Over/Under

In defense of delusions of grandeur

A few threads in my life recently collided with a tweet and turned into an insight or a theory or something about overconfidence and underconfidence.

I won’t describe the tweet in detail, but it was a thinly-veiled humblebrag about being hot, and just my opinion, but it felt like a reach. My response: intense cringe, that popped into my head again and again for the next few days. Which made me wonder: why did this display of overconfidence set my neurons alight?

I realised this is a habitual response I have to overconfidence, like on a trip to Mexico when a friend’s boyfriend claimed to speak Spanish and I discovered this meant ~3 weeks of Duolingo-level. I’ve cringed in response to underconfidence, but only for extreme self-debasement. I talked to friends and found they also react strongly to overconfidence but not underconfidence.

I can think of many negative ways of describing overconfidence (boasting, bluster, arrogance, delusion) but not underconfidence¹. The nearest concepts I can think of are “false modesty” which has a slightly different flavour, and “imposter syndrome”, which is considered understandable and worthy of sympathy. Overall, it feels fair to say society largely finds underconfidence more acceptable than overconfidence.

But…I think we’re wrong. Overconfidence is better than underconfidence. We should reverse the stigma.

Ok but why?

Accurate knowledge of your abilities is highly valuable, and overconfidence is self-correcting and underconfidence is not.

If you’re overconfident in your ability to do something, you’ll try it, collide with reality (thanks Visakan²), and reality will correct you.

Underconfidence leads to not attempting the thing, so there’s no mechanism to correct your underestimate of your ability.

On top of this, I think overconfidence can be a powerful way to outsource motivation - it’s why “doing things in public” leads to people radically levelling up. When you set people's expectations high, many people still have a tendency to rise to those expectations³. I don’t know if setting others’ expectations low leads you to fall to them, but it does give more license to perform poorly.

The friend’s boyfriend I mentioned who seriously overestimated his Spanish abilities at least tried to speak Spanish a lot. He got a better sense of where he was more and less able to communicate, which probably greatly accelerated his learning. And I’d guess embarrassing himself in front of us lit a fire under his ass to get better.

Overconfidence’s bad rep

Why do we judge overconfidence harder?

One reason is that there’s a shitty version of overconfidence that one often encounters, which isn’t actually overconfidence. It’s almost the opposite: insecurity sublimated into bragging. The person with a fragile ego who talks about how {smart/cool/hot} they are because deep down they think they’re not. It’s just cope.

This fake version doesn’t have the benefits of real overconfidence because there’s no intent to collide with reality. The person who really overestimates their hotness will hit on unrealistically hot people (and perhaps charm them with their confidence). Someone covering insecurity won’t because they’re afraid of reality ruining their comforting fiction.

That type of (fake) overconfidence gives the real kind a bad name because often we can’t differentiate the two. You can also interpret this as an extra condition on overconfidence being better than underconfidence: society-level, we should encourage overconfidence paired with a culture of “prove it”. (Related: prediction markets.)

I encountered another reason we tend to dislike overconfidence in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human⁴:

In social dialogue, three-quarters of all questions and answers are framed in order to hurt the participants a little bit; this is why many men thirst after society so much: it gives them a feeling of their strength.

Nietzsche doesn’t specifically say this is about people talking overconfidently, but this fits with the idea of status games. It’s pretty normal to hear someone talking about how good they are at something as an attack—we assume they’re trying to raise their status above ours. Viewing overconfidence as a status game leads to social phenomena like Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Law of Jante⁵.

In conclusion

I’m not sure how to end this post, but in the spirit of overconfidence, I’m just going to roll with it, assume this is deeply insightful, and summarise my observations:

1. We treat underconfidence as better than overconfidence

2. 2 reasons for that are: some overconfidence is just cover for a fragile ego; overconfidence can be (mis)interpreted as a ploy in a status game

3. Overconfidence is better than underconfidence because it’s self-correcting - it leads to action that will better calibrate your sense of your abilities

So… overestimate your abilities with abandon? As long as you’re willing to place bets on Manifold and actually test them.

1. According to Merriam-Webster and whoever spellchecks the internet, it isn’t even a word, whereas overconfidence is

2. Can’t find the actual post even with Defender of Basic’s semantic search tool but I KNOW Visa used the phrase “collide with reality” somewhere because it’s all over my notes and ain’t no way I made that up myself… this post is the closest I could find or maybe this one

3. The Pygmalion Effect (yes yes replication crisis I know)

4. For more Nietzsche content, check out my post about HATH

5. I’m setting aside the observation that these examples come from and seem entwined with their egalitarian cultures of origin (Australia/New Zealand and Scandinavia respectively)