Confidence often is misplaced
One of the common mistakes discussed in the excellent Decision Traps is the idea that you can trust a confident person more than one who isn’t confident. Mark Vonnegut describes what sometimes happens:
I started hunting wild mushrooms after an operation to save my left eye, a consequence of 27-inning August softball madness. My retina detached in protest of my being dehydrated and 52 and running around crashing into people. A week after the operation, I was allowed to walk around but was only supposed to look down.
Straight-out and without a lot of qualifiers, I should admit that I am not a careful person. I actually hoped that wild mushrooms might be helpful with my uncarefulness, that the stakes involved might have an alerting, focusing effect.
First you have to be scanning for mushrooms as you walk along. If you’re not looking for anything, maybe you won’t see anything. If you look for mushrooms, maybe you’ll see other things, but at least you’re looking — and then you find something mushroomlike. And here’s where I thought the carefulness would come in: I would be picking and maybe eating something that would either taste incredibly good or poison me.
I was so pleased with myself when I found what I thought were sweetbread mushrooms because they weren’t all chewed up by insects the way so many of the edibles were. When I was gnawing on this nondescript piece of crap that was supposed to be breadlike and delicate, it didn’t occur to me that I could have been wrong about the identity of the mushroom. I was going to write the authorities in question to tell them that the sweetbread mushroom had an indifferent taste and a disagreeable rubbery texture.
Fifteen minutes or so after eating the new mushroom, which I did not serve to my wife, thank God, my heart started racing, painful spasms seized the back of my throat and sweat started pouring off me. I remembered seeing a picture of a mushroom, one with a skull and bones under it, that was called the sweating mushroom. Funny name, I thought.
“I think I might have made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said softly.
“What’s that, dear?”
“I think I made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said too loudly. Had I been sure I had ingested a less-than-fatal dose, I would have just gone quietly to bed.
It didn’t help that I was on the staff of the hospital where I went to get my stomach pumped. If I had been thinking more clearly, I would have gone elsewhere and maybe used another name…
Continue reading. What’s amazing is that he publishes this story and probably still expects his patients to stay with him. I would find another doctor in a New York minute: a guy who risks his own life due to overconfidence seems likely to risk my life as a patient from the same cause.
