Episode 147 - Confidence

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] David: The Podcast where two overly confident philosophers tell you why our discipline has all the answers. I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:29] Ellie: And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:30] David: Ellie, I wanna tell you a story about a crisis of confidence that I had that has shaped my entire career as a professional of Philosopher.

Picture it the year is 2011. I'm a third year graduate student at Emory. I think that's when we met, right? 2011 I went to a conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. It was the annual meeting of philosophia, a feminist continental philosophy association, and I was giving my very first presentation as a philosopher, it was a talk on Heiddeger and Haraway on temporality and violence. And as I got up to the podium to give this talk, I could just sense my body turning on me.

[00:01:12] Ellie: Oh no.

[00:01:12] David: Like my hands were shaking. I was sweating profusely. And you know how in the movies when somebody dies and you see the soul just rise out of their body?

[00:01:21] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:01:22] David: I just saw and felt all my self-confidence leak out of my body and dissipate into the ether.

[00:01:29] Ellie: Oh, honey.

[00:01:30] David: And so I had this crisis of self-confidence as I was beginning to give this talk, and it went terribly.

[00:01:37] Ellie: Oh no. Oh no. I'm shocked to hear this because I would never have expected this of you.

[00:01:45] David: I know.

[00:01:45] Ellie: In 2011, you were already really confident and also as you've talked about multiple times on the show, you have a debate background and so you were already an acclaimed debater by this point. What the heck happened?

[00:01:57] David: So, I don't know. I think. There was something about the fact that this was not a debate, it was a presentation by myself where I was speaking to a lot of professors who were a lot more established, obviously, than a graduate student.

The fact that it was my first time doing this kind of talk. And that, you know, when you give your first talk as a budding philosopher, you don't have a sense of being an expert. And so all the signs of a crisis in confidence happened. You know, my voice cracked for the whole,

[00:02:26] Ellie: no, no, no.

[00:02:27] David: 20 minutes that I talked about Heiddeger and Haraway and I just couldn't stop it and so I could hear my voice cracking.

And I was trying so hard to rein it back and it was 20 minutes of me with a cracky voice telling people what I thought about these two philosophers.

[00:02:45] Ellie: Did some people try to like gas you up afterward at least?

[00:02:47] David: Yeah. I mean, it was so bad that people afterwards, like I felt like it was pity. Like they were like, oh my God, you did so well, and I was like, I know I didn't. And I just got to that point where I couldn't believe what people were telling me when they were telling me good things.

[00:03:02] Ellie: Oh my gosh. I know, you couldn't believe them because you knew they were lying.

[00:03:06] David: But I wanted to deeply, I was at some point I was like, maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe I really did do well. Just with a really cracky voice.

[00:03:14] Ellie: Oh my God, that's so funny because my first conference presentation was also at Vanderbilt. It would've been a couple of years after that. And I went in hot with so much confidence. It was a paper about how theater is better than film, and it was just like fully leaning into the sort of aura like nostalgia for presence kind of account that like film alienates us. And it was just like really onic and I went in with so much confidence and then got roasted in the Q and A.

[00:03:47] David: Oh, really?

[00:03:48] Ellie: Well, yeah. 'cause people were like, this is an essentially conservative and regressive presentation. I was like, no, it's not.

It's like progressive. And then it, yeah, it wasn't, so, yeah, so we have very different experiences of our conference conversation.

[00:04:01] David: Yeah. We've come, we've come far.

[00:04:03] Ellie: We've come far. We have, we have come very far.

[00:04:05] David: Now we're overly confident philosohpy professors who host the podcast.

[00:04:08] Ellie: Well, that doesn't sound very different from my first experience.

Hopefully my politics are a little bit better,

[00:04:13] David: less regressive.

[00:04:14] Ellie: And yeah, your voice definitely doesn't crack nearly as much. But I think, you know, it's hard for me not to hear that story and instantly have just like an overwhelming physical reaction to imagining you in that position because even though I was overly confident in my first conference presentation, I have also had just like very humiliating and painful crises of confidence over the course of my life as well.

And it's so easy in those cases just to like wish it away, to wish that this didn't happen to us, to pretend like we're somewhere else. And I think. Sometimes we're not confident in certain situations, right? But often we also think of confidence as either something somebody has or doesn't have.

And so I think of you as a confident person, but you're describing a situation which you weren't confident. And I think that distinction speaks to the way that we sometimes think about confidence as situation dependent, and then other times we think about it as a personality trait. And I think, yeah, you know, those two are kind of coming together in my reaction to this story. And whether or not you seem confident from the outside, like if you seem like you have a confident personality to other people, it's something that I think is very desirable.

[00:05:27] David: To be perceived as confident. Yes. Yeah, yeah, of course.

[00:05:29] Ellie: But also to feel confident from the inside. And there can very much be a mismatch of like, people perceive you as confident, but you don't feel confident on the inside. Right. And I think part of the,

[00:05:39] David: or vice versa.

[00:05:40] Ellie: Yeah, totally. Even though not a lot of philosophers talk too much about confidence, somebody who talks about, a phenomenon of this sort is Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he suggests that competence, or what he calls self-reliance, doesn't really have to do with how you're perceived. It actually really has to do with how you feel. On the inside, so to speak.

[00:06:00] David: Yeah. No, and you know, confidence is like really central for so much of our lives for how we comport ourselves in the workplace, in our family, in our friendships. But I feel like not a lot of philosophers talk about confidence.

So for instance, they will talk about other related concepts that have something to do with confidence, but that are not equivalent to it. They will talk about self-esteem and courage in moral psychology, for example. In epistemology, it's very common for people to talk about certainty, how certain we are about our beliefs.

And of course, in the philosophy of religion, people talk about the religious version of c onfidence, which is faith, right? Like placing your faith in something larger than yourself. But I do feel like confidence gets eclipsed and it becomes the ugly duckling in this constellation of concepts.

And so it doesn't get as much explicit philosophical treatment as its cousins. But I think the Emerson reference is really helpful because in some ways Emerson is writing about confidence in a very confident way. Like his writing is so evocative, so strong. And so there is a performative dimension to it that I find very interesting because he's not only performing confidence in his writing, but in performing it he's also p assing it on to the reader. You know, every time I read that essay in particular, I walk away just being like, I need to be more confident. Like I feel already more confident by virtue of having read it. Yeah. You know, like it sticks to you.

[00:07:33] Ellie: Yeah, I mean, I was deeply influenced by the self-reliance essay when I was in high school, a time when famously most of us need more confidence.

And I think that was part of it. And so the reason I mention, I think that Emerson is more interested in the way that confidence feels on the inside than being interested in how we are perceived as confident is that he sets very little store by the perceptions of others. Emerson thinks that what really matters is thinking for yourself and actually standing out from the crowd, not, it doesn't matter whether other people recognize you as standing out from the crowd or not.

It's rather like, are you an original thinker? Yeah. And so he suggests here that to be self-reliant is to believe in your own thought. And what he says is what is true in your private heart but that is true for all people or men. And he thinks this is actually genius. And so for Emerson, the stakes are not just like, oh, confidence or self-reliance will make your voice not crack in a presentation.

It's like truly being self-reliant is genius. Yeah. And so he doesn't reserve genius for special individuals. He actually thinks it's for everyone.

[00:08:47] David: Yeah. The genius of the everyday man specifically, you know, such a transcendentalist move. And the way I read that essay is that the kind of confidence that he's calling for certainly is about our thinking.

It's about being generative and thinking against the grain of the ideas of other people, or just on our own terms. But it also has to do with having the courage to stand up for those ideas when the time comes, right? To live up to them, to stand up for them, even if that means then having to battle other people or having to battle tradition.

So there is also this kind of like maverick attitude to his understanding of self-reliance, where sometimes you have to reject sedimented, well-established institutions in order to express and to be confident.

[00:09:39] Ellie: Today we're talking about confidence.

[00:09:42] David: How has modernity created a crisis of confidence?

[00:09:45] Ellie: Is confidence a personality trait or a function of one situation?

[00:09:49] David: And what does it mean to be over or under confident?

[00:09:53] Ellie: For an extended version of this episode, community discussion and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

[00:10:03] David: So I wanna begin Ellie by talking about this book by the French philosopher Charles Pépin which is called Self-Confidence: A Philosophy. And in this book,  Pépin makes a really interesting argument about confidence, which is that modernity has created this really intense crisis of confidence in every single one of us.

That's because we live in a world that on the one hand, demands a lot of confidence. Like you have to be confident to succeed and make it in this world. But on the other hand, the structure of the world denies us the very thing that it demands from us. So he says, the reason that our world demands confidence is because we are free agents, especially if you think about the economy.

You know, I can have many economic futures. I can be a plumber, I can be a teacher, I can take whatever job I can imagine. And because of that, I need to be confident in my ability to reinvent myself. That's a demand that's placed on economic subjects in the economic present, and that's very different than, for example, in futile times.

In futile times, you just carried on the tradition of your family. Right. If my father was a plumber, I know I'm gonna be a plumber and I don't really need to be confident in myself. I just need to follow the family tradition. Right, so, it's a closed future in a sense. But at the same time, in the modern world, we take up these jobs that are so alienating that we actually lose sight of the meaning of our own work.

We don't really have the sense that they're valuable, that they're adding something meaningful to society. And that feeling of alienation and uselessness translates into a lack of confidence in us. And so that's where the paradox comes from, that we need confidence to be adaptable, yet our work robs us of our confidence and he has this quote that I just wanna, read from the book where he says, self-confidence has never been so important and it's never been so hard to acquire.

[00:12:05] Ellie: Okay. This is so interesting because I was thinking along really similar lines, in preparation for this episode. I was thinking about the fact that our culture gives us so many messages about maximizing our confidence. And I think that that reveals that confidence is simultaneously a really strong value in our culture, and also something that we're not actually reliably taught to have.

Because if we were reliably taught to have it, we wouldn't need so much constant messaging around getting it and maximizing it. And so I think we receive really mixed messages about confidence in our society. In the sense that we receive mixed messages about our own value. On the one hand, in our culture, the individuals self is valorized as the end all be all. We've got like this really strong, pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of approach. And then on the other hand, we are denied confidence. Like we are taught that we are valueless, at least outside of the external appreciation that we get. Like especially tied to our economic power.

Maybe we're alienated in the sense that  Pépin is talking about. So this is great.

[00:13:15] David: Well, yeah, and I think one consequence of the fact that we're not taught, you know, how to be confidence in the proper way, is that

[00:13:22] Ellie: taught to be confidence?

[00:13:25] David: Yeah. Like one consequence is that we don't know how to move in situations of uncertainty and risk.

Right? Which is by definition what confidence is confidence is your ability to move in a strange terrain and be willing to take on challenges where you don't have a lot of guarantees of success. That's how I think about confidence. And I think that would include not just like political conditions of uncertainty, but also economic conditions of uncertainty.

Right? When the situation is risky and unclear, we become less confident. And this reminds me of the research of Lisa D. Cook, the woman from the Federal Reserve, the black woman from the Federal Reserve that Trump has been going after for quite a while. Her line of research in economic theory really zooms in on this point in terms of economic confidence in minorities, and she points out that when the economy is unstable, minorities are much more likely to lose confidence in themselves.

And in the world. And so, minorities don't start businesses when economic times are tough because they feel really insecure. And so it highlights this connection between risk and confidence on a social economic level.

[00:14:41] Ellie: Yeah. And part of what's so important about that research is that it gives a lie to the idea that, you know, just like let the wealthy people get wealthier and then like the poor will come along or the marginalized will come along.

And I think it also supports the idea of a strong social safety net. But that's another story perhaps. But I think this highlights a really important point, which is. That confidence, of course, is about the self, but it's also confidence about more than the self. In this case, it's confidence in the stability of the economy, in the protections of democracy.

We can also have confidence, of course, in the goodness of other people, and so there can be a kind of confidence. About situations and our relations to those situations that is at least equally, if not more important than just like the idea of self-confidence.

[00:15:29] David: Yeah, and I think  Pépin would take that line of thinking and run with it because he points out that the idea of somebody just having confidence in a vacuum, like independently of what's happening around them is kind of incoherent because confidence is a relational concept, right? It's not a personality trait that you are born with, or you either have or don't have a hundred percent. And I have to admit that when I began. Thinking about this topic, I did think about confidence as this personality trait that some people have But  Pépin makes a really good case for why we shouldn't think about confidence in those terms.

And he essentially says that confidence is propped up by these pillars. He talks about these pillars of confidence. And one of the most important pillars for confidence is other people. And so he has this whole theory that I really like about how our confidence is always borrowed first and foremost from other people.

So I develop confidence in myself only after other people have placed their confidence in me. So it's almost like I borrow confidence and then I use it and it grows in me, but it's always almost like alone. And so he rejects what I like to call now the spider web theory of confidence, which is this idea that you just like weave your confidence like a spider weaves its web from within yourself without you know, any other person around. And think about the classic example of gaining confidence as a kid.

[00:17:02] Ellie: Wait, can I just ask like one quick clarifying question? Yeah. You said it's alone. What did you mean by that?

[00:17:07] David: It's kind of like a loan. Not alone, as like, like what is lonely?

[00:17:13] Ellie: What is alone? Oh, oh, an L-O-A-N-L-O-A-N.

[00:17:17] David: Yeah. Like when somebody gives you a loan. And so you're like borrowing money, so you're borrowing confidence.

[00:17:22] Ellie: Okay. I'm so glad I asked for clarification because I was like, I thought you were literally just saying it's not alone. Yeah, it's like relational. Okay.

[00:17:30] David: And a loan is a relational thing.

[00:17:33] Ellie: Okay. And then when you said I wasn't saying alone, I was saying a loan, I was picturing a-lone and I was like that doesn't help me. Okay, gotcha. It is a loan from other people and not in the sense that you're seeing other people had confidence and so you're then adopting it.

You're instead, they're instilling confidence in you.

[00:17:50] David: Yes, that's right. And so think about the example of like a child who is learning to ride a bike and is riding with the training wheels on a child will never decide on their own. I wanna take the training wheels off, right. Because they are used to the safety of the training wheels.

A child only becomes confident enough to ride a bike without training wheels when an adult places their trust in the child and the child realizes it, and so they're actually living out that transformation on borrowed confidence. It's the confidence of the adult that's living through the child and eventually becomes the child's own.

[00:18:28] Ellie: Okay. Well, no wonder I was so confident as a kid then my kindergarten teacher told my parents that I was academically gifted and my parents didn't really know what that meant because neither of them had graduated from college and they were like, what is that? What does it mean to be academically gifted?

And then I just like went around with a ton of confidence. Those who listened to our Genius episode will remember that I wrote a story about myself as a child called The Brilliant Girl. So, yeah, I'm like ashamed of that now. But hey, I guess, I guess it was like, you know, just a function of my situation.

I was told that I was academically gifted and I just believed it.

[00:19:02] David: Ellie is like, just gimme the unicycles straight up. But so I really like this way of thinking about confidence and  Pépin cites another French philosopher, whom we've talked about in the past, the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle who's a really interesting figure.

[00:19:19] Ellie: Dude, you're like obsessed with her. I feel like you always mention her.

[00:19:21] David: I know, I, I do really like her work, but she has this quote that's really important for  Pépin, and the quote is as follows. There is no such thing as a lack of self-confidence that doesn't exist. If you lack self-confidence, it's not because of a failure of yours. It's actually a failure of the people around you who should have instilled confidence in you, but failed to do so.

So what you're actually lacking is other people's confidence, which was never given to you.

[00:19:53] Ellie: Okay. And this is so interesting to think about socially as well. Because I feel like. Given what you're saying, it sheds a very interesting light on the fact that we tend to associate self-confidence with pretty privileged men.

I mean there are certainly, I can think about exceptions, well,you mentioned the federal governments, like I can think of a few way overly confident white men who have yeah kind of like ruined things for the rest of us. But so it seems like then instilling confidence is also something that is an equity issue, right? But I also think, okay, so it seems at the same time though that we might not wanna say that confidence is exclusively about other people. Like it's not just alone, right? So I can imagine situations in which people around me put their confidence in me, and yet I don't become a self-confident adult.

Like there might be cases in which actually other people telling me from a young age that I am brilliant destined for greatness actually puts so much pressure on me that then I sort of rebel against that, or I end up disappointing. I feel like that's a very common thing that people experience.

And I also think there could be cases where I just don't have what it takes to succeed in a given area. And so I don't develop confidence in my abilities. Like it's one thing for my kindergarten teacher to have said that I was academically gifted if she said that I was athletically gifted. I don't think that necessarily would've been enough.

Like I still wouldn't have made it to the WNBA.

[00:21:22] David: So I don't know, maybe, maybe you, you would've imagined a different future and pursued it and become good at it. Maybe not. Who knows? But I think  Pépin would still agree with the general point that you're making, which is that other people are not enough.

And here, I think we can think developmentally to understand this because, of course, when we are young, we do rely primarily on the faith of other people or the confidence of other people making its way to us in order for us to try new things, right? Like to learn how to walk to go to our first pajama sleepover with our friends, you know, and sleep without our parents, whatever it is.

[00:21:59] Ellie: Especially the non pajama sleepovers that you were invited to as a child pajama party. I think that's what you meant.

[00:22:05] David: Thank you. Either way. So when we're kids, we do rely on other people, but when we are grown up, yes, we do rely on ourselves because we suddenly have this capacity to grow our confidence on our own terms.

And so he says, another pillar of self-confidence is in fact the self. And he has a whole theory about how we cultivate confidence, and his theory really hinges on the value of training and practice. So he uses the example of being a musician, like a violinist. If you wanna be a confident musician, there's no way around it.

You just have to put in the time, you know, he cites that famous number that sometimes floats around the self-help, self-development literature. That to be excellent at something, you have to put in 10,000 hours into it of training.

[00:22:54] Ellie: Okay, Malcolm Gladwell.

[00:22:55] David: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think he borrows it from some other psychologist, but yeah, he also uses that number and so  Pépin says you need to do the 10,000 hours as a precondition for developing confidence. But the interesting thing is that on his view, it's not as if training and practice directly lead to confidence. They actually lead to some intermediary state, which is competence. So you train a lot, you develop competence in that particular skill, like you become a competent pianist or violinist.

And then it's still an open question of how that competence in that task can then translate into this more generalized confidence in oneself that allows you to take on new challenges as you move through life.

[00:23:44] Ellie: Okay. As I think about the difference between competence and confidence, at least in the colloquial sense, it strikes me that competence refers more to something objective like, have you reached a certain level of piano playing? And confidence to something more subjective. Do you feel that you're good at piano? Do you feel that you're up to the task of performing in the recital? And so I don't know if you have thoughts on that, but they seem to be different things to me and not necessarily running in parallel though. Ideally they would run in parallel. Ideally, your confidence would match your competence and one would not severely outstrip the other.

[00:24:20] David: Yeah. So you are partly right in the sense that competence is an objective. Like are you good at piano or not? You know, like I cannot fake that. Maybe I can fake confidence in certain settings.

[00:24:30] Ellie: You can't fake competence in singing, I will say.

[00:24:36] David: But his point is that confidence also has an objective dimension, which is your willingness to take on new challenges. Even when you don't have all the skills for that challenge.

So for example, I'm gonna use the example of athletic literacy, which is closer to my life.

[00:24:56] Ellie: You could have been a WNBA player, David, if the right person that told you as a child.

[00:25:01] David: You know, I'm very good at certain sports and so I'm competent at those sports, but that has also given me this belief that I can succeed in new sports, even if I'm not trained in them 'cause I'm like pretty athletic. And so it's a willingness to launch yourself into the unknown. And so that is objective. Some people are more willing to do that than other people.

[00:25:24] Ellie: And we could think about that willingness to launch oneself in the domain specific areas in which we have already shown ourselves to succeed.

So for instance. I'm quite confident in public speaking at this point, and I think a lot of that has to do with the experience that I've had in public speaking, right? And so a slightly larger audience than I've ever spoken to before, I'm liable to be still pretty confident there, even if it's a bit risky because I have this background experience.

But you're also talking about the confidence that's not quite domain specific.

[00:25:59] David: Correct. It's not domain specific. It's domain general.

[00:26:02] Ellie: Domain general. Okay.

[00:26:03] David: So it would be like you being confident to take up standup comedy?

[00:26:07] Ellie: Oh my god, yeah. I was in improv in high school and I will say, I was actually good at the, I might have mentioned this before. I was good at the improv part. I was very good.

[00:26:15] David: You were not good at the comedy?

[00:26:16] Ellie: No, it's, it's true. It's true. I wasn't, and I always say, you're like more the comic relief on the show than I am.

Or when I was in grad school, I decided to take a fiction writing class because I was like, oh, writing's a really big part of my life. I think I'm a, you know, pretty good writer. I will be really good at fiction writing. And I was the only grad student in class of all undergrads. And when I tell you I was not even in the top half of writers in this fiction class, I was like, not good.

[00:26:43] David: But that's, I think that really captures the difference, right? Competence is about are you good at it because you've put in the time confidence is more of like a willingness to go elsewhere. Independently of whether you succeed or fail. And, and the question then becomes, how do we translate our competence, which is domain specific, into confidence, which is domain general? And  Pépin says that the key ingredient is joy. If you were forced to play, let's say the piano as a kid,

[00:27:13] Ellie: I literally was, my dad like really wanted me to become a great piano player. He's an amazing pianist. Yeah. And he made me play and then I, yeah, I hated it.

[00:27:21] David: Great. So don't imagine Ellie was forced to play the piano as a kid. And when you're forced to do something, you don't really take joy in it. So you can develop competence if you just put in the time, but you won't have the personal, psychological, and spiritual growth that then makes you feel good about yourself enough to jump into then like the cello or singing or some other domain. And so if you are competent at something and you also genuinely love doing it, those two things combined give you the recipe for confidence.

[00:28:04] Ellie: We mentioned earlier that we often talk about confidence as though it's a personality trait or a measure of our self-worth, but that's not quite the case, and we've already seen this with  Pépin. As you mentioned. It's more a matter for him of relationality. I read another angle on this in a book called Perfectly Confident, which is by the management scholar, Don A. Moore.

And Moore argues that confidence is an assessment and it needs to be calibrated based on aligning your beliefs about yourself with the facts available to you. That is, assessing our confidence is also a way of calibrating it. We need to calibrate our confidence.

[00:28:43] David: Okay? So bring it in line with actual facts.

Like for example, I have a chapter due next week, Uhhuh. So how confident am I? Well, I have to consider basic facts. Like, oh, in the past I have. Done my revisions in a certain number of days. I know that I have the weekend off to work on this, so on and so forth. And so I guess I arrive at a fair assessment based on an analysis of facts.

[00:29:09] Ellie: Exactly. And before I get into the details of what confidence amounts to for more, I should probably disclose that I originally bought this book before we decided to do this episode, and it was because I felt that I was not particularly good at calibrating my confidence in particular.

I suffer from overconfidence.

[00:29:29] David: Literally the least surprising thing we all already know about you, Ellie.

[00:29:34] Ellie: I know. I know, but okay. It is overconfidence, specifically with respect to my time management. So I tend to be way overconfident about my ability to get certain tasks done in a certain amount of time.

So whenever I'm getting ready, I'm always about 10 minutes later than I thought I would be. Writing my first book was a total disaster time-wise because I just had no idea how long it takes to write a book, let alone a serious philosophy book. And so I was living in some la la land thinking I could write it like six months.

Like that is, that is horrifying. Who like. What good philosophy has been written in six months, unless it was maybe by like Nietzsche or somebody really amazing, might be academically gifted, but I'm no Nietzsche. And so writing it ended up taking two years and honestly probably would've benefited from more time.

But we'll see what the referee reports say. Okay, so I'm a little, I'm waiting, I'm waiting to hear feedback from them.

[00:30:30] David: They're gonna say ready for, it was ready six months ago in fact. I share that problem with time management a little bit. But. I am the opposite. I am under confident when it comes to assessing or projecting the worth of the final product.

So, for example, with my book, yeah, it took me a little longer than I anticipated, but then I was really worried that it was not gonna be good and that it was gonna have a really bad reception. And so I was under confident in the final thing. And I was really surprised when that, and happy, when that didn't happen.

[00:31:05] Ellie: Well, lucky for you, your book is both good and got a good reception.

[00:31:08] David: Yeah. But you know, I wasn't confident about that. Even though we've joked about how we're both overly confident about most things.

[00:31:14] Ellie: Yeah. Well, I actually think when it comes to an assessment of the quality of my work, I tend to calibrate pretty well.

So I would say I know which work of mine is really good and which work is mid and hopefully I'm not putting too much bad stuff out there. I don't know, maybe here and there, but I do think that you and I both tend to be overconfident about time management when it comes to podcast related things in particular though. So like we always think that prepping episodes a meeting, our episode prep meetings are on average two hours. We always think we're gonna somehow magically be able to do it less than in less than two hours, and so Moore says that in order to calibrate our confidence correctly, we need to base it on facts.

We should calculate how long our previous meetings to prep episodes have taken. I know that that's two hours because I have done that calculation at this point

[00:32:07] David: 148 times.

[00:32:09] Ellie: I know, right. And a little bit less, but we're close and estimate from there how long future episode prep will take.

[00:32:18] David: Fair enough. I want to say that. It is not that we're overconfident, it's that we hope against hope each and every time. As Kierkegaard would say, we're just waiting for a miracle to happen every time we get together to do a podcast.

[00:32:33] Ellie: No, literally as recently as two days ago, we sat down for one of these meetings and you go, I think today we could probably get it done in an hour. I was like okay, David, moving on. And of course we got it done in two hours.

So we'll come back to over and under confidence later, but I wanna get into what Moore's analysis of confidence involves here. So we have been talking about what he describes as the first of three forms of confidence, and that is estimation.

Estimation quantifies how good you think you are, how likely you are to succeed, and how quickly you'll get things done.

[00:33:09] David: Okay. And, and this connects to the etymology of the term confidence, which is confidere, which means to place, or to have full trust in something. And so self-confidence would be to have full trust in yourself.

[00:33:23] Ellie: Okay. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And the second form of confidence for him is comparing yourself to others, and he calls this placement. So are you a better than average driver? And in fact, the vast majority of people think they are, which is literally impossible. And he thinks that one reason for errors in placement, the second form of confidence has to do with not knowing what others' abilities are. And so he does this study in his class or like this exercise rather, where he asks his students to place themselves in terms of their skills at juggling most of them under place themselves, and this is because they know, most of them know that they're terrible at juggling and they don't realize just how most other students in the class are also terrible at juggling. So they assume that the other students are better than they are. 'cause they're like, oh, I'm such a bad juggler, but they don't actually know about other students', lack of juggling skills.

On the other hand, we have phenomena of over placement and he does this other exercise with his students where he asked them to place themselves in terms of honesty. Most students over place themselves. They think they rank higher in honesty than in other students. And this is really because they know more about themselves than they do about others. They know that they're X amount of honest, and they assume that other students are less honest than they are.

[00:34:48] David: Yeah, they're over replacing themselves on honesty while they're like submitting chat GPT essays about the subject matter.

[00:34:55] Ellie: No, I think it's more that they're assuming that other students are doing chat. Yeah, exactly.

[00:35:01] David: And I mean, this clearly relates to the Dunning-Kruger effect in psychology where people overestimate their own competence in any, in a given area because of a lack in knowledge, right?

Because they actually don't know much about the area as a whole, and

[00:35:18] Ellie: like all of the politicians we were talking about earlier,

[00:35:20] David: yeah, who think they're so good at government, but they don't know like what actual expertise in that domain actually requires.

[00:35:26] Ellie: And when we're thinking about the second form of confidence, more mentions that we humans are extremely prone both to over and under placement.

And this can have pretty serious social effects. It's one thing if you just like under placed yourself in terms of juggling skills in a classroom exercise, but he notes that high achieving high school students from low income backgrounds tend to apply less to prestigious colleges and universities than higher income students because they assume they won't get in.

They don't see people around them getting into and graduating from these schools very much. And so they under place themselves. Under placement is a bigger factor here, he thinks than financial challenges because many prestigious universities offer full tuition. And other desirable financial packages to low income students.

And so if the students aren't applying because they're under placing themselves, that has massive effects on our society, on their lives too, on their individual lives.

[00:36:23] David: I mean, this literally happened to me when I was graduating high school. My thought was, well, I am a low income immigrant student.

Where should I apply? So I applied to two local state schools. I didn't apply anywhere else. I didn't even know that you could apply out of state. And the idea of applying to a private school was just inconceivable to me.

[00:36:41] Ellie: Was that because you assumed that you wouldn't be able to afford it or because you assumed that you wouldn't get in?

[00:36:47] David: Both.

[00:36:47] Ellie: Wow.

[00:36:48] David: Yeah, both. It was a financial judgment and it was also a judgment of quality where I thought, well, I'm just like this random little kid. I just need to like make a safe bet here.

[00:36:58] Ellie: Okay, so we've got estimation and placement, the two forms of confidence.

[00:37:02] David: You said there are three, right?

[00:37:03] Ellie: There are three. Yeah so the third form of confidence is precision. That is, how accurate are your beliefs and how sure are you that you're right about them?

[00:37:15] David: Okay, great. So I mean, I am a hundred percent precise with my assessment of my beliefs.

[00:37:23] Ellie: Yeah, I was wondering if you'd take a second to think about that and realize that this is the form of overconfidence you suffer from most.

[00:37:30] David: It's hard to know.

[00:37:31] Ellie: I mean, honestly, I think you suffer from this form of overconfidence. Like, I love you, David. But I think you would score really high on over precision, and it's kind of an issue for us sometimes because I'm always finding myself like wanting to fact check you because you'll say these really precise statements.

I'm like, why did you say that it was this particular year or this other particular year? So why would you say 1975 and then have to add, or 1976 when you could have just said the 1970s. And so Moore notes that we as humans almost always skew towards over precision. So you're maybe not alone here, although you might be more extreme.

And that means that we always skew towards having more confidence that our beliefs are accurate than we should. We barely ever suffer from under precision. Whereas like with placement, for instance, we have over and under placement that we suffer from.

[00:38:23] David: I see. Yeah. And in your defense, this happened to me recently with my partner.

We were watching this movie, Ex Machina. About like an AI that gets a human to fall in love with them. And I was really sure that the actress was Natalie Portman. And so I

[00:38:36] Ellie: wait like the, the main actress, what?

[00:38:38] David: And I told my partner, like, I paused the movie, and I was like, do you know who the actress is?

You recognize her? He's like, no. And I'm like. That's Natalie Portman. She looks a little like, she looks really interesting because she's an AI, and then he's like, oh my God, I don't think that's Natalie Portman. And I was like, that's Natalie Portman. It's her specifically

[00:38:55] Ellie: Justice for Alicia Vikander.

[00:38:57] David: Precisely. It is her. Oh my God. And so he is like. No. And so I Googled it in front of him and lo and behold, it was not Natalie.

[00:39:05] Ellie: Yeah, no, it's Alicia Vikander. Okay. Okay. See, and my favorite part about this example is that this is an example from pop culture, which you famously know nothing about. Like you don't know any celebrities, you don't know any movie is like, okay, wow.

[00:39:21] David: It is like the driving, I think I know more pop culture than the average person, even though I've had like multiple accidents driving, and many reasons to believe that I'm bad at knowing pop culture.

[00:39:32] Ellie: Okay. Well, let me teach you how to be a little bit less confident. Yes. In your, let me, let me teach you how to cope with your over precision challenges

[00:39:39] David: for all of our sake.

[00:39:40] Ellie: Right? Yeah. So one of the key ways that more things you can calibrate your confidence is using confidence intervals. A confidence interval consists of two numbers. And they represent the range of what you expect the true value to fall between. So to take an example that he uses in the book. Let me ask you, in which year William James first taught a psychology class at Harvard University.

If I ask you that and I ask you to create a confidence interval there, your first number should be your lowest estimate of the year. And the second number, your highest estimate of the year. So what would you guess, like what is the range of years you would give like low number and high number to determine the confidence interval?

[00:40:23] David: Okay. Putting me on the spot about William James. I know Principles of psychology was published in 1890, so that's like my starting point for this interval.

[00:40:30] Ellie: That's actually like a really solid start.

[00:40:32] David: Okay. Well this is like his famous, you know, his most famous book. I would say like I would deduct a few decades, so maybe like 1860.

Then I would like to 1900. I'm gonna give myself a four decade interval.

[00:40:45] Ellie: Okay, great. So, like many people, you are probably overly precise. Okay. You're, you're actually right, like it was 1875. So you're good. You're good.

[00:40:55] David: Kaching.

[00:40:56] Ellie: If you had given yourself a wider range, like let's say that you had said 1800 to 1950, your answer would've been more likely to be right.

So basically Moore thinks that we should aim to be looser in our confidence intervals because we usually skew towards over precision. So like, why were you, you, you just didn't need to be that precise if you knew that principles was published in 1890, you could have just like had a much wider range.

maybe it doesn't need to be as low.

[00:41:22] David: Yeah, like the 18 hundreds.

[00:41:24] Ellie: Maybe it doesn't need to be as low as 1800 because that would've meant that he wrote principles of psychology when he was 90 years old. But it could have been like 1820 to 1950 or something like that. Okay. So he just, he wants us to not- yeah, just to be looser.

[00:41:39] David: To be looser. Yeah. But like by that logic, then I should have been like 1500 to 2025, you know, like the looser, the better. And also, I wonder how this works in the case of things that are not numerical. So like, to go back to my Natalie Portman example. I can't give a range. It's like it's from Natalie Portman to Nicole Kidman.

So this seems like limited to things that you can actually quantify.

[00:42:04] Ellie: Well, maybe you could say, how confident are you that it is Natalie Portman, and then you can make a judgment based on that. Yeah. I mean.

[00:42:11] David: Okay. Yeah. So in that case, it's a numerical assessment of my confidence in my answer. Right. So I would say it's, it's um, Natalie Portman, and I think it's like.

It's like eighty to a hundred percent sure, even though I was wrong.

[00:42:24] Ellie: Why not? Why not? And I guess one question I was left wondering with is how effective is this actually going to be? Because. Is overconfidence or under confidence? Like are these just things we can think our way out of, or are they deep-rooted cognitive biases and Moore is a management professor and he basically concludes that we should all calculate probabilities for all sorts of things in our life in order to calibrate our confidence. You know, that might be helpful if you're trying to figure out the chances of success for a new business venture. But I don't know how applicable it is to much of what our daily lives consist in.

Like I don't think we need such, I don't think a utilitarian method of calibrating my confidence. Is likely to be that helpful.

[00:43:11] David: Yeah. It wouldn't be helpful for a lot of things like, you know, how confident am I that they will have the apples I want at the store? I like, I don't know. Yeah. And also, what if you're just really bad at probability?

You know, you're just really bad at math. We know that that is a cognitive bias that we're really bad at assessing probability, especially when we really want something. You know, if I really want my favorite apples at the store. I just convinced myself that there's a 90% chance that they will have it, just because I want to give myself the best shot at acquiring the thing that I want.

[00:43:41] Ellie: Yeah. He wants you to calibrate your intervals so that you are 90% sure the right answer is inside it.

[00:43:48] David: But so then you also have to be like, that's a meta level, so you need to make an interval of the likelihood that you're right, and then you have to be 90% sure that that interval is correct, so this is like math genius stuff.

I don't think I'm a rational enough agent to make this kind of self-assessment.

[00:44:07] Ellie: In order to be that way, you would've had to be told from a young age by other people that you were a math genius and then would've set you up for success with your competence intervals.

I've been talking about Moore's view of confidence as involving calibrating our beliefs to facts. He thinks the outcome of this is what he calls perfect confidence, which lies in the middle between overconfidence and under confidence. And so in contrast with the cultural messaging to maximize our confidence, which would just lead to overconfidence in his view, the calibration gives us perfect confidence, which is in the middle.

[00:44:48] David: Yeah. So it seems like he's taking a somewhat Aristotelian position, right, of seeking the golden mean between extremes. And Aristotle himself, in his ethical writings, writes about there being a middle ground between these extremes, which are rashness and then cowardice on the other hand. And so there's something in the middle there.

Although interestingly, when he's talking about the extreme of rashness, he associates that with confidence. So there's a sense in which for Aristotle confidence already has a negative connotation as overconfidence. Whereas like we don't make that association, we distinguish between them. And what he says we should aim for the middle ground is what he calls bravery. So that would be what we would call confidence, right? Like the middle between these extremes. And so bravery is the goal in Aristotelian moral theory.

And two questions that we might ask about this Aristotelian framework is what should we call the extremes of over and under confidence? What's the right term to, to capture them? And secondarily, when do we fall into those extremes? You know, what causes us to be under or over the golden mean?

[00:45:59] Ellie: Okay. I think one place we might start for thinking about this is the fact that overconfidence and under confidence in practice are extremely gendered.

Men are associated with overconfidence and women are associated with under confidence. And this plays out all the time. So think about the overconfident man in class discussions, raising his hand all the time and talking a lot. I mean, just think about the students you've had and like when there is a student who's really raising their hand almost all the time, and you kind of have to reign them in.

At least in my experience, I think that has been 2 0 1. A man in all the time I've been teaching, you have the stereotype of men refusing to ask for directions. There's the audacity of the mansplainer who explains something basic to a woman who's an expert in the field. I was also thinking about the term confidence man, which is a synonym for grifter.

Yeah. Not confidence man is a man, not a, not a woman.

[00:46:54] David: Yeah. And I mean, on the other side of that, this brings to mind for me, that famous essay by Iris Marion Young, Throwing like a girl where she analyzes the stereotype of the under confident woman, or in this case, young girl through the example of athleticism.

Right. And like that's what the essay is about. It's about throwing like a girl. And she says that,

[00:47:12] Ellie: yeah, she's using a study on that.

[00:47:14] David: Yeah. And so she's saying that the research shows that even at the level of performance, when girls are asked to throw, they isolate only one limb to make the movement, like they just move their arm.

Whereas boys learn to put their whole body into it, right? Like they twist the whole body, the torso, they move forward in space and so they make a different kind of throw. And so there is a different way of occupying space here. And she gives other examples, right? Like the way women are taught to sit.

Also, she uses the example of volleyball, which is close to my heart, she says. Women tend to wait for the ball on the court to reach them and react to the ball. Whereas men tend to go after the ball in a more proactive, confident way.

[00:48:05] Ellie: Yeah, I played a boy and a play in high school. I went to an all girls high school, so sometimes we got to play boys.

And the main thing I had to do when I was learning how to play a boy was learn how to take up space differently and learn to essentially man spread. And I mentioned this to my students when I teach this. Text in the philosophy of gender class, 'cause I love this text. I think it is so evocative for the sort of lived experience dimensions of gender.

And it's interesting 'cause I hadn't thought about it in terms of confidence before, but I think that's right and what we see, if we're thinking about this is that confidence isn't just about self-esteem or a belief, and so I actually think this presses interestingly on Moore's analysis of confidence, which seems to be mainly epistemic. It shows that it's also lived through the body in the way that we act in the world, and interestingly. Moore notes that men and women self-report the same levels of self-confidence. And he concludes from that, that there's thus no gender difference in confidence.

And when I read that I was like, what are you talking about? Like what? But then Oh, of course. It's based on the self-report. And I don't think the self-report actually matters that much here. What we see with the Young analysis is that something like confidence is a lived out. We might not be aware of overconfidence or under confidence, but our body is gonna reveal it.

[00:49:24] David: Yeah. Like a young girl doesn't say, let me throw like a girl. Right? It's a compartment that is made possible through the sedimentation of certain bodily habits. And of course that essay is a phenomenological account of what Marion Young calls, feminine motility and Spatiality.

[00:49:41] Ellie: Just Young, I think Marion's her middle name.

Oh, it's like so Latino of you to like assume that the two, the other two last names.

[00:49:50] David: And so it's about a specifically feminine way of moving through and occupying space. Yeah. That's what the essay's about.

[00:49:56] Ellie: Sorry to mansplain her last name to you.

[00:49:59] David: This is not a play, Ellie.

[00:50:00] Ellie: It's a gender role reversal.

[00:50:03] David: But you know, she does point to the fact that these differences in the embodiment of confidence are not due to biology. They're not essential qualities of the sexes. In fact, it's a byproduct of growing up under patriarchy because under patriarchy, women develop a kind of timid and constricted form of embodiment.

So, you know, women are not encouraged to occupy space to activate their bodily capacities to their max. Women are, and especially young girls, are always told that they're fragile, that they are the object of protection by men, so on and so forth. And that is it like a

[00:50:40] Ellie: sit like a lady, cross your ankles.

[00:50:43] David: Exactly. And so over time, women see themselves precisely as having that objectified feminine existence and live it.

[00:50:53] Ellie: And there's a number of dimensions that she points out in this respect in the actual essay, but one that I think is relevant here is what she describes as inhibited intentionality, where women's movement is restricted.

They're not using the full range of motion or possibility. As you mentioned earlier, her account of inhibited intentionality starts with the insight from the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty, who describes the body as an I can, like our body is not first and foremost an object for us, it's an instrument and really like the expression of our very consciousness that acts on the world. So it's an acting body in movement. And Young suggest that for feminine embodiment, there's a self-imposed I cannot, that gets overlaid and interrupts and even redirects our embodied intentionality and women often lack confidence in their own body to do the task before even attempting to do it.

So they think, well, someone could do this, but not me. Someone could open this jar, but not me. And throwing like a girl is a result of living this contradiction between the body as an I can and the body as an I cannot.

[00:52:03] David: Yeah. And you know, whenever we talk about these gender distinctions, because we have all been trained in a particular way of experiencing our bodies.

The other way sounds so unthinkable, right? So like the, I cannot, to me, as somebody who was socialized as a man, it, it sounds so strange, right? Yeah. Like the idea of like only isolating one part of the body or like sitting tightly.

[00:52:27] Ellie: Honestly kind of to me too. And part of that's going to all girls school.

There's like studies on how all girls school really promotes confidence for girls. But I'm also like, famously a man spreader. I don't know. Anyway,

[00:52:37] David: yeah for the people who cannot see us right now. It is Ellie who is like spreading out in the way she's sitting down, whereas I am folded in a very ladylike fashion under the table.

[00:52:46] Ellie: That's actually true. Although even if you are watching a video, I don't think it goes down to our laps. But anyway, remains to be seen.

[00:52:53] David: Yeah. So in terms of the extremes, here we have again this Aristotelian extreme of Rashness, which is male coded, and then we have the feminine side, which is like the throwing, like a girl.

On the masculine side I like to think about this in terms of the Greek concept of hubris which is just like a term for being overly confident in oneself, and it really designates the reason that I like that concept is because it picks out the moral failure of the person who thinks too highly of themselves and doesn't check themselves,

If you think about a classic example of hubris from, Greek mythology, for example, you have the tale of King Croesus of Lydia, who, you know, had this like gigantic empire.

[00:53:37] Ellie: I've literally never heard of this man, but continue. You know, like oh, Croesus. Like what?

[00:53:41] David: Yeah, but it's like a famous example of like people's relationship to Oracles. And so he has this gigantic empire and he's worried about the rise of the Persian empire. And so he goes to the Oracle of Delphi outside of Athens to be like, yo, Oracle. Like there is this enemy rising on the horizon. What should I do? Should I battle them or not? And then the oracle in famously Oracular fashion says something enigmatic, like if you go to war against the Persians, a great empire will fall.

And King Croesus, in like a moment of hubris is so confident that he knows the meaning of the oracle, that he's like, oh my God, I'm gonna kick their ass. He goes to war, loses the war. A great empire falls, which is his own. And so it's like this great illustration of the masculine side of that Aristotelian spectrum.

[00:54:36] Ellie: Okay. So he assumed that the oracle was talking about the other empire being destroyed. But it was actually his own empire.

[00:54:42] David: Yeah.

[00:54:43] Ellie: And of course, hubris is a major feature of a lot of Ancient Greek tragedy. I mean, in fact, it's sometimes what people associate with like the main feature of ancient Greek tragedy or the fatal flaw.

As we think about like fatal flaw in literature, it's usually the fatal flaw of hubris that drives ancient Greek tragedies and in the ancient Greek tragedies that feature women leads. I'm trying to think about whether that's the case, and I don't think it is. Antigone does not suffer from hubris. Ephigenia does not suffer from hubris.

[00:55:15] David: Yeah, neither does, Medea.

[00:55:17] Ellie: She suffers from some other stuff, right?

[00:55:19] David: Yeah. She suffers from patriarchy. But I mean, if we want to use a more contemporary example, a story, a short fictional story that I recently taught is to build a fire by Jack London, which is about this man who goes into the Yukon, like in the tundra in Canada, and he's so confident in his abilities to navigate this extreme weather that he ignores all these signs and all these warnings against going into the tundra, right? Like in the story, like there's an old man that tells him not to go. He has a dog, and the dog is hesitant about going into the snow and he forces the dog to go with him on this journey into the wilderness.

And, sorry, spoiler alert. He freezes to death. The story is like him slowly coming to the realization that he is going to die. Because he was too confident about his own ability. So it's like a modern day ecological version of this tragic male hubris.

[00:56:21] Ellie: Overconfidence can kill, under confidence can lead to really poor social outcomes. I think what we're realizing here essentially is that confidence isn't just like. You know, sort of like desirable trait that it's nice to have, but that it actually is really, really important for our life outcomes.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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[00:57:04] Ellie: We'd like to thank our student employees, Aaron Morgan, Kristen Taylor Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene, and Yuhang Xie, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

[00:57:13] David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.