I have come to believe that the effects of "overconfidence" are almost overwhelmingly positive. [..] I think that part of me is far more valuable than the part that just wants to behave, be nice, and get upmodded in places like this for going along with a crowd...

This is what you have been bred and socialized to think, as a male. (Yes, it does compete with some other, more modern forms of socialization.) Everyone who tries to knock you down is either building their own confidence or testing yours, or both. You are supposed to learn to use this to drive yourself more. Overconfident males who take risks are good for the social group and very good for the few males who become wildly successful, but not so great for the rest. But screw that, I'm a male, I know I'm smart, and I'm going to be one of the successful ones, dammit! Failure is not an option!

I'm a male, and I think I can accomplish anything I choose to do. That makes me ridiculously overconfident, which is probably necessary for accomplishing something new and important. I know about the odds, but I'm just not wired to care about them very much. My problem is that the prospect of great success doesn't really motivate me. This is not what males of the species are supposed to think, as much as evolved creatures are "supposed" to think anything at all. Some wires have gotten crossed somewhere. I am a mutant, and not the cool kind, like an X-Man.

Part of me already realizes that this defect will prevent me from fulfilling my role as a male, and reduces my chance of accomplishing something great from slim to almost nothing. I am a dud in the evolutionary scheme of things, not just a long shot, but a crippled long shot. The other part of me, the part that still works "properly," if there is a proper way for an evolved mechanism to work, believes that this is a problem that can be overcome. I can accomplish anything I want, after all.

The red light blinks, and the diagnostic routines whirr busily. The doll sits and waits patiently, confident that it will be able to carry out its programming. The confidence has been built into the doll, and it is almost as if the machine can sense the power of the deterministic forces that drive it. As if, in the stories its highly evolved brain carefully assembles from its memory banks, it could see the outlines of its future, astride the summit. As if its missing leg, and the tens of thousands of other machines streaming past it, some of them already halfway up the mountain, were insignificant trifles.

The machine sits with serene confidence because it knows something that the other machines do not. It knows that it is different. It knows that it can succeed where others have failed. It knows that when the diagnostic routines have finished and the problem has been resolved, it will be able to surpass all the machines that have moved ahead. It knows that it is overconfident, but it also knows that overconfidence is part of why it will succeed. It knows that it is following a story its brain has been programmed to tell, but it also knows that it is a story following machine, and that the story is also a necessary part of its eventual success. These things it knows.

If an evolved thing can be said to know.