chrisvenus | Talking about confidence

Talking about confidence

I read something that suggested that finding out more about confidence from the point of view of others was helpful to building your own self-confidence. So here we go. I am at times very un-confident in myself so I am going to ask a few questions to get people going on the subject. If you want to add in more comments or questions then feel free. I have a vague feeling I did something similar before but now I'm copying from a book so it will be much better. Anonymous posting welcome if you don't want to put your name to your answers. :)

1) What do you think confidence is?

2) Where does confidence come from?

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?

and my own one for number 7:

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?

I will try to put up my own answers later but I don't have time right now.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Absolutely.

The issue here is partly that I am unusually unhappy with discussing anything in the abstract. I find it largely pointless. I tend to want to deal with specifics, because I don't accept that there is much meaning in theory, given that everything is a specific thing.

This is one of those things that those personality tests test. You know, the ones that tell you what your learning personality is, or whether you're thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving, etc. Some people like to think in terms of abstract or general principles, other people like to deal with specific situations. I am very firmly the latter. Discussions about general principles leave me incredibly frustrated with their imprecision. Realising that about myself (and realising that it's just a style of thought which other people don't necessarily share) helped me no end, just as realising that I learn by doing helped me no end.

You know, the ones that tell you what your learning personality is

Ah, yes, and which Power Ranger I am. ;-)

Some people like to think in terms of abstract or general principles, other people like to deal with specific situations.

I have real trouble with this as a dichotomy. I have a mathematician's mindset I suppose. I like to deal with everything at the most abstract possible level that's able to describe it. I suppose that has to count as pro-abstract really, but I can't stand vagueness. Something should only be abstracted if doing so doesn't lose any of the point being made.

Hm, we need some new terminology, I guess. I hate abstract, but love maths.
But it's not abstract in the sense that moral philosophy is abstract: it's incredibly precise. Perhaps what we're talking about is generalisation: the reason moral philosophy drives me up the wall is that it can only deal with generalities, and in my opinion generalities have nothing to do with actual moral decision-making. Maths doesn't deal with generalities because mathematical things follow laws in a way that psychomological and ethical things don't. So although it's abstract, there are no exceptions falling through the cracks.

Yep, exactly. So in fact I have very similar preferences to yours and... again run into linguistic trouble even trying to articulate this !

I think there are two things described as "generalisation":

1) Noting properties shared by disparate objects, articulating the properties, interacting with or reasoning about the objects in terms of those properties.

2) Noting groups of objects which are likely to have certain properties, or which express a particular property in differing degrees. Interacting with or reasoning about the objects in terms of those properties.

The former is analytical, has formal correctness as a rule of inference, and (empirically) works unless you make a mistake in your analysis. The latter leads to "categorical" statements with exceptions, relies on intuition for whether the exceptions "matter", and is logically unsound in that it can lead you to reason about an object in terms of a property which it does not actually have.

They're both pretty useful in daily life, depending how you prefer to think about different things. Language seems to be mostly built of type 2 generalisations. Mathematics attempts to be built exclusively of type 1 generalisations. Reasoning with type 2 generalisations is prone to arguments about the meaning of "socialism", or "fruitcake", or "dangerous dog", or whatever. Reasoning with type 1 generalisation is prone to not having the full information needed to get anywhere with certainty.

1) What do you think confidence is?

A limited belief in unknown facts, especially of the future:

"How confident are you that you can get this done by the end of the week?" -- "I'm pretty confident. If nothing unexpected happens it'll be done Thursday morning, but there might well be some minor thing I've missed".

"How confident are you that you make a good impression on people you meet?" -- "Not at all, I'm continually afraid that the next thing I say will humiliate me, or that they already dislike me".

"How confident are you that you passed the exam?" -- "Not sure. If they liked my second essay then it'll be fine, but that was a 50/50 gamble".

There is false confidence just as there is false belief, so one can be over-confident or under-confident either because of bad information or irrational effects.

Confidence also means self-confidence, which I think is about your confidence that what you're doing is the "right" (morally, tactically, or whatever) thing, and whether you'll be able to handle (emotionally, practically, or whatever) upcoming events.

2) Where does confidence come from?

I follow others here in saying empirical evidence, but that's not good enough to overcome irrational fears, or irrational over-confidence. So I'd say also there's a calmness of mind which allows people to proceed rationally (if not analytically, for those who aren't that kind of thinker), and which is also needed for a true feeling of confidence.

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?

To be "completely confident" of something means that you absolutely believe it is correct. The last thing you want at work, for example, is someone who was always completely confident they will meet their deadline. You know they'll be wrong eventually, and in the mean time you can't tell when their deadline is at risk and needs contingency planning.

I know (of) people who never admit that they could possibly make a mistake, and never appear to act with equivocation. I'm not sure whether they're confident, bluffing and/or deluded.

I suppose that it is possible to be completely confident that one's decisions and actions are always the best under the circumstances and given limited knowledge. Someone could believe that they will always do their best, either morally or in terms of whatever other outcomes they try to achieve.

As such, you could always be confident of your actions even where you're uncertain what that outcome will actually be (and hence not confident of your results). And you might be confident that emotionally you can handle anything, even if you concede that in a fistfight with Jet Li, your abilities will fail you.

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?

Someone who is hesitant, indecisive, or who keeps changing their mind is obviously thinking quite hard about what they're doing and is probably unsure of the correct approach. So while they might in the end come up with the right answer, they clearly aren't confident of it yet. Still, they might be confident of and comfortable with the fact that they have no confidence in their answer :-)

In social situations, someone who speaks willingly, and follows up on what they say, is confident that nothing too bad is going to happen as a result of that interaction. Someone who doesn't do those things is cautious or afraid of the situation.

Generally, if someone is willing to accept a penalty if they're wrong, then they're at least somewhat confident. But as cardinalsin very rightly says, bluffing does affect this.

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?

Depends what's at stake. When it's a matter of their confidence in something I want, or am planning to rely on, then perhaps frustrated at their inability to help me. Even angry, if I feel that they have a responsibility to be confident. "I can't say whether it'll be morning or afternoon" is a notorious case.

If it's that they're "not confident" socially in the sense of "shy", then usually I figure that I need to let them get to a topic or style of interaction that they're comfortable with, so I suppose I'm trying to feel sympathy.

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?

Confidence is both a state of knowledge and an emotion so I'd say no, it's inherently variable. A "happy person" doesn't always feel happy. But generally there are kinds of situation in which particular people are confident, and they can always feel confident in those. So you might have someone who is, for example, always confident he won't make a fool of himself chatting someone up in a bar.

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?

Holding a royal flush is being confident. Going all in is acting confident.

Interesting perspective.

Holding a royal flush is being confident. Going all in is acting confident.

Holding a royal flush is being lucky. It may result in you having a *feeling* of confidence, but that's not the same thing. And it can have no impact on confidence-in-the-sense-of-personality-trait. Eurch, so much imprecise language affecting this topic: 'confidence' means too many different things.

What I meant is that if you hold a royal flush then you are risking nothing on the hand. You will win (or at worst, I guess, share the pot). That's as confident as it's possible to be, objectively. Consequently, I think most people would also feel pretty confident playing with a royal flush.

Thinking about it more, you can of course blow a royal flush - you can appear too confident and scare everyone off. So there are still things to be insecure about in that situation. But there's absolutely nothing to lose by playing.

I wasn't considering how I'd got the royal flush in the first place. If I were to think to myself, "gosh, I know I have this royal flush, but can such amazing luck hold to the end of the hand?", then I'd describe that as an irrational effect undermining my confidence. Such irrational fears seem absurd when applied to a mathematical certainty like poker, but are quite common in real life. I think that confidence-as-a-personality-trait is the sum of such things, since generally it manifests as failing to feel confident in a situation where in fact the risks are non-existent or manageable.

I mean lack-of-confidence-as-a-personality-trait.

Confidence-as-a-personality-trait is not being undermined by unreasonable concerns. Over-confidence-as-a-personality-trait is the reverse of lack-of-confidence-as-a-personality-trait.

Holding a royal flush is being lucky.

Once I've got it, though, *lucky* is if someone else has a straight flush to King.

I suppose what I was getting at is that the way you were attributing the adjective 'confident' to the situation, not to the person. For example, you say: "You will win ... That's as confident as it's possible to be, objectively." and are thus making 'confident' something which is determined by the circumstances, a quality which belongs to the circumstances, not to the person. That's not the usual use of the word. 'Confident' is usually used to apply to a person. I don't think confidence can be comfortably applied 'objectively' - it's not about the facts, but about how a person feels about themselves (sometimes with particular reference to a certain situation, sometimes as a whole). Even when someone says 'I feel confident I will win because I have a royal flush' what they are describing with the word is not the situation, but how they feel at that moment - they feel confident of victory. That's *because* of their good hand, but it doesn't follow that it's a confident hand, or a confident situation.

Another demonstration that confidence is to do with the person not the circumstances is that confidence can be justified or unjustified. Someone's confidence is not determined by their actual success or probable success, it's just an emotion or attitude associated with their success-as-they-perceive-it.

Fair comments, and I agree that I have conflated two things. Having a royal flush is (assuming a little elementary deduction) an inherently confidence-inspiring situation. So I tried to use it to illustrate confidence: that which is associated such a situation. A royal flush is not itself confidence.

I suppose I should not have said: "You will win. That's as confident as it is possible to be", but "You will win. This will, I imagine, assuming that you know poker and think rationally, make you as confident as it is possible to be".

To be honest, I wasn't trying to define confidence using this example, since that already was question 1. I was more trying to illustrate how acting confident is different.

I don't think that the word "feeling" is necessary, although of course it commonly is used. I don't think "I feel confident" is any different from "I have confidence", and both are a risk-moderated version of "I have knowledge". There aren't "knowledgeable situations" in poker either, but if asked to illustrate knowledge I might say that "looking at your cards is knowledge". If you see what I mean.

To get back to your first comment on my post, I suppose I'd say the difference between confidence and the-personality-trait-confidence is that people with the-personality-trait-confidence are more able/likely to be confident about (positive) things. It's a lot like the difference between being happy right now, and being a happy person in general, and it's a natural correspondence.

I say "(positive) things", because it has just occurred to me that extreme pessimists are generally not described as being "confident", whereas by my definitions so far, they could be considered very confident, of a negative outcome. So there's another subjectivity there, which my definition should note, that having absolute belief in a negative outcome is considered "zero confidence" rather than "100% confidence". But even then it's fair to say that you're absolutely confident of your prediction.

Yes, as with knowledge and belief. A person's knowledge is not determined by actual facts, just facts-as-they-perceive-them.

The differences are that people have very strong intuition and emotion around risk, and that risk is not directly observable. So unjustified confidence levels (high or low) about easily measurable things are even more common and understandable than unjustified belief about easily measurable things. "Knowledge" is a prejudiced term in this respect: there's not really any such thing as "unjustified knowledge".

1) What do you think confidence is?
Confidence is beliving in and trusting yourself.

2) Where does confidence come from?
Realising that all the little flaws that you see in everything you do aren't seen by other people.

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?
No. In general, these days, I'm pretty bloody confident, but even I have low points, mostly late at night in the dark on my own. I think everyone does.

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?
Hmm. I don't know, I'm not good at that sort of thing. I find it something I generally learn about someone as I get to know them better.

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?
It depends on the person. For example: I have several friends who have confidence issues, with one I simply offer reassurance, with another I get frustrated as they never seem to take the good advice everyone gives them with a third who asks for advice in a sensible way, I always try to give it in an equally sensible way. Some generalisation in that answer.

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?
See 3. I very much doubt it.

and my own one for number 7:

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?
Acting confident is, I suspect, what quite a lot of us do, at least to start with, although you still doubt your abilities you get on with things anyway and hope.
Being confident can follow from acting confident, when you realise that by acting confident you've been able to get on and do something, and all the little problems and flaws you see in it aren't seen by everyone else and you realise that, actually, you've done well, and that you can actually do this, and maybe all those little problems and flaws don't matter.

Wow, I found those much harder to answer than I first thought, and I ended up being much more verbose on that last answer than what I wanted to be. Interesting.

Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as...
Parklife!

I don't think "I feel confident" is any different from "I have confidence", and both are a risk-moderated version of "I have knowledge".

This makes me think that you must be a hyperrational person. I would say that confidence is a long way from a risk-moderated version of "I have knowledge". I rarely feel confident, despite generally having good odds, and the degree to which I feel confident rarely bears much relation to the odds that I would attribute to a situation. Your sense of confidence, I assume, must correlate much more closely with your rationally attributed odds than mine does.

Not as much as you might think. Like I say, I think that the irrational fear causes the unjustified lack of confidence: I'm not so rational that my emotions have no effect at all on my beliefs.

I think what you're describing is what I said early on: "one can be over-confident or under-confident either because of bad information or irrational effects". I should add that it's possible to hold conflicting beliefs: one rational and another under the influence of fear, panic, or whatever else is going on.

In that case I think you can honestly say that you're confident of success, you expect it, you predict it, and so on. You can simultaneously feel that there's no chance, or feel non-specific dread, and not be confident at all. I'd say that's conflicting beliefs, rather than two different things only one of which is really "confidence". I guess (contrary to what I said before) one could be described as "having confidence" and the other as "feeling it".

If that doesn't correspond with your experience, then I'm not saying that you're "really" confident even though you feel that you aren't. Just that I don't think of the feeling itself as being 'confidencelessness', but as a fear which inhibits confidence. It's also possible for an assessment of low risk to inhibit fear (unless that's a hyperrational trait too...).

I think it's the same as the way that a prejudice can interfere with someone's ability to form rational beliefs based on their observations. It's pretty rare for someone to acknowledge a prejudice and still maintain it for long, but when it happens I think you probably get the same situation where you "know" something, but don't "feel it to be true".

I think it's not: Confidence (n.) A preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as Parklife, but: For the habitual voyeur of what is known as Parklife, confidence is a preference.

How very Calvinist. Is there a connection?

1) What do you think confidence is?
The belief that you can succeed, whether founded on reason, experience, optimism or self-deception.

2) Where does confidence come from?
See above. I think mine tends to come from the first two (I have done this before so I can again / I have done similar things, or even just things of similar difficulty so this should be analogous).

Oh, and beer. Those who knew me years ago will remember the beer.

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?
No. Not even after beer.

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?
They will be calm and decisive. This is on account of being confident and not needing to invoke excessive amounts of adrenaline / thought to achieve whatever they're doing. In line with the earlier comments about practising virtue it's amazing how much just 'taking some decisions' can instill confidence in someone / a team / whatever.

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?
Not at all confident. (see how this works)

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?
No, but I do think people develop a level of confidence that they tend to return to. Over time you can raise or lower this through reason, experience, optimism and self deception.

and my own one for number 7:

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?

Between thirty seconds and two minutes depending on the situation and your powers of self-deception.

Oh, and generating this many comments on a thread really should be good for your confidence. You ask great questions dude!

Hm. Not as far as I know, although a quick google reveals that he is is the first known source for the phrase 'Great Architect of the Universe'.

Pah! Those are mere details...

1) What do you think confidence is?

A feeling of ease with yourself and your situation.

2) Where does confidence come from?

Kindness to yourself.

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?

Yes and no. I know a couple of people who are totally at ease in any social situation they find themselves in. I suspect however that it's a mask for insecurity.

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?

Erm, observation?

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?

Fine. I try to put them at ease, but that can be quite hard sometimes.

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?

Nope. A confident person may often by quaking on the inside. The point is they don't like it show.

and my own one for number 7:

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?

If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it's fair to assume it's a duck.

In summary ... practice.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 2 of 3

Talking about confidence

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

ObHelpful

no subject

no subject

Re: ObHelpful

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: ObHelpful

no subject