Confidence man

My father-in-law, who knows me well enough to have had me (among others) in mind when he posted to Facebook Yesterday at 7:13am near Philadelphia, PA, recommends an article in a recent issue of the Times:  "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence" (nor is he alone:  it's the #2 emailed article even some days post publication).  He took from it the following lesson:

In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

True dat, but how, practically speaking, do you tell the difference between an actual expert and, say, Supergid?

You could develop your own opinion on the matter at hand and compare it to the expert's supplied opinion. More conveniently, you could examine the reasoning the professional expert included (or is, one hopes, prepared to supply) by way of supplement and background to his or her own assertions, and evaluate its soundness for yourself.  Either way, you are prepared to evaluate a chain of logic, aren't you, and surely you care enough to try?

My business experience suggests otherwise.  In the course of some years' consulting I have worked for only two people who wanted to review (much less understand) my chain of reasoning in any depth, and one of those two was way ahead of me at every step regardless, being altogether more expert in the subject at hand, not to mention even more powerfully possessed of the feeling of confidence.  People have typically hired me as an expert (or, on more than one occasion, as someone they expected to become expert) because they were not prepared to do that thinking themselves.  In general, you should not take anyone at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about--after all, underconfident people are as misguided as overconfident ones--but the fact is we seek the opinions of others, in business life at least, precisely because our capacity to evaluate is limited by our own bandwidth, experience, and abilities.

You want some really actionable advice?  Never trust someone wearing a cape.