Pedagogy

If you’re here for the game, visit this. Calibration Everyone knows that being overconfident can often lead you to making reckless, unnecessarily aggressive decisions, and being underconfident leads to not taking enough opportunities. This duality shows up everywhere in real life - from aspects like investing/business, where real money is at stake, to more personal matters like career progression and navigating interpersonal relationships. If we were always right about things, we could blindly believe in ourselves, and overconfidence would not exist. If we were completely clueless (for some definition of completely clueless), we would be better off asking a stochastic parrot to take our decisions for us. ...

This post was originally written on Codeforces; relevant discussion can be found here. Disclaimer: I am not an expert in the field of the psychology of learning and problem-solving, so take the following with a grain of salt. There is not much “scientific” evidence for this post, and the following is validated by personal experience and the experiences of people I know (who fall everywhere on the “success” spectrum — from greys to reds in competitive programming, from beginners in math to IMO gold medalists, and from people with zero research experience to people with monumental publications for their own fields). This post only covers one possible way of thinking about knowledge organization and retrieval that I have been using for the past decade or so, but there definitely will be other models that might work even better. Even though I just have a few courses worth of formal psychology experience, I still think the content of this post should be relevant to people involved with problem-solving. ...