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Still not bluffing, because they are only speculating on the self-contained scenario, not bringing in fake details.
  - gwern 12y ago
    It is still bluffing because the scenario is not being presented as a hypothetical.
    - Dylan16807 12y ago
      If you don't pretend you've heard of it before, it's an abstract scenario that might as well be hypothetical. You're answering based on the question and only the question.

adwf 12y ago

I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persists as a meme. The problem is that "death of the weakest" is a much better way of describing it - although possibly not so PC to teach in the classroom. The reason why people think Cheetahs evolved to be fast is because they equate it with the ethic of hard work, rather than the real reason - slow cheetahs don't eat and therefore die before breeding, fast cheetahs eat and get to breed. Without meaning to start yet another internet debate/flamewar about evolution, I often wonder whether the strong protestant work ethic in the US is also the reason why evolution is so poorly understood there. Because "death to the weakest" involves no agency, no self-improvement or hard work. EDIT: Just to avoid to confusion (as there seems to be some!), I'm not talking about the mechanism of evolution, purely the actual phrase "survival" and what it means to people when it's mentioned, the implication of agency that goes along with the word.

lucio 12y ago
It is not just a spin? "survival of the fittest" is exactly the same as "death to the weakest". "survival of the fittest" = "not survival of the not-fit" And also "fit" it is not the same as "strong"
- adwf 12y ago
  Yes it is spin, but not just spin. "Survive" often implies some sort of agency, that there is some sort of struggle that was overcome and the organism is still alive. We teach survival skills. Whereas if you drop some antibiotics on a bacteria culture, there is no struggle, the bacteria that aren't already resistant just die. That's why I think the inverted phrasing is clearer in meaning (although yes I meant "weakest fit / not fit").
  - lucio 12y ago
    There isnt a struggle?. Do the non-resistant bacteria "try" to survive and fail, then die? or it "just die"? The inverted phrase will be a PR disaster for Darwin ;)

qwerta 12y ago

"idiot" is well defined medical term, author probably meant "ignorant".

teekert 12y ago

In holland, a DJ called Giel Beelen has/had a part of his show called "Gaat ie mee of zegt ie nee.": "Will he join or will he say no." He asked a national politician about terrorist Jael Jablabla (http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam-stopt-vanwege-3fmradiospelletje.html http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam-stopt-...), about a non-existing band and about the coma of Sharon... The politician bluffed his way through, claiming he knew more about Jablabla than the DJ... and ended his career shortly afterwards.

petercooper 12y ago
We had a similar thing in the UK with a famous satirist called Chris Morris who convinced a wide array of celebrities, including politicians, to say all sorts of idiotic things in a series of spoof documentaries about things like drugs and, most controversially, pedophilia. For example, he got one of the UK's most famous DJs to say that pedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than other human beings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng .. in this case, the facts were fed to the celebs rather than them making them up though.

deleted 12y ago

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Shivetya 12y ago

I wonder where those of us who tend to self depreciating humor, who also in turn confess to not knowing much while being told we get things done, fall. I know some of what I am totally clueless about but revel in being told when I am factually wrong in something I thought otherwise. However there are areas where I just refuse to understand and worse I think I know what some of those are and still won't correct it.

piker 12y ago

TL;DR go with your gut--it's probably correct.

mathgenius 12y ago

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!

Bargs 12y ago
Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the article: "The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Not to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks. This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/ * with apologies to Pendleton Ward.

blinkingled 12y ago

One extreme is confident idiot. The other is the ever doubting fool. I keep thinking there is a happier middle ground - I know some things and I can't know some others. I will do my best with what I know. From personal experience #1 obviously leads to certain failures (unfortunate one if you are even a little wise and honest - you saw this coming and still decided to be a cocky idiot). #2 you lose out on motivation, don't get the credit you deserve and get more stressed than necessary. The happier middle ground works for me - actually look at everything, find out what you know, what you need to know and equally importantly what you are just not going to know. Then work a plan on the strengths of what you know. That's work though - heh! The extremes are just easier to acquire :)

tokenadult 12y ago

This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand their rights—and in areas like employment law, to wildly overestimate them. In 1997, Kim presented roughly 300 residents of Buffalo, New York, with a series of morally abhorrent workplace scenarios—for example, an employee is fired for reporting that a co-worker has been stealing from the company—that were nonetheless legal under the state’s 'at-will' employment regime. Eighty to 90 percent of the Buffalonians incorrectly identified each of these distasteful scenarios as illegal, revealing how little they understood about how much freedom employers actually enjoy to fire employees." I have seen this misconception here on Hacker News many times. (To be sure, here on Hacker News we have participants from many countries, not all of which have the same laws about employment, but I have seen plenty of Americans proclaim "facts" about rights of employees here in the United States that simply are not facts.) Basically, in our thoughtful discussions here, we all have to take care to check our facts. That's why I'm especially glad to upvote comments that ask earlier commenters to explain where they got their information, or to suggest further reading on a topic. I'll link a book here about employment law (mostly related to hiring procedures) as an example of the information I like to see in comments. I need to check my understanding of all issues, all the time, according to the article kindly submitted here, and I appreciate it when other HN participants help me find more information. http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment-Background/dp/1889150592/ http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment-Backgrou...

brazzy 12y ago
Not at all limited to law - accepting facts/stories/statements that fit one's worldview or even just seem interesting or important, and passing them on without ever checking or even doubting their correctness is a mistake that I see very frequently (and occasionally in myself despite conscious efforts to avoid it).
- sakri 12y ago

vinceguidry 12y ago

The article makes a few generalizations about evolution that don't really hold up. The idea that evolution does not have agency needs to be re-examined in the light of the fact that animals themselves have far more agency than we realized. To use the author's example, cheetahs may well have all decided as a group to run faster, in the sort of 'social learning' way that we're just now starting to really get a grip on. I mean, adaptations don't just happen, beings have to use their abilities, and then the cells will respond by getting thicker, stronger, more responsive. Think about lifting weights. If agency isn't responsible for evolutionary advantages, then what is? Random differences? Really? Evolution is way more complex than we realize. Every year, we come across crazy things that happen in our own bodies that just totally blow our minds. Right now I think our broader understanding of how evolution works is hampered by the fact that we just don't know yet how genomes hold on to experiences and then pass them along to our offspring. So we assume that every life form is a blank slate, limited to just the same genetic code all their fellow life forms share. But just because we share the same template in one, specific way doesn't mean there can't be a ton of ways that fertilized zygotes can be different from each other too. And that those differences could result from the things our parents did in their lives.

obitoo 12y ago
"...we don't know how genomes hold on to experiences and then pass them along to our offspring. " Err they don't. That's Lamarckism theory, and I wasn't aware there was even a shred of evidence towards it. Sometimes when you don't know how something happens, its because it isn't actually happening
- Someone1234 12y ago
  > Err they don't. That's Lamarckism theory, and I wasn't aware there was even a shred of evidence towards it. There is quite a bit from the last few years. Gene expression in particular is a field we continue to learn a lot about [0] and several studies have suggested Lamarckism might have some merit [1]. Saying there isn't a "shred of evidence" is just scientifically untrue. There is some legitimate evidence that limited information could be passed from mother to child prenatally. Your post is the classic Dunning–Kruger effect. Few in evolutionary biology would be as "sure" as you are, and you get less and less sure the more you learn. [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43787/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43787/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Epigenetic_inheritance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Epigenetic_inherita...

Bahamut 12y ago

This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing. Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes things more likely to happen your way, and people also like confidence more than uncertainty. For the Marine Corps, such a bad adage is useful since uncertainty is bad, and it often is better to choose an action, even if sub-optimal, than do nothing at all.

drblast 12y ago
Projecting confidence is an invaluable skill to have when you're trying to get people to charge up a heavily defended hill or take a building by force. Anything else, not so much. I've witnessed many Marines try and fail to do something complex with ultimate confidence that brute force would solve the problem. The dedication is admirable but the range of situations in which it's sufficient for success is small. In many non-military cases, doing nothing is a completely viable option that should always be considered. I'd venture to say that the most successful person is good at recognizing what deserves a Marine-level amount of effort and what can slide.
sliverstorm 12y ago
I imagine confidence & morale can, in their line of work, tip the scales and make something impossible, eminently possible. The small troupe of British soldiers who recently repelled a militant attack with only bayonets comes to mind. Outnumbered, outgunned, the subject of an ambush, it seems to me that a combination of resolve and confidence was the deciding factor.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  Morale is incredibly important in any type of effort. Think about how productive you are working on something that excites you vs grinding for dollars.
Florin_Andrei 12y ago

wglb 12y ago

Very well written article. Very amusing commentary threads. But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.) There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous who said that he would keep a list of his mistakes in his wallet and refer to it from time to time. A boss of mine who was adventurous about experimenting with new technology said "I don't know very much about it, but I do know 50 ways that wont't work". This has led me to asking someone who claims to be an expert "Tell me three (or five) things that won't work" in their field of expertise. The advice from the article For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect seems spot on.

jameshart 12y ago
A coaching tip I always give to developers: you don't know enough about a topic if you can only think of one way to solve a problem. If you only know one way to do it, how do you know it's not the worst one? Take the time to sit back and enumerate a few ways of solving the problem and figure out which one's best in this situation. Why are you rejecting those other solutions? Are you sure those reasons are sound? Are you sure they don't apply equally to the solution you've selected?

leeber 12y ago

I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know. Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about. For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these types around. When a conversation comes up and the knowledge of the people involved is put to the test. Maybe your boss is asking who knows how to perform a certain task, or who has experience with certain hardware or software, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking what is the best TV they should buy, etc. There's the people who claim to know about topics XYZ when they really don't, and you, naturally, admit that you don't know. But you might still be the most knowledgeable person about the general topic, and best candidate to offer advice or take on said task. Doesn't matter, you get labeled as the uninformed person while the "idiot" who claims to know everything about XYZ appears to be knowledgable expert. And worst case scenario is when your boss, co-workers, friends, etc. are dumb enough not to catch it.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know. I don't think that's true in practice. For proof, just watch any academic debate, ever.
- StandardFuture 12y ago
  The parent comment is stating a premise as a conclusion. Not having trouble admitting when you don't know something or understand something very well is actually a third attribute (commonly called humility), not the result of the first two. If more people focused on having it as an attribute then the scenario that the parent comment mentioned (and similar scenarios -- such as disappointing YouTube comments?) would be much rarer in occurrence. In fact, failing to have the third attribute affects the other two. Your confidence will quickly become overconfidence or pure hubris when faced with something you don't know much about. Also, in relationship to the second attribute, it is hard to convince yourself that you are not actually knowledgeable of something if you are not humble enough to consider that possibility.

shimfish 12y ago

I often reply "I don't know" when asked about things I don't know. It's invariably met with an explicit or implicit questioning of my worth. I can see why people learn never to admit ignorance.

ScottBurson 12y ago

"Master, what is knowledge?" "When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it -- this is knowledge." I don't remember where I read that, but I like it.

deleted 12y ago
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ppereira 12y ago
Analects of Confucius, Book II, Chapter XVII. https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/164/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/1...

nwatson 12y ago

I'm probably too late with this comment ... but if the diameter of the tube is significantly larger than the diameter of the ball, and the initial velocity of the ball is large enough, then the trajectory of the ball as it leaves the "curved tube" won't necessarily correlate well with the straightforward textbook answer you'd expect to see. Perhaps the original context for the question made this a bit more clear, but as presented in the article, the "real world" might intervene.

cowardlydragon 12y ago

The REAL problem is that confident incompetence in males is attractive to females.

jacobn 12y ago

And this is why software schedules are always off. Any schedule for that matter. If you're into this type of psychology, check out "Thinking Fast and Slow" by D. Kahnemann. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...

reddytowns 12y ago

I would have liked this article more if they had left out the word "All" in the title

unknownBits 12y ago

I don't really mind people not realizing they are idiots, if they could at least stop trying to be in power and stop ruling over others. Most of our leaders/rulers are complete idiots without realizing it, that's the worse problem on this planet; if you try to convince them of their ignorance, they react with power, insolvable..