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ugh yes….you want exactly the same cultural shifts i want…
and i appreciate that you’re being epistemically humble about the value you give to humility—hella meta
but i don’t think that valuing overconfidence is a chesterton’s fence? maybe? i can come up with a believable reason we might overvalue overconfidence: we start out with a world where some people are overconfident in their beliefs, some people are underconfident, it all averages out to basically correct confidence. some people start taking into account the confidence that believers have in a belief, and it helps them determine the truth, it’s a good heuristic. but since being believed gives you social status, as the heuristic spreads, overconfident people do better than underconfident people in situations where social status has more effects than truth, or in situations where social status is easier to see than the truth. bam, the overconfidence fence is built.
also, like, at this point i’ve seen several studies saying that humility has better economic consequences than overconfidence even if it gives you less status (you can see the list of papers in this link, i thought they were good but i don’t know much about statistics), at least when it comes to investing.
idk how useful this is, this is basically just me being like “if there’s one thing i’m SURE of it’s EPISTEMiC HUMILITY!!!”
Haha I did not even intend the meta-ness.
And I like your story of the overconfidence fence. Your link to the papers is broken though :(
oops! here you go. there’s actually a list of papers at the bottom, the article itself is a summary