this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I wish I could have half the confidence these people have talking about the things I actually know about.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How do we know that we can trust this author though? 🤔

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I guess you have to read it to find out...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Are they experts? I probably shouldn't trust them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Confidence and Knowledge are anti-correlated... so please, be proud of the extent of your ignorance:-).

[–] force 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

this isn't necessarily true. people who have more knowledge or reasoning generally have higher confidence in their abilities than those with less, although people with less knowledge tend to have a higher disparity between their confidence and their actual performance. people with more knowledge still think they know more than the people with less knowledge, even though despite the higher confidence they still underestimated themselves.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Useful corollary: smart people tend to overestimate others’ intelligence, sometimes drastically.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

To be more clear, I was incompletely referencing only the left side of this curve:

since it seemed closer to what the person I was responding to was speaking about. Ofc you are correct that the right side of the curve also exists, though the amount of effort to reach it seems extremely out of proportion to the level of confidence gained - i.e. it is far easier to just be dumb and think that (or rather, act as if) you know everything, than to make yourself smart and actually know everything, about a particular topic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Same with covid.