Just a random thought: This could also explain why rationality and depression seem to often go together. Rational people are more likely to notice things that could go wrong, uncertainty, planning fallacy, etc. -- but in this model those are mostly things that assign lower probability to success.
Even in the usual debates about “whether rationality is useful”, the usual conclusion is that rationality won’t make you win a lottery (not even the startup lottery), but mostly helps you to avoid all kinds of crazy stuff that people sometimes do. Which from some perspective sounds good (imagine seeing a long list of various risks with their base rates, and then someone telling you “this pill will reduce the probability of each of them to 10% of the original value or less”), but is also quite disappointing from the perspective of wanting strong positive outcomes (“will rationality make me a Hollywood superstar?” “no”; “a billionaire, then?” “it may slightly increase your chance, but looking at absolute values, no”; “and what about …?” “just stop, for anything other than slightly above average version of ordinary life, the answer is no”). Meanwhile, irrationality tells you to follow your passion, because if you think positively, success is 100% guaranteed, and shouldn’t take more than a year or two.
Just a random thought: This could also explain why rationality and depression seem to often go together. Rational people are more likely to notice things that could go wrong, uncertainty, planning fallacy, etc. -- but in this model those are mostly things that assign lower probability to success.
Even in the usual debates about “whether rationality is useful”, the usual conclusion is that rationality won’t make you win a lottery (not even the startup lottery), but mostly helps you to avoid all kinds of crazy stuff that people sometimes do. Which from some perspective sounds good (imagine seeing a long list of various risks with their base rates, and then someone telling you “this pill will reduce the probability of each of them to 10% of the original value or less”), but is also quite disappointing from the perspective of wanting strong positive outcomes (“will rationality make me a Hollywood superstar?” “no”; “a billionaire, then?” “it may slightly increase your chance, but looking at absolute values, no”; “and what about …?” “just stop, for anything other than slightly above average version of ordinary life, the answer is no”). Meanwhile, irrationality tells you to follow your passion, because if you think positively, success is 100% guaranteed, and shouldn’t take more than a year or two.