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AlexU comments on Incremental Progress and the Valley - Less Wrong
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Maybe the reason why so many startups fail is that people are prone to have irrational beliefs about business ideas. This causes many entrepreneurs to pursue bad investments or irrational business practices.
More relevant to the discussion topic, consider these questions:
Some beliefs have the tendency to be self-fulfilling prophecies, but is it irrational to have these beliefs? Is self-deception necessary for the "self-fulfilling" property to work? Can we, say, have a positive outlook on life while having rational expectations at the same time?
Good point. It might be that there are very few business ideas that actually are rational to have confidence in -- otherwise, someone probably would have implemented them already. In other words, most business ideas, even the ones that turn out to be good ones, might be inherently bad gambles a priori.
It's also possible that business ideas aren't actually all that important, and that other factors dominate the success of a start-up. I believe this is essentially Paul Graham's position, for what that matters.