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Wei_Dai comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a crazy idea that I'm not at all convinced about, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. Criticism welcome!
Rationality and common sense might be bad for your chances of achieving something great, because you need to irrationally believe that it's possible at all. That might sound obvious, but such idealism can make the difference between failure and success even in science, and even at the highest levels.
For example, Descartes and Leibniz saw the world as something created by a benevolent God and full of harmony that can be discovered by reason. That's a very irrational belief, but they ended up making huge advances in science by trying to find that harmony. In contrast, their opponents Hume, Hobbes, Locke etc. held a much more LW-ish position called "empiricism". They all failed to achieve much outside of philosophy, arguably because they didn't have a strong irrational belief that harmony could be found.
If you want to achieve something great, don't be a skeptic about it. Be utterly idealistic.
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"?
Good point. :) I guess it actually has to be something more like "comparative overconfidence", i.e., confidence in your own scientific ideas or assessment of your general ability to produce scientific output, relative to confidence in your other skills. Theoretical science (including e.g., decision theory, FAI theory) has longer and weaker feedback cycles than most business fields like running a pizza parlor, so if you start off overconfident in general, you can probably keep your overconfidence in your scientific ideas/skills longer than your business ideas/skills.