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Jordan comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong
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Overestimating my driving skills is obviously bad. But how about this scenario of the possibility of happiness destroyed by the truth?
Suppose, on the final day of exams, on the last exam, you think you’ve done poorly. In fact, you only got 1 in 10 questions completely right. On the other 9, you hope you’d get at least a bit of partial credit. On the other hand, all 4 of your friends (in the class of 50) think they’ve done poorly. Maybe there will be a curve? In fact, if the final exam curve is good enough, you might even get an A for the course.
The grade goes online at 6 PM. It’s already there, and it won’t change.
So what do you do? This is the last grade of the semester, and no more exams to study for. A bad grade will make you unhappy for the rest of the evening (you wanted to go to that party, right? You won’t have much fun thinking about that grade). A good grade will make you happy, but so what? Happiness comes with diminishing marginal returns (and for me it’s more like a binary value, happy or not). You have a higher expected utility for tonight if you don’t check your grade. And you’re not any worse off checking the grade tomorrow.
Should you destroy all that expected utility by the truth? (For reference, the truth is a that you got a C-, which is BAD).
My “solution” to this problem (probably irrational?) is in the spirit of “The other way is closed.” I look.
To maximize utility, I shouldn’t look at the grade until tomorrow morning. Some people don’t. I haven’t, once, and it didn’t bother me too much that I haven’t. And after bad grades, the outcome was usually pretty much as expected. So I know my utility function. That’s not the reason.
This is like the two-box decision of Newcomb’s problem. Rationally (according to Eliezer) you would pick one box. I’m not rational. I pick two. What’s there, is already there.
I. JUST. CAN’T. NOT. LOOK.
Sometimes I come up with an awesome idea for my research, something that seems like it will totally blow open the problem I've been working on for weeks/months/years. After having such amazing moments of insight I usually take a couple of days off because the potential that the idea is right just feels so good, and because, well, in research it usually turns out that most amazing insights don't solve that problem you've been working on for years.
I know what you mean. I get that all the time, with all of the unsolved math problems I occasionally look at. And since my name isn't on wikipedia yet, I haven't solved any of them.
Although, in this case I would argue that we're better off knowing we're wrong, than being happy for the wrong reasons. The happiness at an end-of-semester party comes from a different source (socializing, having fun, etc), which are, dare I say, the "right" reasons. Destroying this happiness by the truth will not lead to the discovery of more truth, as it were (the grade is already there). Destroying the happiness over a mistake at least lets you find truth in acknowledging such mistake.
But then again, if I have a "brilliant" idea, I start working on it immediately, without giving myself much of a chance to bask in its brilliance.