Modified: July 25, 2023
confidence all the way up
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.Nate Soares wrote an essay a while ago on how he experiences self-confidence when opining on difficult topics:
On reflection, I've concluded that (at least part of) the answer is something I call "confidence all the way up". Insofar as I'm uncertain of my content, I'm confident in my analysis — except, I'm not fully confident in my analysis. But insofar as I'm uncertain of my analysis, I'm confident in my reasoning procedures — except, I don't put faith there, either. But insofar as I'm uncertain of my reasoning procedures, I'm confident in my friends and failsafe mechanisms that will eventually force me to take notice and to update. Except, that's not quite right either — it's more like, every lack of confidence is covered by confidence one meta-level higher in the cognitive chain.
The result is something that reads socially as confidence regardless of how much empirical uncertainty I'm under.
Ultimately, this infinite regress is supported by nothing but faith:
Where does it bottom out? Well, insofar as my friends and failsafe mechanisms aren't sufficient to raise errors to my attention, I expect to reason poorly in an irredeemable fashion and then fail to achieve my goals. It bottoms out at the point where I say "yeah, if I'm that far gone, then I fail and die."
And yet it works, and seems like the basis for a healthy relationship with the challenges of the world.
I think this actually gets to something very deep in spirituality, maybe in how our minds are constructed. It connects to the idea of trust in ourselves and in the world, trust which is a form of faith#Faith is trust. This trust is, ultimately, totally empty, empirically unsupportable. It is a stance we take, an axiom, not a proposition to be justified.
The good news is that this means a form of unearned confidence is available to everyone at every moment, regardless of your actual life experiences.
(the bad news is, it's still not clear to me how to actually flip that switch. one take on this is that confidence is about accepting failure)