Luke Muehlhauser warns that overconfidence and sunk cost fallacy may be necessary for many people to generate and sustain motivation for a project. (But note that the post is almost nine years old.) Entrepreneurs are said to be overconfident that their startup ideas will succeed. Maybe increased rationality (individual or collective) will stifle innovation.
I feel that. When I do calibration exercises, I’m only sometimes mildly overconfident in some credence intervals, and indeed, my motivation usually feels like, “Well, this is a long shot, and why am I even trying it? Oh yeah, because everything else is even less promising.” That could be better.
On a community level it may mean that any community that develops sufficiently good calibration becomes demotivated and falls apart.
Maybe there is a way of managing expectations. If you grow up in an environment where you’re exposed to greatly selection-biased news about successes, your expectations may be so high that any well-calibrated 90th percentile successes that you project may seem disappointing. But if you’re in an environment where you constantly see all the failures around you, the same level of 90th percentile success may seem motivating.
Maybe that’s also a way in which the EA community backfires. When I didn’t know about EA, I saw around me countless people who failed completely to achieve my moral goals because they didn’t care about them. The occasional exceptions seemed easy to emulate or exceed. Now I’m surrounded by people who’ve achieved things much greater than my 90th percentile hopes. So my excitement is lower even though my 90th percentile hopes are higher than they used to be.
Psychological Effects
Luke Muehlhauser warns that overconfidence and sunk cost fallacy may be necessary for many people to generate and sustain motivation for a project. (But note that the post is almost nine years old.) Entrepreneurs are said to be overconfident that their startup ideas will succeed. Maybe increased rationality (individual or collective) will stifle innovation.
I feel that. When I do calibration exercises, I’m only sometimes mildly overconfident in some credence intervals, and indeed, my motivation usually feels like, “Well, this is a long shot, and why am I even trying it? Oh yeah, because everything else is even less promising.” That could be better.
On a community level it may mean that any community that develops sufficiently good calibration becomes demotivated and falls apart.
Maybe there is a way of managing expectations. If you grow up in an environment where you’re exposed to greatly selection-biased news about successes, your expectations may be so high that any well-calibrated 90th percentile successes that you project may seem disappointing. But if you’re in an environment where you constantly see all the failures around you, the same level of 90th percentile success may seem motivating.
Maybe that’s also a way in which the EA community backfires. When I didn’t know about EA, I saw around me countless people who failed completely to achieve my moral goals because they didn’t care about them. The occasional exceptions seemed easy to emulate or exceed. Now I’m surrounded by people who’ve achieved things much greater than my 90th percentile hopes. So my excitement is lower even though my 90th percentile hopes are higher than they used to be.