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Comment by smgit | Hacker News Reader

Go one step further. Why does that happen?

People on HN skew young, smart (in one domain), and tend to live in a bubble of similar people. If you know you're smart, the smart people you talk to validate your smartness (in one domain), society validates it some more by paying you massive amounts, and you're not experienced enough to know better, you're bound to overestimate your abilities and knowledge.

It needn't be most, or even many on HN, and people of all kinds vastly overestimate their abilities. It's just that on HN it's overestimating with great ambition.

(I say this very confidently, don't I?)

So funny to jump to the "they're just kids" explanation for this when we are literally talking on a forum hosted by a VC incubator.

Is it not Occam's razor that people are like this because this world of startups, "cutting edge tech", "move fast and break things", etc. gives quite clear incentives to be like this? The entire of financial world of tech is quite significantly propped up by the inertia of unearned confidence!

> If you know you're smart, the smart people you talk to validate your smartness (in one domain), society validates it some more by paying you massive amounts, and you're not experienced enough to know better, you're bound to overestimate your abilities and knowledge.

And then you become the richest man in the world and buy Twitter and show everyone that you're kind of just clueless outside of your area of expertise, but putting up with you is profitable enough that people just go with it.

Also, lets not discount the fact that people can have a lot of success stepping out of their core domain.

People can do this repeatedly with positive feedback and increasing scope until eventually it doesn't work.

You sound like an expert in psychology.

Eh, I'm nothing of the sort, I'm only advancing in years and have made it a point to exist in as many segments of society as I could. I was that cocky engineer once, my words are only anecdote from first-hand experience and observation. I never expect to be right, only hopefully more right than wrong.

How would discourse change to eliminate this problem? Should we only speak about topics we are employed in? Lead each comment with a summary of our qualifications, or a proclamation of humility where we signal how little we know?

I know you jest, but I think it wouldn't be a bad idea at all. There are languages whose grammar forces the speaker to explicitly clarify the source of information; Eastern Pomo, for example, has different verb forms for whether it's something you know first hand, saw, are repeating, or deducing. I imagine it's not only useful for the listener, it also helps the speaker realise if maybe they are building a shaky argument to make a point. I, for one, would be interested to see that system in English, it could lead to interesting developments.

I mean, hypothetically MS or Meta could already automatically do this...

See, you put the caveat at the bottom, but I think you are just having a normal discussion. You aren't speaking "very confidently," you are just making an argument.

What I think happens is people who are very knowledgeable about a subject are hyper-sensitive to slightly incorrect information. And to boost their egos they like to diminish the people making the incorrect statements as not just incorrect, but confidently incorrect, a la Dunning Kruger.

See how confidently I made the exaggerative statement above? I don't necessarily mean it to be completely true, but I am making an argument. I think an assessment of confidence requires more than seeing no mollifying qualifiers like "I think" or "it might be". There's no verbal tone on the web.

It was a little meta-joke, but I think the world could use a lot more expressions of doubt. Very few things are certain or universally true, and those that do tend to have Greek letters in them. I find highly confident people highly suspicious, and a culture that rewards overconfidence and punishes doubt both exhausting and dangerous.

Probably because people on the internet like to hear opinions on things like psychological and sociological factors from people who have simply stated an expertise in semiconductors...

Institutionalization of engineers and physicists thinking they are smarter than others.

overconfidence leads to participation which results in measurable statements and artefacts, under confidence does not. people are loud and (mostly) incorrect or silent.

But why would those "measurable statements and artefacts" lead one to believe they are competent? Presumably, wouldn't they also provide evidence of one's ignorance if they were evaluated objectively?

(If it wasn't clear, I'm poking at the idea that we have numerous biases that prevent objective evaluation)

My (unpopular) take--programmers have been 'gassed up' by a decade of overcompensation + title inflation.

People think the high pay and the fancy titles* they're (often) given reflects their value or intellect*, even subconsciously, and they behave in such a manner.

*Sorry, I don't consider web programming (which comprises a majority of modern software development) "engineering"

*Many are some of the most intelligent people quite literally on Earth, or are otherwise exceptional.

heh yeah i think we're coming up now on two generations of our brightest minds being spent on making us more isolated from each other and clicking on ads.

Ivy Leaguers are trained, often from birth, that they are better than the rest of us plebs because of their “merit” and represent a superhuman caste. This guy was most likely the same way.

If you’re told that you’re a superhuman, then why not think you can get away with it?

Oh, it's not just Ivy League although of course that usually comes with a background of privilege and prestige that further compounds on this tendency. STEM people in general heavily demonstrate this tendency. MBA types too, although they tend to think the solution always comes down to treating everything as a business or privatization.

This is a good overview of some of your biases, but I don't think it generalises to reality.

You're aware that zingy one-liners only make for good conversation on the screen, not real life, right?

> MBA types too, although they tend to think the solution always comes down to

treating everything as a market or something to be solved with a market mechanism

Intelligent people are not any less likely to be delusional than anyone. They are however, much better at convincing themselves and others of their delusions.

People that have logic training such as lawyers and engineers even more so.

Michael Shermer's book Why Smart People Believe Weird Things.

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