| > And then if you're wrong about those things, reflect on what led you to be more certain than you should have been and try to prevent it from happening again. This is counterproductive for people who have a fear of being wrong, which is what the article is about. Those people are already spending too much time reflecting on wrongness. Trying to prevent overconfident wrongness from happening is very likely to land them back in the camp of not speaking up, which is where they started. In fact, I'd be willing to bet there's a statistical advantage to being a flat-out narcissist and quickly convincing oneself that a correction was just an interlocutor's misapprehension of what the narcissist already knew.[1] Something like how Heads-Tails-Tails beats Heads-Tails-Heads in random coin toss sequences. If ending up wrong can double as the first step of being right, it accelerates the learning process. Meanwhile, students of your teachings would either: 1) fall behind as they speculate about the nature of recurring cognitive bias and overconfidence, and/or 2) introduce communication problems through compulsive hedging (probably compounded by said fear of being wrong) 1: I know a few non-narcissists who, for whatever reason, use this method. It's at most a mild annoyance, and they are vastly easier to communicate with than compulsive hedgers. (And obviously easier to communicate with than people who don't speak up at all for fear of being wrong.) |