No Treason

On the most recent post at NoState at the time of this writing, Elitist stupidity, I commented about how the story of Mike’s past employment struggles related to my own observations about intelligent people who lose the plot to confirmation bias and forget about what made them successful.

Mike termed it elitism, but it’s not the exclusive domain of elites to do this.  It is very human to believe your own press and to assume that past performance is predictive of future profit.  We take our relationships for granted, we take our jobs, careers for granted amongst other things.  Part of this is that we rely heavily on observation, which eventually becomes an avalanche, burying critical thinking as entropy increases.

The other part is that success is like a drug, changing our perspective.  Failure qualifies as well, but we don’t usually lament the irrationality of people who fail because their failure already discounts their opinions.

For whatever reason, we respect people with money, fame, notoriety.  We rely on these observable traits or conditions to judge or enhance the veracity of their opinions.

I think this is very apparent, as Mike shows, that during economic booms where the stock market is always going up, credit is cheap and easy for expansion of long term capital projects.  It doesn’t take much intelligence to invest in something that continues to generate a profit, even if you don’t know the names of all of the firms you have invested in, let alone what they do, or how their books look.  Hiring 10 senior manager experts may look like a big time move, but it doesn’t guarantee big time results.

Confirmation bias caused by credit expansion and a boom economy definitely forms a key component of Sunshine Capitalism.

Perhaps it tells us something more about ourselves, our flaws and follies.  The easier things get, the harder it is to retain our “A” game.  Maybe humans are hard-wired for creative self-destruction.

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