Calibrate your self-assessments

Through painful trial and error, I've found that my hunch that a woman likes me is almost always wrong. Someone will be flirting very heavily with me, and I'll think "there is no way in the world she's not into me", and then it will turn out she will not be into me.

It may also be that you are recognizing the indications of interest correctly, but then screwing things up with your follow-up behavior. Usually, female attraction in the initial phases is easy to destroy with even a single serious misstep. (And it may be serious even if it seems insignificant or altogether non-obvious to you.)

I've noticed that I have a particular form of calibration problem, for which I don't know if there is a specific term. Tentatively, I'm calling it "pernicious sliding selective self-assessment."

What I mean by this is that all of my achievements become diminished in my own eyes, because my frame of reference for comparison gradually excludes people who haven't reached at least an equal level of achievement:

-- When I started working out, I gradually came to ignore the 80% (or whatever it is) of the population that is sedentary and could only compare myself to the people I see at the gym, a disproportionate number of whom make me look weak by comparison.

-- Similarly, when I took up a martial art, I ended up comparing myself not to the population as a whole, but to the more advanced practitioners, thus feeling incompetent.

-- I have a lot of academic accomplishments, including a degree summa cum laude from a competitive university and a Fulbright fellowship. Yet I suffer horribly from imposter syndrome, in part because my frame of reference for comparison gradually weans out anyone who isn't also academically accomplished.

Unfortunately, the fact that I am aware this is happening doesn't seem to help overcome it.

I tend to think that if I talk about something I'm interested in, other people will be interested in it too. No matter how fascinating the underlying concept to me, nor how well I think I'm explaining it, this almost never happens.

Heh, I hear you on this one.

My initial response was to try to "fit in better" by simply avoiding those topics and sticking to smalltalk. Worked really well for the purpose, but also made me feel stupid - and worse, it drastically reduced the number of interesting people I got to know. Essentially, while most people found the stuff I care about horribly boring, occasionally I would run into someone to have a worthwhile chat with; but if you eliminate all the possibilities for such chats, they never happen.

So I resorted to introductory stories: interesting anecdotes and personal tales that have something to do with the subjects I'm interested in, even if they are tangential to the main area. If you draw people into the subject first, they are much more likely to allow you to expound on the boring bits as well.

For example, a side interest of mine are factors that change people's motivation patterns. Essentially impossible to talk about directly. But I can introduce the subject in two steps. First I start smalltalk about the financial crisis and the motivations of bankers responsible for it. Then I segue into short descriptions of some of Dan Ariely's experiments (where he showed that amount of theft increases proportionally with the number of steps a person is removed from actual, physical money), which can be described in a way that most people find very intriguing. THEN you can go into more technical details, and have a spellbound audience.

All of the above is probably a very obvious approach, but was quite a revelation to me. We all have our little blind spots...

On the subject of body dysmorphic disorder (WARNING: Some gooey personal details ahead, and notes on how I more-or-less fixed mine):

I am male, and have been told that I have it (and by my psychiatrist, even!). To me, therefore, this is a particularly good example of the discrepancy between automatic self-evaluation and abstract self-evaluation; I could abstractly note that people seemed to find me attractive, and that I was in many ways on the right side of the physical appearance bell curve, but looking in the mirror inspired nothing but revulsion.

So, of course, this became the first subject at which I attempted mindhacking. I started with the typical self-help-book advice: Look in the mirror every morning, and tell yourself you're attractive. This was, somewhat surprisingly to me, partway successful - but only partway. The result was that my subjective evaluation eventually transformed to "I could be so good-looking, if it weren't for X, Y, and Z!" (although really the list I made had a lot more than 3 items). The primary feature to which the fixation reduced at this stage was my nose - rather than go into the specifics, allow me simply to say that I disliked it very much. So, I thought, this halfway worked - why not meet it from the other direction? I'll get a nose job.

So I got a nose job. And I didn't tell anyone I was getting one, figuring I could see if there was a change in their reactions (Results: some people figured it out, some did not. Of those who did not, the most common comment was "Did you get your teeth whitened?".) The change to my subjective self-evaluations, after a settling-in phase, was quite the opposite of the usual "plastic surgery will never make you happy/satisfied" advice we hear - my perception of my own attractiveness rose substantially. The other items on the list did not go away, but with the primary one gone, I self-evaluated much more positively.

So, I thought, I'll give the self-help method some more time. I started playing with lighting around and above my bathroom mirror, which made for an interesting effect - using more flattering lighting improved my self-evaluation and feelings of attractiveness for that day, even though I abstractly know it doesn't make a difference outside, but having the ability to switch lightings around in general also helped me grok that one's toothsomeness is not a fixed value; it very much changes based on the situation.

Grokking that particular fact produced another increase in my self-evaluation of my appearance, albeit a smaller one, and also put me on another track - what other circumstantial things that I've been neglecting could help? This post grows long, but basically: I fixed my posture and started dressing nicer (where "nicer" simply meant anything that I self-evaluated positively when looking in the mirror) and tried various new things with my hair (which had been very long and shaggy). Both helped notably. I also opted to try more elective procedures - first Lasik (which went swimmingly - worthwhile even if you don't think your glasses make you look ugly; having 20/15 vision is AWESOME) then electrolysis. Both of these also seemed successful, although nothing produced the dramatic change in my self-evaluation that rhinoplasty did.

In sum, it does seem to be possible, at least in my case (and n=1 so p >>>.05, obviously) to remove physical attractiveness as a major daily concern for someone with BDD. I still think about my appearance, and sometimes contemplate things to change/improve, but no longer have angst or pervasive worries about it. Since my self-evaluation is no longer so overpoweringly negative, I seem to be able to just take people at their word (or body language) about my appearance these days. This is not quite the same as perfecting my ability to self-evaluate, but I've manually pushed and prodded my self-evaluation close enough to the outside consensus that outside evaluations are now responsible for much of the daily/weekly/monthly variation.

Since I first read about calibration on LessWrong, I've been trying this with tests and debate tournaments.

With a sample size of about 50: 95% of my estimated test grades are within 3% of my actual test grades.

On debate, however, if I am 60% confident I won a round, I won it 90% of the time; if I am 80% confident I won, I win 100% of the time. Other people seem to be much better than me at assessing the probability I won a debate round (if they observed it).

It seems that I am really good at some forms of estimating, and really bad in other situations, which means that overall switching from Inside View to Outside View wouldn't necessarily be an improvement, but that in certain situations it would help me enormously. Has anyone else encountered this?

I walked out of my first examination almost certain I had failed. I got my results back, and learned I had passed with honors. This situation repeated itself with depressing regularity over the next few semesters.

Back during my schooldays I was often certain that I had failed a test, just like many other people in my class. It turned out that most of the time the others didn't fail the test while I did. I concluded that they are for some reason just bullshitting about their self-assessments, it didn't occur to me that they just repeatedly failed to accurately predict their own success.

You know, not sensing people's emotions from their faces is seeming less like a handicap and more like I am immune to illusions every time I hear about the biases most people have. Then I realize I don't expect people to be feeling something unless they tell me anyways, and that's potentially just as inaccurate. Then I realize I might not be compensating exactly enough, and worry recursively.

If you hate yourself and think you're worthless, take a moment to consider whether you have any evidence that you're objectively doing any worse than anyone else

Okay, suppose I'm objectively doing worse than everyone else, is that a reason to hate myself? I don't think so.

These people get locked away because their self-esteem is at an extreme no sane human would ever reach

I work in a psychiatric hospital, and I don't think self-esteem has much to do with it. You only actually get locked away if a doctor can convince a judge you're going to get yourself or someone else physically hurt (To be fair, this was different in Nietzsche's day.)

I'd say the vast majority of people with poor reality testing, including inaccurate self-assessments, are living in the community rather than in locked wards. Which does reinforce your message: it could be any of us.

I've always had this problem when asked to self assess on personality traits. E.g. 'Are you extroverted?' Compared to what baseline? My friends? Some hypothetical average person?

I'm not sure how much this relates to the question of calibrating self-assessments in particular, but when I was at Yahoo, a few of us made this game -- http://yootles.com/calibration/guessum -- with the objective of being a fun way to train yourself to be better calibrated, at least for mundane estimation tasks. It was based on this article: http://messymatters.com/calibration (and especially the follow-on post with the results, and the speculation that people could learn to be better calibrated, hence the game).

we all know people who insist that they are ugly and stupid and unlikeable even though they don't seem any worse off than anyone else. 

I don't [? · GW] know these people [? · GW].

And research agrees: studies show that people are uniquely bad at rating their own physical attractiveness.

Well, that's a relief, that I'm not unusual in being unable to evaluate my own physical attractiveness. (Or am I unusual in being aware that I don't know how good or bad looking I am?)

Great to hear that your exams went well after all! Well done.

I never had any anxiety about exams. You just need to realize they have some implicit curve and cannot fail too many people, so if you're better than median, you simply have to pass, and if you're better than 80th/90th percentile you'll pass with very good result. It's very easy to observe your skills relative to others in your group.

But then I outside view naturally when vast majority of people seem to inside view naturally.

When I moved to Ireland, I knew that their school system, and in particular their examinations, would be different from the ones I was used to.

What were the main differences? I am guessing the school system you moved from was the US? As I only know parts of the UK system, I feel like I'm missing possibly important information.

re: flirting, your underlying system cares for maximizing max. expected pay-off, it doesn't care for maximizing accuracy. Biologically, you get giant utilons loss for missing a mating opportunity (Think about it! For your underlying system, that's a huge fraction of worth of your life! It's the utility loss comparable to being forced to play Russian roulette with live bullets, several times in the row!), and microscopic utilon loss for being rejected. Your underlying system, though, doesn't trust your cognition with the correct mating odds - if it tells your cognition correct odds, you end up not trying, and not reproducing.

University exams are a lot easier to pass in Ireland than in Italy (the only two countries I'm familiar with), but the consequences of failing an exam are way worse in Ireland than in Italy.

how everyone thinks they're an above average driver

I think I'm a terrible driver, and I gave up driving when I realized there was a good chance I might hurt someone.

broken link on "usually correlate"?

very interesting. glad i read it. can really relate to the exam example (same thing happens to me). One comment, though, i wish you would not call women "girls" (as in "pretty girls") if you are talking about adult behavior, they are women, not girls.