Self-deception

[ciphergoth]

Is self-deception always bad? Are there any beliefs so dear to you that, in a world where they weren't true, you would prefer to go on believing them?

Update: very interesting answers so far, I hope I get to hear from lots more of you!

Comments

[hughe.livejournal.com]

this.

[martling.livejournal.com]

On further thought, I'm going to elaborate on this a bit, because it's an interesting tangent. ciphergoth, I would be interested in your thoughts & any references on this area.

Firstly: "being optimistic" does not mean I act as though a positive outcome is certain. Rather, I would say that when choosing what to do and how to prepare for the possible results of my actions, I bias my efforts towards enabling the most positive outcomes, and preventing the most disastrous, largely ignoring the space of harmless failures in between.

I think the reasons for this weighting tie in closely with the behaviour of human memory: similar, largely uninteresting memories tend to overlap and merge, whilst what stands out in the mind over the long term are the high points and low points. Hence, by maximising the highs and minimising the lows, the subjective quality of experience in one's subsequent memory of a period can be optimised, even perhaps at the cost of the actual average happiness experienced moment-to-moment over the whole period.

For a concrete example, take my main hobby: gliding. I started in 2001 and have since racked up some ~200 hours in ~400 flights. The vast majority of those hours were probably actually pretty dull, and they make up only a fraction of the actual time spent on the sport, which largely consists of days and days of faffing around on airfields plus a fair chunk of travel time getting to and from them. On average, it's really quite crap.

But looking back, I forget all that and just remember the epic flights, the awesome moments, the hilarious stories - and a few scary moments. And so, when preparing to fly I put time into two things: avoiding disaster, and making sure I have everything prepared so that a great flight is never curtailed by stupid problems like dodgy equipment, a lost sunhat, lack of sandwiches or a bottle to piss into. In the vast majority of cases this is a waste of time, because the flight turns out not to be so great. I could put that time into avoiding non-disastrous problems instead: fixing our unreliable vehicles that could leave me stuck in a field for a few hours after landing out, for example. But I don't, because ultimately I will forget such minor inconvenicences. Doing so would perhaps increase my average enjoyment over time, but I'm more interested in the peaks.

I suppose this can be applied forwards as well as backwards: the expectation of future highs keeps people going through the lows. This is, I think, why people will happily buy lottery tickets even though their price is well above the expected value of the ticket; they are paying simply for winning to exist as a possibility.