Accuracy Versus Winning

Normatively, seeking disconfirmation and not finding it should make you more certain. And if you do become less certain, I'm not convinced this necessarily makes you less determined – why couldn't it heighten your curiosity, or (especially if you have something to protect) make you more determined to try harder and return, with justification, to the same certainty?

I'm beginning to suspect that providing theoretical justifications for inherently irrational humans is a waste of time. All I can say is that my empirical evidence still holds, and I observe this in myself. Believing that I'm going to fail demoralizes me. It doesn't energize me. I'd love to have my emotions wired the way you describe.

Or, how about the student who believes they may have the answer, and has a burning itch to know whether this is the case? Or the one with something to protect?

The point is that the student benefits from believing something regardless of its truth value. The greater the extent to which they believe their idea is valid, the more thinking about math they'll do.

While I'm not very familiar with these literatures, I suspect encouraged overconfidence is often just a motivational hack, in which case you should again look for a Third Alternative: can you find the willpower to do this, while having properly calibrated belief in its success? Alternately, it might hack around people not realizing (even deliberatively) the potential payoff of success and/or the upside of failure; but then you should determine and appreciate these things.

I'd love to hear your Third Alternative.

Also, y'know, there could be some issues on which many people really are underconfident.

It seems to happen occasionally.

Where do you find in that link the suggestion that rationalists should be less confident?

"Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want."

"Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can."

One who sees that people generally overestimate themselves, and responds by downgrading their own self-confidence, imitates the outward form of the art without the substance.

Not necessarily. If there is no known way to correct for a bias, it makes sense to do the sort of gross correction I described. For example, if I know that I and my coworker underestimate how long my projects take but I'm not aware of any technique I can use to improve my estimates, I could start by asking my co-worker to do all the estimates and then multiply that estimate by two when telling my boss.

Is there are known way of correcting for human overconfidence? If not, I think the sort of gross correction I describe makes sense from an epistemically rational point of view.

Someone who "feels" it is their "duty" to do something is someone who already does not want to do it, so by definition the second has motivation and the first does not. But these are imaginary people and this is fictional evidence. A real answer to the rhetorical question might be found by surveying mathematics students, comparing those who stay the course and those who drop out. I do not know what such a survey would find.

Do you deny that believing you had the answer to a mathematical problem and only lacked a proof would be a powerful motivator to think about mathematics? I was once in this situation, and it certainly motivated me.

Someone who "feels" it is their "duty" to do something is someone who already does not want to do it, so by definition the second has motivation and the first does not.

The way I used "duty" has nothing to do with disliking a thing. To me, "duty" describes something that you feel you ought to do. It's just an inconvenient fact about human psychology that telling yourself that something's best makes it hard to do it. Being epistemically rational (figuring out what the best thing to do is, then compelling yourself to do it) often seems not to work for humans.

I should eat them for free, since I already pay money to eat pigs.

Assuming I don't have to kill and clean them myself, and that I am not emotionally attached to any of the animals in question:

If the value is not cumulative, the answer is likely zero, because of the social penalties of being known to eat animals categorized as "pets", "cute", and "babies". More than that, contingent on the ability to do so without public knowledge of such and depending on age; likely at most 200 or so, which assumes young animals and that I eat only the muscles and little else until finished (id est, the point at which the utility of a varied diet exceeds that of a point of IQ.)

If the value is cumulative with an expected gain of around one point a year, roughly an average of around two pounds of food per day, however many individual animals that works out to be, id est, the point at which the utility of not gaining excess weight exceeds that of gaining IQ, a value which may vary with time.

I suspect this comment will go a long way toward convincing others of the accuracy of the first word of my user name...

Given that 1 point of IQ is 1/15th of a standard deviation, a "point" of IQ isn't necessarily a consistent metric for cognitive function - depending on the shape of the actual population curve used to take the test, the actual performance delta between 125 and 130 may be VASTLY divergent from the performance delta between 145 and 150.

I think we need a different shorthand word for "quantified boost in cognitive performance" than "points of IQ". Does anyone have any ideas?

Lots. This contradicts my revealed preference though I suppose, because I have a vague idea that fish oil increases intelligence but I haven't made a special effort to eat any.

I'm trying to anticipate how you'll follow up on this in a way that's relevant to my post and coming up blank.

Assuming I somehow found a way to counteract taste-related problems, more then 10. Why value the life of a kitten?

EDIT: And given my social situation as autistic, I could get around the resulting problems without too much in the way of trouble.

How many kittens would you eat to gain 1 point of IQ?

Has this comment really gone entirely without explanation and still been upvoted multiple times? How is this remotely relevant to the post?

I'd guess 1 point of IQ is somewhere around equivalent to the cognitive boost I'd get by sleeping half an hour longer every day, and it'd take quite a few hours for me to earn enough money to buy a single kitten, so... no more than a couple per month, I'd guess. (And that's not even counting slaughtering and cooking the kittens or paying someone to do that.)

;-)

My recollection is that at least one study showed some regression to the mean in confidence -- highly-skilled people tended to underestimate themselves.

To the best of my knowledge, this sort of effect is mostly not an effect of underestimation, but rather of either misestimating the skills of others, and/or of restricting the group against which one evaluates oneself.

Generally, it seems, if one has no knowledge of others' skills in an area, an estimation of one's own skill level is likely wildly inaccurate; if one's knowledge of others' skills is biased in favor of a non-random group, one's own skill is likely closer to the mean of that group than expected.

That is to say, if you're better at X than your friends are, you're probably not as good as you think; if you're jealous of your friends' skill at X you're probably better than you think. On the other hand, if you measure your success against the best and brightest in a field, you're probably wildly underestimating yourself; but if you're proud of being good at something and compare yourself to random people you meet you're probably substantially overestimating yourself.

People posting on LW are strongly self-selected in favor of rationality, so anyone reading this is probably closer to average within this community than they think they are!

Anyone trying to increase their rationality is probably in the upper 10% already.

Upper 10% of what? They might be in the upper 10% of truthseeking, but not the upper 10% of any number of other fields--which confidence could prove useful in.

That the human brain is wired in such a way that self-deception gives us an advantage in some situations may tip the balance a little bit, but it doesn't change the fact that luck only favors us a small fraction of the time, by definition.

On the contrary: "luck" is a function of confidence in two ways. First, people volunteer more information and assistance to those who are confident about a goal. And second, the confident are more likely to notice useful events and information relative to their goals.

Those two things are why people think the "law of attraction" has some sort of mystical power. It just means they're confident and looking for their luck.

As the post hinted, self-deception can give you confidence which is useful in almost all real life situations, from soldier to socialite. Far from "tipping the balance a little bit", a confidence upgrade is likely to improve your life much more than any amount of rationality training (in the current state of our Art).

OK, I see you don't believe me that you should sometimes accept and sometimes reject epistemic rationality for a price. So here's a simple mathematical model:

Let's say agent A accepts the offer of increased epistemic rationality for a price, and agent N has not accepted it. P is the probability A will decide differently than N. F(A or N) is the expected value of N's original course of action as a function of the agent who takes it, while S(A) is the expected value of the course of action that A might switch to. If there is a cost C associated with becoming agent A, then agent N should become agent A if and only if

(1 - P) F(A) + P S(A) - C >= F(N)

The left side of the equation is not bigger than the right side "by definition"; it depends on the circumstance. Eliezer's dessert-ordering example is a situation where the above inequality does not hold.

If you complain that agent N can't possibly know all the variables in the equation, then I agree with you. He will be estimating them somewhat poorly. However, that complaint in no way supports the view that the left side is in fact bigger. Someone once said that "Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all." Just like the difficulty of measuring utility is not a valid objection to utilitarianism, the difficulty of guessing what a better-informed self would do is not a valid objection to using this equation.

that luck only favors us a small fraction of the time, by definition.

That's a funny definition of "luck" you're using.