Overconfidence is usually the mistake of experts, and we do give them a lot of power and authority. Plain and simple, incompetence is frustrating, but the people guilty of it usually can’t screw things up that bad. The people guilty of overconfidence can do much more damage.

Those who lack confidence, for example, routinely make all sorts of faulty assumptions and poor inferences, assuming that they lack the competence, charisma, or talent to succeed in their careers or relationships.

We all spend a lot of time complaining about incompetence, but as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a talk he gave at High Point University, overconfidence is the far bigger problem.

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

«Ignorance more often begets confidence than knowledge.»

...ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge...

Too little confidence, and you're unable to act; too much confidence, and you're unable to hear.

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.

We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

Most of my reputation is a product of exaggeration and ignorance.

For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe.

You foolish man, you do not understand your own foolish business.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect