Quotes About Overconfidence

Predictably, psychologists who test police officers' ability to spot lies in a controlled setting find a big gap between their confidence and their skill. And that gap grows as officers become more experienced and they assume, not unreasonably, that their experience has made them better lie detectors. As a result, officers grow confident faster than they grow accurate, meaning they grow increasingly overconfident.

Research on calibration—how closely your confidence matches your accuracy—routinely finds people are too confident.10 But overconfidence is not an immutable law of human nature. Meteorologists generally do not suffer from it. Neither do seasoned bridge players. That's because both get clear, prompt feedback.

Danger breeds best on too much confidence.

Pride comes before a fall

Let's not be overconfident, we still have to count the votes.

If you get too big for your boots, if you've got big dreams, you're gonna get them broken or shattered.

It is like a disease to think that an invincible status has been achieved after being satisfied with the past successful operations.

He attended some lectures somewhere and imagines that the devil is no match for him.

Companies which get misled by their own success are sure to be blind sided.

Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences.

The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice.

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

The bat-and-ball problem is our first encounter with an observation that will be a recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

Overconfidence is another manifestation of WYSIATI: when we estimate a quantity, we rely on information that comes to mind and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind—perhaps because one never knew it—is impossible.

there are many pseudo-experts who have no idea that they do not know what they are doing (the illusion of validity), and that as a general proposition subjective confidence is commonly too high and often uninformative.

Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsigh

recurrent theme of this book: many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions.

overconfidence is a direct consequence of features of System 1 that can be tamed—but not vanquished. The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.

suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts.

Overconfidence: As the WYSIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence.

Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly," Tetlock writes.

But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns

We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

planning fallacy