Overconfidence is a psychologically-generated distortion of perception consisting of an inflated estimation of one's future success. Because both economics and law usually encourage accurate and calculated estimates of risk, overconfidence is regarded to be detrimental to human judgment and it is denounced as a vice. When an assumption of risk is subsequently realized, the presence of overconfidence is thought to prove that the assumption of risk was ex ante unwarranted.

The main argument of this paper is that overconfidence is underrated. Overconfidence can have constructive value in a variety of situations in which people tend to display a hyperbolic discounting of future utility, which produces in turn inconsistencies in their preferences over time. Intuitively, by artificially raising the estimation of future rewards overconfidence can be instrumental if it offsets the inhibitory effects of exaggerated preference of present rewards. Thus it can produce greater incentive, greater perseverance, resolute performance, and consequently higher achievements. Examples of this effect are found in situations of negotiation, in the improved recovery rate from serious disease and in situations of violent confrontation or wars.

Because overconfidence can lead to positive outcomes, there is at times an incentive to manipulate the facts perceived by the decision maker in order to build up his confidence and increase the efficiency of the decision. These manipulations are a branch of the general theory of non-cooperative games with non-perfect information. We particularly draw attention to internal manipulations, performed by the same player between two points in time, where the former concerns the latter. These manipulations consist in constructive self-deceit and include, inter alia, selective memory, deliberate forgetfulness, and calculated inadvertence. In light of the constructive value of overconfidence, we regard these common mental practices as possibly rational and beneficial.

It follows that under some circumstances, and in particular where the assumption of calculated risk should be encouraged and the chilling effect of over-deterrence should be eschewed, a systematically erroneous assessment of the risk is a key to optimal behavior. Therefore, we criticize the common supposition, according to which an overconfident person should be deemed negligent even if his overconfidence proves useful. We further object to the common view, according to which an intended manipulation of memory should necessarily entail recklessness. For similar reasons, we argue that the law of complicity should acknowledge friendship and love as countervailing the need to combat crime, inasmuch as friendship and love are instrumental to self-esteem.

The Constructive Value of Overconfidence

What do you think you look like? And what do others think of you? A film about first impressions from artists Lenka Clayton and James Price.

Awesome.

Here's Looking At You // Current

Perhaps beyond the stage lights, a new group of younger intellectuals has taken shape. That is what one of my angrier critics, the New York-based freelancer Rick Perlstein claims. "A well-stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen" bright, talented, gutsy public intellectuals, he claims. But who are they? He doesn't say.

The Internet provides instant communication and quick access to vast resources, but has it altered the quality or content of intellectual discussions? Too many voices may cancel each other out.

Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers?

On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the MemeStreams thread with the longest temporal gap between recommendations, where the subsequent recommendation was created by memetic replication, not by coincidence (in which the second user had no awareness of the earlier post).

Big Brains, Small Impact

This is a digital age, one in which a wealth of accessible information empowers you, the citizen-consumer. But where is the information coming from? How accurate and unprocessed is it, really? Ask yourself this: how empowered do you feel debating a television screen or a newspaper?

Our task is to move the discussion away from talking heads and talking points, and give it back to you. That is Big Think's mission. In practice, this means that our information is truly interactive. When you log onto our site, you can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with todays leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy's views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar's assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring.

Big Think is yours. We are what you think.

Big Think - We Are What You Think

Mohsin Hamid, looking back on the process of writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

The time had come for me to decide what to do with my life, and where to do it. The choices I faced were confusing.

By the summer of 2001 I had produced a draft ... a stripped-down, utterly minimalist love story of a young Pakistani man in New York who is troubled by the notion that he is a modern-day janissary serving the empire of American corporatism.

People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.

My Reluctant Fundamentalist

On this New Year's Day, spare a thought for the hapless nerd. Clad in too-short, too-tight pants, armed with a pocket protector, glasses firmly taped together and pimples unpopped, the nerds of this nation most likely rang in the New Year with a rousing game of World of Warcraft. They probably didn't even hear the ball drop at midnight.

That is, if there really is such a thing as a nerd.

Contrast this with:

What is a nerd?

Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at UCSB, has concluded that nerdiness is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

See also:

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Ridicule That's Getting On Our Nerds

Jared Diamond:

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

Each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

Remember:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

What’s Your Consumption Factor?

The easiest way to get Dugg is to have a trivial idea.

Once having committed stupidity, it seemed preferable to remain consistently stupid until the bitter end. I would stick to my guns, even if they were pointed at my own head.

Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever.

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

Pakistan is the most urbanized country in South Asia.

"Look, this is a democracy," said one woman there who refused to be identified.

And so what kind of country do I want to live in? I want to live in the kind of country where a woman doesn't get slapped for wearing a "Kitty Not Happy" T-shirt.

Most of the essays in "Monkeyluv" are engaging. This one is a masterpiece.

Taking for granted the misery of the human condition, goth turns depression into an aesthetic, a semi-ironic pose — a perfect style for the awkward and self-conscious.

Something about our fast-paced, super consumerist society seems to have robbed the teaching vocation of the respect it deserves.

I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority.

Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways. Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive.

Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities.

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people’s liv... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Few Westerners will find it convenient to break the eight-solid-hours mold, but that tells you more about the kind of society we are than what our bodies and minds might really need.

Perchance to Dream

The Brits thought Americans prudes. But then the table turned.

Quick, Jeeves, Cover the Piano Legs!