You Are Probably Overconfident. (If You Skip This, Doubly So.)

When I lived in the mountains of Utah, I used to ski in the backcountry often. This is not resort skiing, and there is no patrol checking for avalanche risk, so assessing that risk becomes your own responsibility. It is an imprecise science, and there is always a chance you’ll get it wrong.

But the more my friends and I skied, the more certain we were of our ability to get it right. Here’s what happened over and over again:

1. We’d get to a slope, assess the risk and decide to ski.

2. We’d get to the bottom safe and sound.

3. We’d pat ourselves on the back for being so good at judging avalanche danger.

4. Repeat.

You don’t have to know much about backcountry skiing to imagine how dangerous a feedback loop like this can be. We were attributing a positive outcome to our skill, when it just as likely could have been (and probably was) luck.

…

Just look at Daniel Kahneman. The guy won a Nobel Prize in economics for research into these exact biases. You know how he responded when an interviewer asked if he was less likely to make poor decisions because of his work? “Not at all,” he said. “And furthermore, I have to confess, I’m also very overconfident. Even that I haven’t learned. It’s hard to get rid of those things.”

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The New York Times