I wrote a post arguing that what is irrational overconfidence for an individual can be good for society. (In short, scientific knowledge is a public good, individual motivations to produce it is likely too low from a group perspective, and overconfidence increases individual motivation so it's good.)
To extend this a bit, if society pays people to produce scientific knowledge (in money and/or status), then overconfident people would be willing to accept a lower "salary" and outcompete more rational individuals for the available positions, so we should expect that most science is produced by overconfident people. (This also applies to any other attribute that increases motivation to work on scientific problems, like intellectual curiosity.) As a corollary, people who produce science about rationality (e.g., decision theorists) are probably more overconfident than average, people who work at MIRI are probably more overconfident than average, etc.
This starts to look like Lake Woebegon.
The argument that overconfident people will be willing to accept lower compensation and so outcompete "more rational individuals" seems to be applicable very generally, from running a pizza parlour to working as a freelance programmer. So, is most everyone "more overconfident than average"?
This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.
This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.
Rules for this thread:
If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :