Talking about confidence

[chrisvenus]

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.

Comments

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

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.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

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

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

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.