[Frost1x]

>Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief).

This is an interesting quote. From my experience and personal perspectives, many of the best researchers and scientists doubt themselves, a lot, and are typically hesitant to make definite statements in general. Research is inherently high risk and prone to failure... that's fundamental to what makes it research. If you work in research for awhile, you're wrong so often that it creates an environment of constant self-doubt and constant questioning of ideas.

On top of that, from my experience, the more I learn about an area or subject, the more I realize how little I knew before and the more I've discovered in terms of what I don't know. As the space of your knowledge grows, the surface area also increases and you eventually begin questioning things some fundamentally just accept while the deeper you dig, the more you know where the current frontiers of uncertainty and knowledge truly lie. Combine that with the understanding of where you started (knowing even less but thinking you knew more) and how in hindsight, you were so wrong.. leads to lower confidence in your assessments, even if most might consider you an expert.

[vikramkr]

I'll second that. In my anecdotal and limited experience, the outliers in successful entrepreneurship are the ones that project vulnerability/self-doubt, while the outliers in successful research are the ones that project a lack of self-doubt and create reality distortion fields around their work. The best of both seem to have self-confidence in their ability to succeed, and successful researchers seem confident that problems can be solved, and that they can solve them, but that seems to come with an embrace of uncertainty and an allowance for self doubt.

[lowdose]

> the outliers in successful entrepreneurship are the ones that project vulnerability/self-doubt,

Isn't it exactly the other way around? Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg have a reality distortion field. The outliers in entrepreneurship sell a new world that they are going to create. When Elon Musk started talking about electric cars and space travel to Mars 99% of the people thought he was batshit crazy.

[vikramkr]

I'm referring to the outliers among that group. The first level of outlier is being successful. The second level of outlier is being full of self doubt and successful

[lowdose]

Could you give some examples of these outliers?

I do not know any successful entrepreneurs that project vulnerability nor self-doubt. For a VC's that's a big no no. So you have made me curious and this is a sincere question.

[vikramkr]

I dont actually know of any off the top of my head, which is the point of my post. Successful, self doubting entrepreneurs seem rare, successful high arrogance researchers seem rare. I can think of a few executives that seem like decent people, but I cant think if anyone that doesnt act like they know all the answers

[ramraj07]

This is very true for _good researchers_. Unfortunately the grant system nowadays does not look kindly to self-doubt: your proposals have to be authoritative and confident for them to be funded; if there's any whiff of a "maybe" there it does not get funded anymore. Thus, professors who are over-confident (or, surprisingly often, even oblivious) about the potential pitfalls in their proposal are more likely to be funded, if they are even proposing something that's novel. Many researchers don't even bother writing the actual proposal, they write a proposal for a projct that's already half way done, so they know for sure it's going to work (and they can also provide preliminary data). When the money comes they will use it for a future project and then repeat the cycle applying for the grant for that project afterwards. Futile cycle to the drain unfortunately.

[robocat]

I love this quote from Jim Keller:

"I imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self-conception, and 98% of that is wrong."

Quote is at @1:23 (during the last half hour where the interview is mostly philosophical) of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA

[choppaface]

Perhaps the idea is self-belief is more “I think I can get it done” versus “I think I’m right.” A lot of good researchers will fail every which way very quickly until finally getting somewhere that once looked impossible.

In research, this process is usually a personal one (perhaps with a lot of discussion). But in industry, a CEO is giving orders and dragging a lot of people along with what feels wrong, and the CEO isn’t in a position to show deep self-doubt if it exists.

Not sure here about the message, but am sure the wording as Sam has chosen is very poor.

[visarga]

Too much confidence in predictions is also a problem in current day deep neural nets. They would try to make their probability estimates close to 0 or 1, even for uncertain cases.