I don’t think it’s pretending. They are both human, after all. Explaining away the difference in statements as situational bias (math is unpopular, so Grothendeick perceived it as hard; business is popular, so Jobs perceived it as easy) does not seem irrational to me. If we dissolve the question of blame, then why should praise be any different?
If Jobs perceived business as easy and people around him perceived him to be good at business there no difficulty in reconciling the two.
Proposing a situational bias that makes the statements difficult to reconcile is strange. There no reason to rationalize the point made to be right. Beliefs have to pay rent.
So the rent it pays is something like when you put up a sign “DO NOT DISTURB—AUTOMATED GUN TURRETS INSIDE” on your apartment. It doesn’t change the fact that you have to pay rent, or the dollar amount, but it means you can spend less effort on negotiating late payments, because the landlord will wait just a bit longer before kicking you out.
In terms of anticipation, it’s something like “if I did it over again, I’d still have done the same thing, because my behaviors were dictated by circumstance”. I guess it’s sort of like timeless decision theory.vs causal decision theory; in TDT, you can trust that your past self has modified you to make the correct decision in the future, while a causal decision theorist would not trust such an assumption.
I don’t think it’s pretending. They are both human, after all. Explaining away the difference in statements as situational bias (math is unpopular, so Grothendeick perceived it as hard; business is popular, so Jobs perceived it as easy) does not seem irrational to me. If we dissolve the question of blame, then why should praise be any different?
If Jobs perceived business as easy and people around him perceived him to be good at business there no difficulty in reconciling the two.
Proposing a situational bias that makes the statements difficult to reconcile is strange. There no reason to rationalize the point made to be right. Beliefs have to pay rent.
So the rent it pays is something like when you put up a sign “DO NOT DISTURB—AUTOMATED GUN TURRETS INSIDE” on your apartment. It doesn’t change the fact that you have to pay rent, or the dollar amount, but it means you can spend less effort on negotiating late payments, because the landlord will wait just a bit longer before kicking you out.
In terms of anticipation, it’s something like “if I did it over again, I’d still have done the same thing, because my behaviors were dictated by circumstance”. I guess it’s sort of like timeless decision theory.vs causal decision theory; in TDT, you can trust that your past self has modified you to make the correct decision in the future, while a causal decision theorist would not trust such an assumption.