So, one problem seems to be that humans are slow, and evaluating all options would require too much time, so you need to prune the option tree a lot. I am not sure what is the optimal strategy here; seems like all the lottery winners have focused on analyzing the happy path, but we don’t know how much luck was involved at actually staying on the happy path, and what was the average outcome when they deviated from it.
Another problem is that human prediction and motivation are linked in a bad way, where having a better model of the world sometimes makes you less motivated, so sometimes lying to yourself can be instrumentally useful… the problem is, you cannot figure out how much instrumentally useful exactly, because you are lying to yourself, duh.
This model gives an explanation for why people who are very successful often say they cannot imagine failure.
Another important piece of data would be, how many of the people who cannot imagine failure actually do succeed, and what typically happens to them when they don’t. Maybe nothing serious. Maybe they often ruin their lives.
So, one problem seems to be that humans are slow, and evaluating all options would require too much time, so you need to prune the option tree a lot. I am not sure what is the optimal strategy here; seems like all the lottery winners have focused on analyzing the happy path, but we don’t know how much luck was involved at actually staying on the happy path, and what was the average outcome when they deviated from it.
Another problem is that human prediction and motivation are linked in a bad way, where having a better model of the world sometimes makes you less motivated, so sometimes lying to yourself can be instrumentally useful… the problem is, you cannot figure out how much instrumentally useful exactly, because you are lying to yourself, duh.
Another important piece of data would be, how many of the people who cannot imagine failure actually do succeed, and what typically happens to them when they don’t. Maybe nothing serious. Maybe they often ruin their lives.