You know how high school sports coaches like to go on about how “You have to believe you will win!”? And how the standard rationalist response is “Nonsense, of course you don’t. Beliefs are supposed to track reality, not be wishful thinking. Believe what looks to be true, try your best, and find out if you win”?
The coach does have a point though, and there’s a reason he’s so adamant about what he’s saying. If you expect to lose—if you’re directing attention towards the experience of your upcoming loss—then you are intending to lose, and good luck winning if you aren’t gonna even try. The problem is that he’s expecting on the level of “Will we win this game?”, which, according to the data, isn’t looking like it’s something we can control. He doesn’t know what else to do, and he doesn’t want to just give up, so of course he’s going to engage in motivated thinking. Fudging the data until he can expect success is the only way he can hope to succeed. It’s a load bearing delusion.[8][9]
One way to do better is to deliberately trade correctness of expectation for effort without letting delusion spread to infect the rest of your thinking. “Yeah, I’m probably going to lose. I don’t care. I intend to win anyway”. Or, in other words “Do or do not. There is no ‘try’”. That means setting yourself up for failure, expecting success knowing that you aren’t likely to have that expectation realized. It’s not pleasant, and that gap between your expectations and the data coming from reality is what suffering is. But with suffering comes hope, and sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile.
This post seems highly relevant.
It describes <a solution to this dilemma> that also is <a mental mechanism humans use natively>.