Be Less Confident

Don’t fall for the confidence trap

Of all the unfortunate aspects of the way we conduct discourse, one of the most infuriating is our valorization of confidence, both intellectual and ethical. If you are more confident, you are likely to be more persuasive, appear more informed, signal that you are worth listening to, and generally give people the impression that you are quite clever. If you were to ask me, prudentially, whether you should appear more or less confident, then in almost every situation, I would be forced to reply “you should be more confident”.

This is a real shame, because while the appearance of confidence is socially advantageous, it is often epistemically, philosophically, and ethically limiting. So I want to argue that you should be less confident, although with some very important provisos.