Dunning-Kruger asymmetry. The less confident, more doubtful must always work to understand the ones more sure of themselves. Just like people living in cities often pay extra taxes. https://twitter.com/jillfilipovic/status/1325578732220932097

Doubt is good. It’s really the only signal the universe ever sends you that you’re on the right track, expanding your understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Not skepticism of what the outgroup says. Not suspicion that they’re cheating.

Doubt. Plain doubt.

In absolute form, Dunning-Kruger effect assumes an objective knowledge scale and tags higher confidence of lower knowledge as “false confidence”

In open-play learning, there is no scale. Just the doubt. And meta-doubt about whether you know anything. Relativistic D-K effect.

Doubt = like acceleration in general relativity.

This systematic orientation towards doubt (not the same as systematic doubt which is just mental bureaucracy) is an attack surface. If you’re already doubt-biased, it’s easier to FUD you. Solution is to deepen doubt below the shallow kind vulnerable to FUD.

Most FUD in political psyops focuses on undermining institutional sources of authority. This works on systematic doubt. Which, remember, is bureaucracy of the mind. But existential doubt is much more robust to FUD.

Standards like reproducibility, correct statistical inference, etc. are important checks on bullshit and embodiments of systematic doubt. But if that’s all you’re concerned with, you’ll merely be a good epistemic bureaucrat. Hanlon’s auror defending against malice and stupidity.

When you encounter a broadly confident person, ask what that confidence is rooted in. Typically they’re good at one narrow complex thing and have inappropriately extended confidence beyond that. Engage on the narrow complex thing if interesting, politely disengage elsewhere.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people find it actively painful to stay with doubt. They skip straight from the first sign of novelty or ambiguity to vigorous and energetic bureaucrat mode. They don’t stay in the liminal zone just hanging with the doubt.

Why bother? Why not just skip to your arsenal of doubt-smashing techniques like a stable genius? Why not immediately jump to Bayesian modeling, long bets, p-value-hacking snuffing, effect size ninja-ing? Why endure existential doubt like a masochist?

Because sometimes there will no nowhere to jump to. Nothing to do. Nothing in your arsenal of doubt-busting tools that you can systematically deploy. No relief from *doing* something.

Systematic doubt is doubt seen through the legibilixing lens of a doubt-busting cognitive mode.

This is why I’m wary of doubt-busting instinct. The sophisticated modern tools are in spirit not that different from the red string and apophenia of conspiracists. Both legibilize an uncomfortable and illegible feeling by giving you something to do. Something you can be good at.

Succumb too much, too often, and soon the only kind of doubt you’ll be capable of experiencing is the kind you can bust with one of the clever tools you’re skilled at deploying. You’ll become gut-blind to the existential kind. Which is where the bigger ahas lurk.

There’s a very natural and easy set of instinctive behaviors you’re already good at that help you stay with doubt rather than immediately jump to busting it: irony, absurdity, the usual stuff. My modest contribution to that anti-arsenal is embrace of mediocrity.

Irony is “seeing double” without succumbing to urge to yell “duck over rabbit, with 95% confidence”

absurdity is noticing map-territory glitches without feeling like resolving it. Just enjoying it.

Mediocrity is not tying identity and confidence to bring good at doubt-busting.

If you like sci-fi metaphors, these are all tricks for multiverse travel. Inhabiting multiple universes and timelines at once.