Weekly I/O #3

I’m not sure, Boring is two-way street, Consciousness

“Weekly I/O” is inspired by Shane Parrish’s and Tim Ferris’s weekly newsletter. Haven’t figured out the exact form and purpose of this weekly, so let’s just take it as a writing practice first and we’ll see how it goes.

Here are some thoughts and notes I have this week:

1. Say I’m not sure more, because I think we confuse confidence with certainty.

We believe in order to be a confident, believable communicator, we must express things with certainty.
However, when you express the uncertainty, you can become a much more believable communicator.
Like when you say things like “I believe this thing to be true but just let you know I only look up to two articles on it.” That shows others that you are thoughtful and you thought about the process.

(From Podcast: The knowledge project #39)

This is definitely a controversial one. You can listen to the whole discourse here from 1:39:00.

I always admire people with this kind of characteristic (thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb). In the short run, say things with (fake) certainty due to lack of preparation/research may work. In the long run, showing you thought of the process makes you a more reliable person.

But still, there are differences between public and private communication. It’s hard to expect a presidential candidate to say “I’m not sure” with too many things.

2. Intellectual humility improves learning, creates hunger for information
(From Podcast: The knowledge project #39)

Same idea as the previous one. When saying things with certainty, other people become more unlikely to express their opinions to you, particularly those opinions they themselves are uncertain of.

If you say “I’m 60 percent sure”, then you leave at least 40 percent space for others' opinions.

3. There is no birth of consciousness without pain
(From Carl Jung)

4. When someone describes somebody else as boring, nothing shakes me up. It is a two-way street.

I used to think that if a conversation wasn’t going well, then I was the boring one. I put it on myself to be the one to carry the conversation on.
Now if the conversation isn’t connected that much, I’ll do my best to try to make it go somewhere and try to entertain myself from it if that completely fails.
But I no longer think of myself as being the bad conversationist in the pairs, cause I treat it more like a two-way street.

(From Podcast Not Overthinking #29)

From an interesting topic “Small Talk & Social Awkwardness”. I should relisten this episode.

They also talk about whether it’s okay to talk about “work” at social events, which I do all the time 😵

5. From a human being perspective, expectation management and setting up rules for communication should be regarded as the top priority when organizing an event with others.

However, in reality, we pay much more attention to other things such as what skills one possesses and therefore (s)he should do certain things.

(From a conversation with 晉宏 and thanks to 黃俊豪 for introducing me more about DT and the concept of expectation management.)