Competence/Confidence

I actually engaged with this exercise, though perhaps not as fully as I could have.

The graph format was at first an amusing treat, then exhausting as I realized I was going to have to keep decoding graphs without a break (I'm not good at decoding graphs), and then I either got used to it or perhaps, um, a little bit gave up on it and started going too quickly and being somewhat dismissive. Probably a bit of both.

I picked "only suffering once", as opposed to also suffering from my expectation to suffer again in the future. ("I'm sad now, and what's even worse is that since I have been sad before, this will probably happen to me again, oh no!")

I spent most of the post feeling perplexed about why anyone would ever want to focus on "confidence", even though I simultaneously expected I'd be able to reasonably answer that question if I tried. I seem to have some kind of epistemic immune response going on that encounters a thought like, "Maybe I should increase my confidence independently of my best guess about my competence," and responds by shouting "WHAT NO ARE YOU CRAZY STOP".  As I considered your "improv" example, I found myself working pretty hard to fabricate the details of the story where as your competence increases, you lean more into the things you would be getting by focusing exclusively on confidence if you, like, didn't care about believing true things.

For my own example with "suffering only once", my responses to the graphs kept being "confidence increases with competence, confidence increases with competence, of course I want confidence and competence to be locked together".

I could not figure out what graph with the fuzzy green bar means.

I did at least notice that I don't think it matters very much if I fail to recognize my competence in this skill, so long as I keep performing it well, since I'm not exactly dumping a lot of resources into deliberately improving, which might have caused some relaxation that wasn't already there.

At the end, I wondered what the heck is going on in your head, and whether you mean completely different things than I do by "confidence".

This was cool. I hope you do more of it.

 

Since some others are commenting about not liking the graph-heavy format: I really liked the format, in particular because having it as graphs rather than text made it much faster and easier to go through and understand, and left me with more memorable mental images. Adding limited text probably would not hurt, but adding lots would detract from the terseness that this presentation effectively achieves. Adding clear definitions of the terms at the start would have been valuable though.

Rather than thinking of a single example that I carried throughout as you suggest, I found it most useful to generate one or more examples as I looked at each graph (e.g. for the danger-zone graphs, in order: judging / software testing, politics, forecasting / medical diagnosis).

I think I would enjoy and appreciate learning this framework. A bunch of graphs without explanation or examples is, unfortunately, too dry and difficult for me to understand.

How is confidence different from the belief you have in your own competence? Your self-reported confidence and competence should always be the same.

Is there something I'm missing, some way that confidence is distinct from belief in competence?

What comes to mind immediately for me is that conveying those of these that are relatively empirical to newcomers in each given field seems really valuable.

I initially was glazing over looking at the graphs without knowing what to do. Then I remembered I was supposed to be applying this to a particular skill. Then I tried doing that, but it was effortful and I stopped.

Options: have more handholding about what it means to apply a graph to a skill, and/or handholding on what sort of skills are relevant. (I think Logan’s example was lower relevant than usual)

(This comment written as if directed to Dunkin, so that's who "you" is)

Second [LW(p) · GW(p)] on "Loved the format, could use small explainers sometimes". I did not actually attempt the exercise, because I honestly came here from seeing LoganStrohl's comment and wanted to see what this weird format post was. I am not sure I have any skills where I can do a good job evaluating confidence and competence separately, as some other commenters noted.

I'd bet it's different per person, but I couldn't get a good lock on what some of the graphs meant^[1]. I didn't understand what the "danger zone"^[2], dependency^[3], and sufficiency^[4] graphs were pointing at..

I also couldn't understand why the "gains in one optimizes another" graph returned to the baseline^[5]. It seemed the skill-practicer would be well suited to attempt to continue along the "correct" lines. This might be cleared up if instead the competence dimension, after the undershoot, shot up really quickly. Looking again to write this, it seems like you kind of did this, just with a different scale, but I didn't see that without pretty close focus, and I don't think I did a bad job, so it was probably completely missed by some people skimming.

Could you please explain what the second "danger zone" graph means, i.e. what kind of skill could have such a danger zone ?

The first danger zone is pretty clear: this is a skill for which being overconfident is bad. Any skill where failure is expensive falls in that category. Any dangerous sport would be an example, being overconfident could mean death.

The third follows a similar idea, where misplaced confidence is bad.

I barely assed the exercise but like/liked this.
For (graph comfortable) me i found  the graphs* to cleanly get me to some subset of the relevant frames/questions/narratives.

if i'd written the post, a version of the final chart would have been first (or at least near).  i have various other thoughts on that level which feel both like quibbles and like significant differences in how you and i (or an agent and another agent) carryout the moment to moment cognition of an attempting to be rational agent.  

 

*except the green bar graph, which i could just guess at meanings for.