One other point of reluctance occurs to me: there are conditions under which imagining yourself to be a superstar, while still bad from a selfish viewpoint, might be good for society as a whole: when you’re considering becoming a scientist or inventor. Finding a working tungsten light-bulb filament was more than worth wasting hundreds or thousands of failed filaments in Edison’s experiments, both from society’s point of view and from Edison’s… but what if you look at harder scientific problems, for which each world-changing breakthrough might cost hundreds or thousands of less-successful scientists who would have been happier and wealthier in finance or law or medicine or software or...? Maybe it’s a good thing that lots of smart kids imagine being the next Einstein, then pick a career which is likely to be suboptimal in terms of personal utility but optimal in terms of global utility.
On the gripping hand, maybe the world would be better in the long run if science was seen as inglorious, (relatively) impoverishing, low status… but very altruistic. “Less science” might be a tolerable price to pay for “less science in the wrong hands”.
One other point of reluctance occurs to me: there are conditions under which imagining yourself to be a superstar, while still bad from a selfish viewpoint, might be good for society as a whole: when you’re considering becoming a scientist or inventor. Finding a working tungsten light-bulb filament was more than worth wasting hundreds or thousands of failed filaments in Edison’s experiments, both from society’s point of view and from Edison’s… but what if you look at harder scientific problems, for which each world-changing breakthrough might cost hundreds or thousands of less-successful scientists who would have been happier and wealthier in finance or law or medicine or software or...? Maybe it’s a good thing that lots of smart kids imagine being the next Einstein, then pick a career which is likely to be suboptimal in terms of personal utility but optimal in terms of global utility.
On the gripping hand, maybe the world would be better in the long run if science was seen as inglorious, (relatively) impoverishing, low status… but very altruistic. “Less science” might be a tolerable price to pay for “less science in the wrong hands”.