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The relativity of mysterious overconfidence
Both doubt and confidence have benefits, but is there anything worthwhile in overconfidence?
It is the season of party conferences in Britain. Over the years I have lived here, my attitude towards them has evolved from interest to irritation, and on to indifference. What has been a constant throughout, though, is the overconfidence the political leaders exhibit at a conference: not a hint of doubt that the proposed policies will be effective, serve everyone and lead to electoral victory.
The conundrum of persistent bad decision-making
Of course, overconfidence is not something that just politicians exhibit. We are all occasionally guilty of being too certain for our own good, discovering later on that the viewpoint we thought was unassailable or the watertight course of action we undertook were not quite that unassailable or watertight as we thought. Overconfidence is a cognitive bias — one of the most pernicious ones, argues Nobel laureate and éminence grise of the behavioural sciences Daniel Kahneman. It is the one, given a magic wand, he would eliminate first. But he entertains no illusions: in the same article, he admits it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many…
