Steelmanning to Build Confidence

What prompted me to write this article? I just felt that I had something worth saying. Simple enough, right?

Not quite. I’ve long had things worth saying. What held me (and I suspect countless others) back was a sense that I wasn’t the right person to say them. This feeling tends to manifest less as apathy rather than anxiety. Imposter syndrome not by inner voices screaming of your inadequacy, but by a fear of your thoughts being unoriginal. Amalgams of amalgams of books, newspapers, advice, and articles like this one. It’s a defeatist corruption of the efficient market hypothesis, plucked from its economic context and armed to attack the psyche. If your idea were worth anything, it would have been said or even implemented already.

We easily find those thoughts laughable. Yet we still act as if we believed them. I’d wager that the fear of not being the right person to say something is what holds many tongues in, for instance, your average workplace meeting. The efficient thought hypothesis casts a shadow that we tend to ignore to maintain a sense of normalcy. We ignore it as we do with climate change, much of the news media, or the fear that you left your oven on and the front door unlocked back at home.

It’s as if we’d been attacking a strawman of those thoughts. We need to do the opposite and steelman those thoughts to build deeper defenses against them.

I’ll give an example from my own life. Even as I talked to media outlets about being on the autism spectrum, that feeling nagged me despite my rational mind’s efforts to contain it. I thought:

“Aren’t there better autistic people to talk about their experiences? Those who had to deal with adversities that I didn’t, have accomplished more than I have for the betterment of society, or both?”

?Ridiculous, I know. But if you look past the absurdity, a question emerges: how have I and so many others have failed to fully put these preoccupations to rest? How can we repeat to ourselves that our ideas and voice matter, yet we struggle to live those words? My thesis: something I will call internalized credentialism.

Internalized Credentialism: The Authority-Loving Monkey in our Brains

?Our definition of credentials does include the traditional titles and email signatures. But they come also in softer forms. Soft credentials hide under the broad umbrella of social and professional reputation.

The more credentials one has, the heavier the weight their words tend to carry. What puts the -ism in credentialism is that we mistake the style for the substance. The truth value of something said depends more on the credentials of whoever says it rather and less on any objective reality. It's a mental shortcut when we don't have the time, resources, or willpower to do our due diligence: trust the experts. A convenient and often necessary one, at that.

Credentialism becomes internalized when it becomes so deeply ingrained that we can sincerely deny believing in it. So much so that we can judge ideas by the credentials of whoever utters them while repeating to ourselves: “Good ideas can come from anywhere.” The message we send is that your rank should affect how loud your opinion gets to be. A higher rank implies greater experience and wisdom, which means better judgment.

There is a comforting familiarity about the anecdote of the CEO learning from the janitor, or of the fresh employee speaking up at a meeting and wowing the most senior staff. It’s the perfect anodyne. These stories suppress feelings of insecurity about our place in any social pecking order. And for those of us with high status, we feel morally protected by their emphasis on the importance of listening to everyone, even if they might be considered below you (not by you, of course!).

You might be able to pick up the scent of a pessimistic turn coming by this point. Oncoming run-on sentences about how hierarchy is still alive and well, no matter how egalitarian we might think ourselves. A breathless crusade of words to chastise us all on our failure to live up to the morals of those stories.

But a blind charge at the hypocrisy is the wrong response. We must locate the weakness in its armor. That starts with recalling that internalized credentialism tells you that your thoughts might best be said instead by someone more experienced, eloquent, or even competent. Of course, it is ridiculous to wait for someone to say something you have in mind. That’s part of what makes it clear that there is no right person to say what you want to say.

That’s also why the good news is that once you ask yourself who the right person is, it’s easy to break through the facade. The answer will almost certainly involve a lot of equivocation. Dig deeply enough and you will find some questionable-at-best answers.

One good way to do that digging is to picture the ideal person to sell your brain-products. They may have extensive formal credentials in whatever academic fields your ideas touch. Decades of experience at leading organizations. PhDs. Media appearances. Multiple published books and stacks of esoteric academic papers whose audience does not reach the hundreds place.

But they may have more subjective and often suspect credentials. Standards of eloquence that depend on:

• Using certain words.
• Speaking a certain way.
• Worst of all, certain demographic and cultural characteristics that influence these things.

There. Now you can charge at the hypocrisy. Just be sure not to hit your head too hard, because we need to steelman credentialism for a moment.

An Ironclad Solution

An argument in favor of internalized credentialism might go as follows:

• The main principle of the argument is that the average idea from a highly credentialed person will be better than that of a less credentialed person.
• Credentials, by definition, give us reason to believe that the utterances of the credentialled are better. More experience, for example, implies thoughts with stronger foundations informed by past experiences.
• Most criteria on which credentials are determined are legitimate. Yes, there are some illegitimate criteria, especially if we are judging credentials unconsciously. But we can eliminate them while maintaining the main principle.
• Not all ideas deserve action or even serious consideration.

These statements, while agreeable, overlook that ideas can be refined. We can steelman. Yes, it takes effort. Yes, you have to sort through poorly informed takes. But it is worth the pain because the result is a richer pool of thought from which to draw.

So, how exactly do you make an incomplete or poor idea stronger? Steelmanning is a critical component of maximizing the value of each idea, but it is not the only one. Enter:

The Five-Stage Sieve for Ideas

This five-car train of thought allows more value is extracted from each idea:

1.? ? Is the idea good and feasible?

2.? ? If it’s not feasible, can it be implemented in a more feasible but lower-magnitude way?

3.? ? If it’s not good, can parts of it be modified to make it viable?

4.? ? If it’s irredeemably bad, what problem was it trying to solve? Is there another way to solve that problem?

5.? ? If the problem it was trying to solve is not important, why was it perceived as important?

Each step operates like a sieve. Solid parts of the idea are caught in it. The weaker, liquid parts run down into the finer layer below it. The result: multiple layers of insights derived from a single thought.

The first and second steps may already be within an easy grasp of our intuition. The third step is steelmanning --- its addition ensures that much fewer ideas are shot down. It wouldn’t be correct to call the fourth step steelmanning. But it follows the spirit because it highlights a problem that might otherwise have gone unaddressed. The quality of a solution alone does not say anything about the importance of the problem it targets.

Even the worst possible type of idea, a poor solution to an irrelevant problem, can uncover valuable information. By asking why the unimportant problem had perceived importance, we might discover hidden biases that underlie myriad problems elsewhere.

But What Are the Action Items?

So, we have an answer. One way to encourage the feeling that now is the time to speak up. Something to get us closer to living the morals of those feel-good stories. However, I sense that much of my audience is starting to bristle at the lack of bullet-pointed action items. Don't worry --- they are coming.

Steelmanning to build confidence has two components:

1. People must trust that there will be others to steelman their ideas.

2. Others must actively validate that trust. They cannot merely strengthen others’ thoughts as they come to them. They must seek and consider all opinions from all sources, refining them as necessary to make them viable.

The first component is difficult to build without the second. Simply stating that good ideas can come from anywhere may prompt others to spit out more of them. But active listening will diversify this new inflow. Listening kickstarts a virtuous cycle of trust and action. Observing solicitation of feedback has a good chance to trust their own will be considered fairly. New thoughts provide more material to convert into tangible results, which bolsters trust even further to draw out more.

From this view, we can see that confidence can be determined by cultural surroundings as much as --- perhaps more than --- personal character traits. We so often see low confidence as a personal problem addressable with self-help books, mindfulness, and gumption. A product of the hyper-individualistic work culture we so eagerly distance ourselves from in rhetoric. Like with credentialism, we have thoroughly internalized this idea.

Our bias toward individualized solutions is understandable given their relative ease of implementation. It takes one person doing things differently to take the individual angle, but it takes many people with varying degrees of coordination to get at the cultural roots of low confidence.

Steelmanning helps us gather the willpower to organize collective improvements to culture. Somewhat ironically, it does so in part by helping us take individual action towards such improvements. Your search for concepts to strengthen, once again, starts that virtuous cycle that allows others the will to do the same.

Of course, there is potential to organize the start of that cycle. The most obvious way might be through specific training intended to develop the eye that sees the best in ideas. But there are more subtle ways:

• One good way is to use the five-stage sieve. The worst-case scenario is that the essence of some ideas falls through all five layers. Even then, there is still an opportunity to get value from it that would not exist if it were immediately shot down.
• Reframe how you convey that ideas are weak. This reframing naturally complements usage of the five-stage sieve. If a lackluster thought comes along, you can now say that you can extract X, Y, and Z from it even though you cannot implement it in its original form. Say that instead of "That's not a good idea because X, Y, and Z" and you will communicate that it is acceptable and even beneficial to have bad ideas.
• Outside of meetings, a record of ideas may encourage people to write down anything that comes to mind. No matter how silly or underdeveloped it may be.

We might draw parallels here to the ways in which we are seeking to normalize failure. Watching others fail and learn from it helps us to not relentlessly criticize ourselves into the ground over our own failures. Similarly, if people see seemingly unviable concepts beget something of value, they will untie the merit of their ideas from their self-esteem.

I admit that I have much more to see of the professional world before fully understanding the challenges of fully realizing these items. My credentials may be lacking. But the wisdom is decentralized on how concepts come to being, development, and fruition. No doubt many study and do it every day in highly self-aware ways that are worth learning about. But as long as there exist unknowns, there will be value in considering more ideas. These steps are a great way to begin seeing that value.