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latanius comments on If You Were Brilliant When You Were Ten... - Less Wrong Discussion
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By... measuring the distance between the Optimal Way Things Could Have Been Done in Retrospect and what really happened in the past n years? (I guess it's a common phenomenon, I regularly observe it on myself.)
Since you didn't live the counterfactual, how do you know it was optimal? The planning fallacy doesn't just apply to future actions, you know. Plans for what Ought To Have Been Done are just as prone to friction and "meeting the enemy" as plans for What Wll Be Done, and have the additional problems of hindsight bias and never being tested.
Warning, Anecdotal Evidence: In my case there was a noticeable fall in my school results. When I was around 13-15 years old I was so convinced of being extra smart that I thought I didn't need to work hard to achieve results. When my marks started to go down, I didn't immediately think that I needed to study more, but I was instead puzzled and kind of pissed off. It took me a couple of years to realize the obvious truth and correct my behavior. This is the closest to an evidence I can think of.
Since you eventually did recover, how non-optimal was that? Maybe a few years of slacking off generated more utilons than the transient satisfactions of jumping through the hoops we hold up for teenagers.
I don't know for sure, of course, but I see many negative effects that appear to be related to the overconfidence I was made to have in that period. It took me a lot of time and effort to get back on track, especially with math, and I probably didn't fully recover until I began my bachelor. Plus, I was being a real dick for some time, and this possibly made me lose some potential good friends. I don't have the counterfactual, of course, but since we don't have 10 000 smart kids to use in an actual experiment, this kind of evidence has to be taken into account. Unless you happen to have a clone army in your secret evil lab of course... ;)
Of course imagining the Optimal Way is a fallacy, but people (including me) still imagine it... (by the way, this being an instance of the planning fallacy is a good point)