The vice of OVER-CONFIDENCE

 

I've referrred to Derek Muller's consistently thought-provoking science channel, Verittasium, on the blog before - here and here.

His latest post last week was on the unfortunate human predilection towards being massively - and inappropriately - confident about our beliefs all the time. 

He starts by touching on the notorious Dunning-Kruger Effect (which identifies the tendency for less 'knowledgeable' or 'competent' people to most drastically over-estimate their abilities in self-evaluations), but goes on to discuss how EVERYONE tends to be massively over-confident - even when making a guess about a problem that we really don't know the answer to - and explains the concept of 'calibration', meaning the correlation between the confidence we have in our beliefs or predictions and their accuracy.

Playing FPL, of course, is a classic case of having to constantly make intelligent predictions of events in the football world that we can't actually know the outcomes of in advance; we are just making guesses about problems we don't know the answer to.

And such events in football all come with a high degree of uncertainty: even the great Erling Haaland, even when he's on such a great run of form as he has been so far this season, cannot be relied upon to always get a big haul against a 'weaker' opponent, nor indeed can he be relied upon to score at all in every single game.

'Calibration', in this sense, means that our confidence in a particular outcome should correlate exactly to its probability. 

Therefore, if our guessing was 'well calibrated', we wouldn't ever feel much more than 60% or 70% confident that Haaland, even in the form of his life, was going to score in any given game, and should never really be more than about 50% confident - or anywhere near that! - of him notching a brace; and confidence in him returning a hattrick cannot ever be more than a very, very low percentage - it is just too rare and unpredictable an event, even for a player like him (especially when Pep so often subs him off early!). 

And yet, somehow, we always seem to end up professing near-100% confidence in such predictions. That is a dangerous INSANITY.

It probably arises from our desire to feel good about ourselves all the time, and to look good in front of others. Anxiety about future outcomes, and doubt about the accuracy of our decisions are uncomfortable feelings, something we seek to suppress. And we imagine that other people will be more impressed by us, and be more likely to be swayed by our opinions if we express them with absolute assurance. Hence, once we've made a decision, we immediately reassure ourselves that it must - absolutely definitely - be correct, and that we can place near-100% confidence in it. But that just ain't so - EVER.

There are, I think, FOUR supplementary vices which follow on from this tendency to be over-confident in our choices.  1) It hurts harder, makes our disappointment and dissatisfaction all the sharper when we happen to be 'wrong'.  2) It makes us more stubborn: the disproof of an idea we had become so confident of, and so emotionally invested in, undermines our sense of self, and we struggle to accept that; the powerful impulse of denial drives us into thoughts such as, "I might have been wrong this week, but I'm bound to be right next time!" and into sticking by bad picks longer than we should.  3) It makes us less self-reflective, more resistant to the possibility of change in the short-term as well. (Many FPL decisions, such as the captaincy choice, playing a chip, the starting lineup and bench order, can be changed without cost within the gameweek, right up until the deadline. And late-breaking news might often give good cause to do so. But once we've made our choices for the week, we tend to be very reluctant to revisit them - for any reason.)  And 4) It makes us less grateful for our good fortune: when we get a great haul from a player, we always like to think, "I predicted that, I knew that was going to happen: I completely deserve every single point of that improbably huge return!"  Hmm, NO, you don't; you got LUCKY.

We would be much better off - certainly happier in our playing of the game, and probably more successful too (though these two things should not be inextricably correlated) - if we could break away from this habit of always wanting to be believe that we are absolutely correct in our decisions, that we know what the best FPL picks for the week are going to be. We don't; we're just guessing.