Mini Blog Post 26: Having an accurate self-image
Introduction
I care a lot about having true beliefs. This is an essential sub-skill to making good decisions that achieve my goals. And one extremely important thing to have true beliefs about is myself - I’m an input to every single decision that I made! And these beliefs can take many forms:
Understanding what I’m good at - what should I volunteer to do? What tasks can I leave little time for, and still get done? Which parts of my life can I just not worry about?
Understanding what I’m bad at - when should I seek advice or help? When should I give up on a task? Which tasks should I search for creative work-arounds to?
Understanding how I come across socially - which people do I get on well with? Who do I like? Do I give good first impressions? Do I need to meet new people in a structured environment?
Understanding my quirks - what makes me happy? What weird things make me feel anxious? What makes me feel truly relaxed?
Understanding my biases - am I overconfident? Do I get defensive? Do I adopt the beliefs of those around me too much?
I think this is an extremely important point, and worthy of a post, because having an accurate self-image is hard. Our minds are full of biases: insecurities, overconfidence, Imposter Syndrome, defensiveness, blind spots, planning fallacy, a desire to fit our existing self-image. Yet there are facts about me that exist in the world, not my mind - if I start a project, I’ll either finish it on schedule or not. So having true beliefs here is really useful!
A big underlying reason why this is hard is that it’s unpleasant to acknowledge some things about yourself - if I’m procrastinating, it’s really hard to confront that, because it’s far more pleasant to pretend that I’m not and continue. Because some part of me only considers a flaw real when I acknowledge it. I find it helpful to remind myself that “feeling real” is a property of my mind, while flaws have real consequences in the world - understanding a flaw is exciting, because it already exists. Understanding can only make things better, because now I can do something about it! If this prompts me to fix it, that’s amazing! But even if the flaw is an immutable part of myself, the circumstances I put myself in are not. Eg, it is valuable to me to know that I have low willpower, even if I can’t do anything about this, because this means I can set up systems so that I take the actions I want to anyway.
The default state of the world is that you have incorrect beliefs about yourself.
Be Grounded
As with all problems of bias and perception, the way to find truth is to be grounded. The default state of the world is that my opinions come from my intuitions. And when it comes to my self-image, my intuitions often suck. They do not completely suck - intuitions are significant evidence and should not be ignored. But it is important to couple them with other forms of evidence.
And be humble! Remember, the default state of the world is that you have incorrect beliefs. There is no shame to realising you were wrong about something - the false belief was holding you back, and you become stronger for discarding it. If your intuitions disagree with the evidence, and the evidence keeps accumulating, your intuitions are now the thing holding you back.
At this point, it’s important to remember what evidence really means: an observation that is more likely to have happened if the belief were true, than if the belief were not true. Everything is uncertain, everything is complicated. Evidence for a belief should not mean that you take it unquestioningly, but you should also not ignore the evidence!
You should always check the strength of the evidence! If I don’t think I get defensive, and a causal acquaintance accuses me of this, that’s weak evidence. If a close and trusted friend gently suggests I’m being defensive, that’s strong evidence.
An excellent source of evidence is historical data. How have things gone in the past? Are my past actions consistent with my beliefs? Notice when something weird happens - the feeling of surprise and confusion is a powerful signal that there’s something to be learned.
But one of the key lessons from science is that observational data is insufficient - often many hypotheses can be fit to the data. So you need to run experiments. Make predictions, and go out into the world and test them! If you think you’re good at learning new things, pick a random online course, spend an afternoon on it, and see whether you feel like you understand it at the end. Further, make concrete, advance predictions - it’s easy to explain any data you see, without realising you’re weaseling your way out of your original beliefs. Set yourself a concrete goal, like being able to spend 5 minutes explaining the course content coherently to a friend!
Another excellent source of grounding: other people’s opinions. Your mind is full of blind spots and biases. And so are other people’s! But they have a very different perspective, so their opinions provide significant evidence.
I find this extremely useful for resolving insecurities - my mind has a systematic bias there, that it’s very hard to overcome from the inside. So if, say, I give a talk and am anxious about how it went, I find it extremely valuable to get feedback from people. Because I know I suck at analysing this from the inside, and I care about the actual question - if I repeatedly give bad talks, I should probably stop giving talks! And because my intuitions are biased, other people’s opinions are much stronger evidence - I should basically replace my intuitions with the aggregate data. This also doubles as a useful quirk to be aware of. Anxiety can be efficiently resolved by seeking feedback, and so I should obviously do this, even at the cost of mildly bothering other people!
Once I’ve gathered evidence, a useful tool to remain grounded in future are policies. Often, I’m not wrong in random ways, I’m wrong in systematic ways. I suck at time estimates, and I always underestimate. This means that my intuitions are actually great evidence, just shouldn’t be taken at face value - doubling my time estimates makes them systematically more accurate. This is a simple rule I can follow to address systematic biases, without needing all of the effort of becoming properly grounded next time!
I find that we often already know a lot of our systematic biases, we just don’t react to them. So if you find this idea interesting, I recommend setting a 5 minute timer now, and listing policies you might find it useful to follow!
Navigating Social Norms
A further reason that forming an accurate self-image is hard is that a lot of social norms go against this - especially norms focused around modesty, arrogance, self-esteem and weirdness. It feels bad to acknowledge that I’m actually awesome at something, or that I suck at it and should stop trying. But if these are true, it’s really useful to know! These norms serve a valuable purpose, but should not hold you back from having accurate beliefs.
The main solution I have to this is to be grounded. Remind myself that I don’t care about arrogance or modesty - I want to have true beliefs. For example, I know that I’m good at maths! And I know that I’m good at giving talks! I have a large amount of empirical data for these beliefs, so I have confidence in them, and these are important inputs to my future actions (ie, I put myself in situations where I do maths and give talks). And I know that there are things I suck at! I’m pretty bad at motivating myself to do boring things, and rote memorisation. I tend to come across as fairly blunt and intense on first impressions. These are also useful things to know!
I think these norms have value - often arrogance manifests as a cognitive bias in favour of yourself, and a refusal to acknowledge evidence against this, and it is right that that is socially punished. And while I advocate for having these beliefs, I do not advocate for talking about them in most social situations (I make a special case for blog posts about arrogance and truth!). This can make other people feel insecure, without adding anything to you, and I think that’s a lot of the purpose of these norms. Tact is another valuable skill (and understanding if you are bad at tact is a useful belief to have!)
But I find that, if I’m not paying attention, this often bleeds into my own self-image, and affects my ability to make the right decisions. The default state of the world is that you do not have true beliefs. If I slip up in the constant fight against entropy, I will cease to have an accurate self-image. And that is not a cost I am willing to pay.
Feedback
I’ve found that an incredibly valuable way to form better beliefs is getting feedback from other people, and that’s what I’ll focus on for the rest of this post. One of my more public forms of weirdness (pre this blog) was having several public anonymous feedback forms about myself, this is something I value a lot! This is really, really useful, because it’s a great way to spot blind spots - this can surprise me, in a way that just introspecting rarely does. And it’s invaluable for calibrating myself about how I come across socially - other people’s perceptions are the grounding here.
Receiving feedback
There is a significant skill to receiving feedback well. There are two main failure modes:
Becoming defensive and rejecting the feedback
This is obviously terrible, this defeats the entire point of feedback.
I think the skill of receiving criticism well and learning from it is a valuable one, and in part I like seeking feedback as a way of practicing it!
Becoming insecure, and assuming the feedback is true, and feeling anxious about it
This is also terrible! Feedback is evidence, but often weak evidence! I’ve collected a lot of feedback over time, it is not consistent.
My main tool is to assume the feedback is true, and try to explain why that world makes sense. Fleshing out the hypothetical world in as much detail as I can. This is valuable, because it makes the possibility of the feedback being true a lot more concrete, and harder to reject out of hand. But it’s also a defence - if I flesh out the scenario and it feels weird and off, I feel comfortable rejecting it.
And then, if the feedback does feel compelling, I remain grounded, by asking other close friends whether they think the feedback makes sense. Note - ask “is this plausible” not “do you agree with it”, and be clear that you want honesty rather than emotional support!
The main value of feedback is additional data and ideas, which you check against your other ways of finding truth, not as something to blindly believe! See what you can learn from it, take it seriously, but only as a possible hypothesis about the world. And balancing between taking it seriously and being able to discard it is a difficult skill, but a learnable one.
Further, feedback is filtered through lens of being from somebody else’s point of view, which is a significant and systematic bias. For example, I know that I have a mediocre work ethic at best, and can only get stuff done with creativity. And sometimes people assume I must have a good work ethic, but this is a question on which I definitely trust my own data over other people’s perception! You need to correct for this bias, because the ultimate goal is to have true beliefs, not to agree with the feedback.
And remember that feedback is about figuring out what is true, which is very different from what your actions should be. True beliefs are one input, your values and goals are another. And all actions worth taking have some drawbacks! Knowing about a drawback is useful, because you can be aware of it and try to minimise it. But it shouldn’t stop you from taking the action at all! For example, I know that I can come across as intense on first meeting. And I consider this a downside, and a drawback, and one that I try to manage and minimise. But it is overwhelmingly worth it, if it can help me learn from conversations and form meaningful friendships.
Finally, bear in mind that giving feedback is often significant emotional labour! It takes time and effort to give good feedback, and it often feels uncomfortable to criticise people. I think that it’s good to learn how to take feedback well and constructively, in thanks for this, if nothing else.
And demonstrating that you take feedback well encourages it! If you want your friends to be able to tell you about your mistakes and blind spots, it’s important to reward that behaviour. This involves being able to take in constructively in your head, and showing that you’re listening. I try to always be grateful, and to take them seriously. And if I take concrete lessons and behaviour changes from it, to tell the other person about it! Thanks is a lot more meaningful when accompanied by specific details, concrete examples and actions.
Receiving feedback in person is especially useful (though more intense emotionally) because you can ensure you’ve understood it correctly. I always try to paraphrase back the feedback, to ensure I’ve understood it well - I rarely did the first time! This doubles as a way of demonstrating that you’re genuinely taking them seriously.
What good feedback looks like
There is also a significant skill to giving good feedback! Feedback involves converting an opinion into language, divorced from all of their context and nuance, and having it be converted into concepts in your mind, taking on all of your context and nuance. Misunderstandings are the default state of the world. All of the general skills of learning from conversations are useful here! Note that misunderstandings don’t make the feedback useless - it’s just weaker evidence, and you need to collect more of it.
The main points:
Be specific - avoid vague language, focus on specific things. This makes the feedback more believable and sincere, and more useful
Be concrete - give examples! This is another channel of communication, and majorly reduces understandings
Be actionable - it’s much easier to update on feedback when it includes next steps, and these are much harder to figure out for the recipient.
Focus on actions rather than enduring personality traits, things that can be changed. Or at least worked around, eg “you aren’t great at public speaking, and should try to give those roles to ___”
Demonstrate that you’re on the same team - be empathetic, show the feedback is about helping the recipient become stronger, not about tearing them down. I try to always couple feedback with a sincere compliment
If at all possible, give feedback in person, or give them a way to ask you for clarification, and show that you welcome this! Misunderstandings are the default state of the world, but are much more common in a monologue than a dialogue.
I think understanding what good feedback looks like is important as a skill in its own sake, this is a major source of value I can give to others, but also because this can help solicit genuinely useful feedback for myself!
How to get feedback
The final, and most important part of thinking about feedback, is figuring out how to get it! I try quite hard to show friends that I welcome feedback and honesty, but rarely get it. And the main reason for this is that there’s no reason to give feedback. You might think to give feedback on a specific action, or event, or if a flaw/virtue comes up, but the default state of the world is that it never comes up. There’s no trigger to stop and reflect and give meaningful feedback. So you won’t get much feedback unless you do something about it.
My main tool is to create a clear point in time where I explicitly ask for feedback - eg posting a feedback form about myself on my birthday and requesting feedback as a birthday present, or requesting it in advance of a self-improvement workshop. I find this works incredibly well - getting 35 and 20 bits of feedback respectively. Sending messages to friends explicitly requesting it also works well.
I used to be a fan of anonymous feedback forms for this, but I feel less enthused about that nowadays. Anonymity is valuable because it encourages unfiltered honesty, which I care about a lot, but I trust most of my friends to be capable of that anyway - they know I want that. And for feedback to be useful, it needs to be specific, concrete and actionable. I can often make feedback into this by asking the right questions, but I can’t if it’s anonymous. Worse, feedback is often made deliberately vague to preserve anonymity, making it approximately useless.
If you do this, I highly recommend explicitly asking for the kind of feedback you want! Always ask people to be specific, to give concrete examples, to give context, and to make things actionable. I find feedback of this form is very socially focused - how I come across, how people perceive me, first impressions I give, how others perceive me, etc. I think this is pretty valuable information! But if you want other information, it’s important to be clear about that - people giving feedback want to help you, so help them help you.
The value of feedback
At this point, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of getting feedback as not worth the effort - it’s a bother, it’s a bit weird to ask for, it doesn’t seem necessary. And there’s some merit to this! Giving feedback is emotional labour, and you should take asking for feedback seriously. But if you can cultivate the skill of receiving feedback well and constructively, I think this is a favour worth asking from your friends.
And if seeking feedback feels unnecessary, check whether you truly feel confident in how other people perceive you. It’s easy to confuse “never having really thought about it” with “not needing feedback” - if your thoughts on an aspect of yourself are confusing and vague, this can often feel like confidence in it from the inside. You don’t know enough to notice the open questions, so it doesn’t feel like there are any questions left to answer! I think that if you are uncertain about things like how others perceive you, feedback is incredibly useful - the less you already know, the more valuable feedback can be!
Personally I’ve found my experiments with feedback forms highly valuable - it’s strongly updated my impression of how I come across, and how I’ve changed over time, and identified a few blind spots. Most notably, as a result of one comment, I’ve started putting a lot more effort into thinking about how I dress and groom myself. Which, unexpectedly, has been a really positive development! I’ve developed a much better sense of my personal style, and feel much happier with my appearance. This was completely not what I expected to happen, but the entire point of seeking feedback is to expand your hypothesis space, and identify blind spots! If a development is expected, you probably didn’t need feedback in the first place.
Conclusion
I think that having an accurate self-image is incredibly valuable, and is a pretty important part of how I make life decisions. I hope my mindset and tools are somewhat useful! This is never something that can be perfectly accurate, and I’m constantly updating it as I change over time, and discover new evidence. But I’ve found my crappy partial model is still extremely useful, and has gotten much more useful over time. Having true beliefs is necessary for making the right decisions.
So, if the ideas in here have resonated with you, I strongly recommend explicitly asking people for feedback! Think through what feedback you want, what good feedback looks like, and ask your friends for it. Posting a public feedback form is something I’d tentatively endorse, but bold. One thing that is similarly useful, but feels much safer is just sending a message requesting feedback and sending it to all of your close friends! And if this doesn’t feel necessary, ask whether you feel like you currently get enough feedback. The point of the message is not because they aren’t willing to give you feedback, but because the default action is to never stop and give feedback. So think on what you can do to change that default, and create a trigger.
A closing note: I personally find feedback very motivating. And I find feedback has been incredibly useful whenever I’ve started something new, like teaching. It’s helped me to identify my flaws and fix them, ground myself, and substantially improved my self-confidence. And the most recent new thing I’ve started is blogging. This is the last post of my daily blogging commitment (though hopefully not the last post ever!) and so I’m relaxing my “no perfectionism or editing” rule. So, if you’ve been reading this blog, it would make me incredibly happy to hear what you’ve thought of it, and what you’ve gotten out of reading it! And I especially appreciate thoughts following the rules of good feedback! Specific examples of posts or ideas you’ve most enjoyed, concrete examples of beliefs you’ve changed, actionable ways things could have been clearer or more useful to you.
And thanks for reading! This has been a really fun project, and I hope to resume it (in a far less intense way…). And feedback is a great way to improve how I feel about the project, if you want to increase the chances of future blog posts ;)
