Confidence examines how social cues—like poker tells or con artist tactics—mislead us into judging competence and truth, from Bloomberg’s Omaha blunder to Trump’s debunked claims. Feynman’s skepticism contrasts with today’s overconfident misinformation, where bold assertions (e.g., Musk vs. Fauci) outpace evidence, eroding trust in digital interactions. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And I'm back today again with David Bloomberg.
How you doing, David?
Good, good.
Feeling pretty confident.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's very good.
Nice segue into our topic today, which we're going to talk about confidence.
And this isn't the mathematical confidence as in a confidence interval.
This is social confidence.
So confidence, really, I mean, it's a feature of human interaction that we use to judge things about other people.
In general, when we look at this thing, we are when a person is competent, they become confident.
And we often then, in a way that we don't even really realize, we often look for the existence of confidence to see how competent a person is at things.
And actually also kind of how truthful a person is in a lot of aspects.
And this is a thing that can be a useful tool, but it's also a thing that can lead us to the wrong conclusion quite a bit.
I have an interesting thought as soon as I'm thinking about this.
This relates directly back to the meta thinking that we talked about on a previous episode.
And I have a thought about this that Inuit tribes, when they are looking for fish, they don't know where to find fish.
They don't see fish, but they don't look for fish at all.
They look for birds that are feeding on the fish.
And in this way, we are doing the same thing in this way.
We are looking for confidence to see something about other features of a person.
And we're looking at something that's not the thing in order to see something else.
In the mongst all this complicated stuff allows us to get interrupted.
So let's get a first take.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as a poker player, especially.
But yeah, what's your first take on the topic?
Ah, my first take.
It's funny because you mentioned a poker player.
And, you know, one thing I will say is when I'm playing poker, I'm rarely terribly confident.
And it's something that'll get you in trouble is being too confident.
I remember one time I was playing against a friend of mine, actually, at a casino.
And I had a straight flush.
It was an Omaha game, so it's not, you know, impossible, obviously.
And it was a limit game, which means you can only bet so much.
So I kept raising and then he kept raising me back and I kept raising and he kept raising me back.
And I'm like, what is going on here?
And I was 100% confident.
And finally, he stopped raising, which I later realized was out of pity for me because I was so confident in my hand that I had neglected to notice there was a higher straight flush that could be made.
And he had it.
Right.
And so he was obviously a lot more confident because he had the absolute best hand, which I thought I had the best hand, but I just was overwhelmed and not paying attention well enough and let my confidence kind of run away from me.
We often see the same thing in Survivor, the other topic that I frequently bring up.
And just as we record it, just in the, as we record this, in the second to last week of the show, there was a player who said multiple times that his plan was foolproof.
It was a genius plan.
There was no way it could go wrong, which, of course, everyone listening, whether they watch Survivor or not, immediately knows means it went wrong.
Yeah.
It was not foolproof.
And he was supremely confident in one of his relationships and kind of forgot it was a game.
And the other person did not forget it was a game and turned on him.
And so, you know, there's just all these different ways where people can be so confident and still be so wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, that's interesting.
I mean, when I think about this, I think that confidence or some aspect of it must be part of all deceptive practices.
If you're attempting to deliberately deceive, some level of confidence has to be employed.
And of course, it can be very simple.
Like when I was not old enough to buy beer and I went to the place and I bought the beer anyway, and I just confidently placed the things on the counter and put the money there and dared them to do anything about it.
And they just took the money and walked into the store.
That's one example, right?
But as you put with poker, it must get very, very difficult because in some cases, you don't want to seem confident and you want to seem unsure.
And then you're using a different deceptive practice.
But attempting to downgrade your confidence must also be something players learn as they get into the game, right?
That has to be true, right?
Yeah, definitely.
And then, of course, we get into what we discussed the last time I was on, which was the multi-level thinking of, well, I'm going to act less confident.
But if he, you know, my opponent knows that sometimes I act less confident when I have a good hand, then they're going to realize I have a good hand and I should act more confident.
And it gets into all of that.
Yeah, I've always found that if you want to do something or be somewhere that maybe you shouldn't technically be, and I'm not talking about, you know, committing a crime or something like that.
But if you just like act like you're supposed to be there, that's most of the battle.
You know, so I mean, there have been times when it's like, no, your level isn't supposed to go to this area of the convention floor.
If I just walk through and, you know, and just don't even look like I'm checking to see if I should be there.
Yeah.
Most of the time, nobody stops you.
And so, you know, I do think that that comes up a lot in those situations where if you just act like you know what you're doing, then people will be like, oh, well, they must know.
And then when it goes to the deceptive practices like con games, as you mentioned, I won't say all of them necessarily require a level of that confidence, but a lot of them do.
I actually was briefly a member of a police organization that fights confidence crime.
Now, I have never been a police officer, but they gave me a free one-year membership because I gave a presentation at their annual meeting.
And that presentation was on psychic cons.
And, you know, it's as a side note, it's truly astonishing how much money these criminals can get by pretending to have powers, convincing their victims that money is the way to solve their problems.
There's a curse on them, whatever.
Obviously, in those sorts of con games, yeah, they have to be absolutely confident and convincing.
Yes, I looked into the crystal ball.
Yeah, I spoke to a spirit.
It told me you are cursed.
The only way that we can get rid of the curse is money is the root of all evil.
And so you must bring me all your computer.
Right.
You must bring me this money and I will cleanse it for you.
I will bury it at the cemetery at midnight or whatever.
And they're not cleansing the money.
They're cleaning out their victim.
And so, yeah, that type of con game, obviously, they have to be very confident.
There are other types where it's really a matter of keeping the victim off balance, like the grandchild scam where someone calls up an older person and says, I have your grandson here in Mexico.
He came to visit.
I have kidnapped him.
You will wire me $50,000 or you'll never see him again.
Yeah, right.
And don't you, you know, don't tell anyone else, don't tell his parents because he wasn't supposed to be here or something.
I think I'm actually mixing a couple of cons there.
But the point is it's hitting them emotionally hard and fast rather than, you know, being confident, gaining the confidence of the victim.
Yeah.
But when I look at this, I think it seems to me that confidence directly affects our level of trust we have with other people.
Like when we talk to people and they're confident in the things they say, it can be difficult to move around that.
And this, this confidence comes up to me a lot with, you know, misinformation, conspiracy hypothesis stuff.
And not even that.
I knew a guy in high school who was so confident.
He could say anything.
He really could.
He'd try to tell me all kinds of stuff.
He'd try to tell me things like, you burn helium in a hot air balloon to make it go up.
And I tell him, helium doesn't burn.
Like, no, no, you burn helium.
I done it.
No, that's not possible.
It doesn't happen.
Like, you know, it's, but he was convinced and he knew and he was wrong, but he was so confident in being wrong that it was difficult for anyone who didn't have the, you know, scientific knowledge of why it wouldn't happen to ever confront that.
And it was baffling to see that even when you'd show him, he would still double down.
I mean, this was back in the 90s before most people even knew about conspiracy life, but it was, he just had this, this ability and he was just so confident in everything that he thought he knew that he would just always double down on it, always.
And that that was really difficult to get around.
I mean, it was also difficult to have some conversations with him.
But I mean, he had other redeeming qualities.
But you mentioned con artists.
They confidence scams are situations where the con artist is creating a believable situation that allows them a level of access they wouldn't normally have.
I watched a show.
I think it might have been on HBO, maybe.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm getting that wrong, but it was called Slippery Pete.
No, Sneaky Pete.
Sneaky Pete was what it was called.
And it was all about this con artist.
And it was a really, it had three seasons.
It was a really great show.
I just binged it a couple of months ago.
And it was really interesting to watch all of the things that he gets up to on the show that he's just bold-faced lying almost all of the time, but almost always he's including some truths in there because that helps, right?
And confidence is what's allowing them to do all of that.
That's most of the weight of the magic is being carried through in them confidently declaring something that you can't immediately say is untrue.
I mean, that's just as true with con artists as it is with people spreading conspiracies.
They very confidently say the thing, and you don't, you can't immediately refute it.
So you have to either be as confident as them in it in that moment, or you have to accept what they say.
And that's part of our world right now.
We're seeing that all the time in conversations everywhere outside the internet.
I mean, these all these things are kind of being spread on the internet, but they're happening everywhere else as well.
And I know that you've had a lot of interactions with the conspiracy-minded.
I've interviewed a few people who've left that space on this podcast.
Those were interesting interviews.
And it's interesting to see that they were taken in.
I mean, they were taken in by things.
And in some cases, I think in the one case, Lydia, she said that she was mostly taken in by fear of vaccines and their potential ill effects.
I mean, all she wanted was for her family to be safe and healthy.
And that's terrible.
But for Brent, when he talked about it, he talked a lot about the delivery of the people who are doing the presenting.
And that has to be all in confidence.
That has to be all, you know, if they went up there and they were nervous and fidgeting and they were checking their notes all the time and double checking everything.
I mean, double checking everything should be a sign that they're getting it right.
But we would normally see it as a sign that they don't know what they're talking about, right?
And to confidently say a lie is going to be more powerful than to double check the truth.
That's a thing we have to deal with in our world.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
I mean, obviously things have changed over the years.
You know, it used to be someone could say something confidently and be wrong and you didn't have a way to fact check them right away.
Now you whip out your phone and you're like, no, that's not true at all.
And if it's a normal everyday fact, then they're probably not going to fight too much.
Like I was, you know, speaking of poker games, we had one guy who was all full of bluster and he was, he was definitely a know-it-all.
And he confidently stated that tanks could go some ridiculous speed, like 100 miles an hour or some ridiculously high speed, 150, 200, whatever.
And we were like, I don't think so.
And we looked it up and we're like, no, look, it says right here.
He's like, no, no, no, I know for sure.
I'm going to call my friend who used to drive a tank and he's, he'll tell you.
So he calls his friend on the phone and we can only hear one end of the conversation.
He says, well, I'm here with these people and they don't believe that, you know, a tank can go whatever speed it was.
And he goes, oh, are you sure?
Are you positive?
Well, I thought it could.
What?
You know, and so you could tell he's just getting shot down by his own friend in real time.
Right.
And since he had helped this friend up as the expert, there wasn't much place for him to go at that point.
But there are other people who, yeah, they won't back down.
And a lot of people won't say anything because it's just not polite to argue.
If you're together for a dinner amongst friends, are you really going to get into the argument about how fast a tank goes?
Or are you just going to blow it off?
Right.
And, you know, if other people hadn't had experiences with this guy, being a know-it-all, being a wrong know-it-all before, then probably nobody would have said anything.
The problem is that nowadays, online, fact-checking among some people has become like a vile thing to do.
Like I was on my conspiracy cousin's Facebook page, and she at the time was, I don't know, had posted some ridiculous conspiracy or another.
And I fact-checked it.
And immediately I was jumped on by her and her buddies and, you know, told that, you know, one of them said something derogatory about fact-checking, like fact-checking isn't real or something like that.
Like basically, they didn't believe any of the obvious facts or the sites that I had used or anything else.
It's like I'm using, you know, four different major media sources.
Oh, you're using the MSM, the mainstream media.
Yeah.
I use Snopes.
Oh, you're using the biased Snopes.
You know, whatever it was.
And they were literally derogatory comments about fact-checking.
They were all so certain, so confident in their beliefs that the facts just would not interfere.
And I think that goes all the way to the top of the conspiracy mongers.
And, you know, if we think back to when Trump was first announcing he was running and he started to build up like a boulder running down, rolling down a hill.
One reason I remember that people were drawn to him was that no matter what he said, he was absolutely confident in how he said it.
And that hasn't changed.
Yeah.
You know, he never hesitates.
He never doubts.
It doesn't matter how ridiculous the statement is, he will say it.
Yeah.
And people will be like, wow, I want to, you know, follow that man because he says what's on his mind.
He stands for what he believes in.
And you're like, yeah, but what he believes in is wrong.
Well, that part didn't matter to them.
Yeah.
They wanted to follow the man who believed what he was saying.
Yeah, that's true.
And his level of confidence was, I mean, when I described my friend who in high school who declared that helium burns in hot air balloons, that's the person I thought of a lot when I thought about Trump, because he would never be convinced by anything and he would just double write down and say, no, absolutely this or whatever.
And it would never be a scientific fact.
It would be, it would all a social interaction level that was trying to make it uncomfortable to oppose him or oppose whatever thought he'd put into the space rather than about an appeal to reality, I would call it, which is that, you know, you might point out the scientific reason why a thing can't happen or something else is really going on, but the social influence overpowers that pretty quickly.
And I, I mean, that's an interesting thing that, I mean, that's another way that confidence is being used as a way to push us to one side.
The idea that a confident leader could drive a nation over a cliff and everyone would be happy doing it.
Well, not everyone, but well, yeah.
I mean, what is the worst thing almost that you can say about another politician?
It's calling them a flip-flopper.
You know, that gets thrown out like a huge insult.
Like, oh, they changed their mind.
They're a flip-flopper.
When really, if new information presents itself or you educate yourself, you should change your mind.
That should be applauded.
You know, some people point at Biden and say, well, he used to be anti-abortion.
He used to be anti-gay marriage.
Okay, but he's not now.
Yeah.
You know, for whatever reason, whether it was politically more expedient at the time for him or whether he has evolved in his viewpoints, like many people have over the past several decades.
You know, I mean, there's, there's a reason that they were able to pass the more, the recent, I can't remember the name of it, the new marriage act that Defensive Marriage Act.
Yeah.
Yes.
It was, yeah.
And even got some Republicans on board because the way people think has slowly shifted.
And it doesn't make you a flip-flopper.
It doesn't make you bad.
It means that you have learned.
And that's something that we should always strive for.
Yeah.
So I have one more note on this that I'd like to kind of go over because when I was really thinking about it, this was this seemed really interesting to me.
Most of the social cues we use to judge confidence are exactly that.
Social cues, like we look at people as they're speaking and we judge all kinds of things about what they're doing while they're speaking.
And, you know, their voice, how confident they are when they speak is, you know, all those little factors in their voice.
But most of our interactions now are happening online in text only.
And none of those social cues are occurring.
So it's almost all of the evolutionary work that's been done for us to judge each other's level of confidence is totally useless in this space.
So it's, it's like a world that we have not evolved to work in.
And when we think about confidence, it's especially a poor place to judge any kind of confidence.
I mean, how do you tell how nervously or hesitantly someone typed a tweet about something, right?
You have no idea.
You can't, you know, as long as their words are arranged a certain way, that tells you as much as you're ever going to know.
And they could have any state of mind when they put it, right?
Right.
And so I think that this is like skewing or like scrambling or maybe even like decalibrating slowly some of our sense of how we judge this interaction, how we judge these things.
And that maybe this is leading to a generally lower level of trust with everything in our world as our world becomes more digital.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Is this, how does this grab you?
That is not something I've thought of.
I know that certainly it can be difficult to tell, more difficult to tell intention or sarcasm, other things like that, you know, which is where, especially for people who don't like to use emojis, for example.
And, you know, confidence, it seems to me anyone can feign confidence more easily online.
Yeah.
And sometimes, honestly, that might be better because, like, you know, to take it a different direction, something I had thought about earlier, sometimes in a court of law, witnesses are judged based on their confidence.
Yeah.
But that doesn't make them any more right.
However, jurors, by their very nature, as human beings, think, oh, well, that guy's confident that he saw this person walk across the street towards where the murder happened.
So that must, he must be right.
Their level of truthfulness is directly being judged by their confidence.
Yeah.
Right, right.
And the person may be truthful as far as they remember it, but that doesn't make them right.
But then you have the person who would probably be more like me if I were being honest, saying, ah, it was dark.
I didn't have a really good view.
I think it was him, but I'm not sure.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're going to look at that and say, oh, well, this person isn't very confident at all.
And I try to portray the same thing online.
Like, if I say something has happened, I'm going to put in modifiers.
Well, I think this is, or it may have been, or probably.
Yeah.
And so even online, even in areas where I consider myself an expert, I always double check things.
Other people don't bother.
No.
Other people are just so confident that they will go on there and state it.
And then if they're proven wrong, they're like, oh, I was just joking.
You know, I mean, if they're the type who will admit it.
You know, the other types are the ones you mentioned, the ones who will double down.
Yeah.
Your information is bad and my information is good, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, literally right now we have Elon Musk spreading baseless conspiracies about Dr. Fauci, among other things.
You know, just saying straight out, he lied to Congress.
He funded gain of function research that killed millions of people.
Yeah.
I mean, it's totally fake.
It is totally a very right-wing, almost QAnon level conspiracy belief, but Musk has decided it's true.
So he's going to confidently state that it's true.
Yeah.
And even literally when a senator responded to him and said, hey, do you want to think about this a little bit?
He was like, no, this is the way it is.
The senator happened to be an astronaut, by the way, too.
He's not just some, you know, schmo off the street.
Yeah.
I think this is also how we came to have alternative facts.
We had people who were just stating things with extreme confidence, and that's all there was to it.
President Trump's inauguration was the biggest and most watched event in history.
And no one is allowed to say otherwise because it upsets the president.
Yeah.
And then on the other hand, you have people who aren't that way who, you know, I'm sure you've heard the term imposter syndrome.
Yeah.
And I think many people find themselves having this, whether they recognize the term or not.
And I think that it's, I mean, in my non-psychologist opinion, I think it's kind of healthy because it makes you question yourself.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I started at my job.
So I have recently retired after more than three decades.
And when I started at my job, you know, there were certain people that were like, ooh, they were the experts.
And as I progressed in my job, one day I just kind of looked around and realized, oh, hell, I'm one of the experts now.
How did that happen?
And even so, I still felt like I would question myself.
Like, am I really the expert in this?
When it was clear that I was.
But it's interesting because one day I was having a conversation with my then boss when at the time we were friendly.
We had a falling out just before I retired in part because she was sure she was right about everything.
But at the time, I mentioned something about imposter syndrome and she looked at me like I was speaking Martian.
You know, she had never heard of it and she had certainly never felt it.
She was always confident.
She always believed that she was right and there were just no two ways about it.
And so it was just interesting to me.
At the time, I kind of shrugged it off.
Now I look back and go, yep.
And it's funny because I see, I mean, she certainly know Elon Musk, but you know, there's some features in common in their management styles, let me say.
Just maybe I should just point out for anyone who doesn't know what imposter syndrome is.
Now that we've talked about it for several minutes.
Oh, yeah.
It's the experience where you feel it's a, it's a level of lack of confidence, really, where you feel like you should know something, but you don't really feel confident enough to say to yourself that you really know it.
So you feel that other people will expect you to be good at it, but you don't really feel confident to be good at it.
So you feel like an imposter in your spot, like you're, you're about to do the speech about all the great things that thing X is, and you don't feel like you know enough about thing X and everyone's going to see right through you as a as an imposter, right?
Yeah.
And it's funny because it seems to me that the people who most often feel that are the people who should least often feel it.
Again, totally non-psychologist here.
I haven't done studies.
It's just in my own, in my own life, that's the way it seems.
Like the people who question themselves are the ones who don't need to, but it's healthy to question yourself.
Otherwise, you end up like the people we're talking about, who are so confident that they don't allow anyone to, you know, they don't question themselves, even when it's clear that they should.
Yeah.
You know, Trump, Trump could have looked at that crowd size and clearly it was not a big crowd, but no, in his mind, it was.
Faking it is the next best thing, though, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think the way I see it, I think it's related to, and this, this, you know, you tell me this may be a whole other episode on its own here, but I think it's related to how familiar a person is with science and the scientific method, or maybe people who think this way get into science, because too many people don't understand what science is.
It's not just like a law book of facts.
It's a process.
It's not a dogma that you have to follow.
Right.
And the process means being wrong a lot.
Yeah.
You know, and that's something you'll often see as something thrown at scientists.
Like, oh, you're just saying that because that's what, you know, you want to protect your science.
You know, you want to protect the way that what you've been saying.
No.
Like science is a narrative or something, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Science is a constant process of trying to disprove itself.
The most famous people are not those who say, hey, I did an experiment and it showed that other guy was right.
I mean, unless it's like some, you know, big deal, like someone confirming something that Einstein had thought might be right.
But the ones who say, hey, I did an experiment and it proves that the way we were thinking about this topic was wrong and we have to go back and rethink it.
That's what is great in science.
That's what everybody strives for is to discover something new.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's a process for that.
And what I might point out is that I said earlier that the next best thing was to fake it.
Well, when you're putting forth something to disprove something, to show something new, if you don't actually have any proof, the best thing to do is fake it.
I think that's a thing that we're seeing a lot of in our information space.
Yeah, and that's another thing that the process of science can deal with that too, if people are willing to listen to it.
Yeah, if you're not willing to listen, if you're like one of my conspiracy cousin and her friends, and you're not willing to listen, then it doesn't matter.
All the science in the world isn't going to change anything.
Yeah, waving your hand and just declaring that all that information is garbage and your information is right makes you God in your universe, but it doesn't make you living in a universe of reality.
Yeah.
And the other thing is that facts on the ground change.
And really, all we have to do is look at how COVID has gone.
Because initially, it seemed like the vaccines would prevent most illness, as well as making the illness less severe.
But then the virus evolved and evolved again and again and again.
And it can now often, very often, get around the vaccines.
Yeah.
The vaccines are still good at preventing, very good at preventing severe illness.
Yeah.
But they don't do what was initially hoped they would do, like other vaccines do.
And, you know, there are still people out there yelling that, oh, those scientists, they said everything would be fine after the vaccine came.
Yeah.
Well, based on the knowledge at the time, that was true.
But things change.
Answers are complicated.
Life is complicated.
Biology is complicated.
Yeah.
And too many people don't want complicated.
They want confident.
Yeah.
They want someone to confidently tell them everything's going to be fine.
The answer is simple.
And all you have to do is follow my lead.
Yeah.
And it gets back to a story I think I told on a previous podcast about some creationists I was talking to, and they were like, You show me where it proves in one paper that evolution is true.
And it's like, well, there's not one paper.
There's the whole bulk of science.
But because their book said the world was created in six days, okay, there it is.
One sentence or, you know, a few sentences.
There you have it.
That's what they wanted, but that's not what science is going to give them.
You know, a couple of quotes came across my Twitter timeline with good, good timing recently.
And one of them is from Richard Feynman.
And he said, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing.
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure about anything.
Yeah.
Now, this is one of the great scientists of our age.
Yeah.
And he's talking, he's extolling the value of uncertainty.
But of course, that's not what certain people want to hear.
They're like, no, no, we want certainty, but you can't get certainty.
Another one came from the Thinking Is Power account on Twitter, which she is also a scientist.
I just don't know her name off the top of my head.
And she said, uncertainty may be comfortable, but certainty is an illusion.
Avoid the false dichotomy by proportioning your acceptance on a spectrum from zero to 100%, but try to avoid either extreme.
Then move your confidence along the spectrum with evidence.
And so, you know, I just think those were appropriate.
I don't know.
We have a good record here where you give me a topic and then all of a sudden it pops up on my Twitter timeline.
Probably it's happening.
All those things are happening all the time.
And I just noticed them after you're like, hey, let's talk about this.
Right.
Well, I think we're going to wrap it up here.
And I'll let everyone know that I'm going to be confident and I'm going to tell everyone that they should listen to this podcast every week and share it to everyone they know, get them to listen to it as well.
And the answers will be simple.
And all you have to do is follow my lead.
So now you're a cult leader.
I see how it goes.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's what it takes, David.
Well, I am confident that, you know, people have enjoyed this conversation, I hope.
And, you know, I mentioned Twitter a couple of times.
For now, anyway, I'm still there at David Bloomberg.
And I'm not confident about how long that'll last, but we'll see.
We'll ride it out for now.
Yeah, I'm interested to be a part of the dumpster fire that it becomes.