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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

An exaggerated belief of performance in a flash card game might not indicate that belief is exaggerated in general. Maybe they have a heuristic like "I'm good at things" which gives a pretty accurate estimate of their performance on day-to-day tasks, and flash card games are an edge case that they're not good at estimating.

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I don’t know if it’s good heuristic of performance or not. Everyone has to be judged individually in this case. I do think that it is a measure of self-confidence, which may effect performance, and certainly risk taking.

I think about what Guido van Rossum said recently[0]. He’s seen incompetent men’s ideas gain acceptance more often than merited because they are more forceful in how they present them. I’m sure if you asked the incompetent man why his idea was chosen, he’d say it was because it was the best technically, and not because of some lesser reason, like politics.

[0] https://qz.com/1624252/pythons-creator-thinks-it-has-a-diver...

Please. Money lies. We all know it. People with money are deferred to, emotionally coddled, and ALWAYS given the benefit of the doubt. It is literally the foundation of Western culture. Those who have always had it live in a very delusional world that has always lied to them about their abilities. That's how we end up with a " very stable genius" as the "leader" of the western world.

But the noble poor man (or the noble savage if we look to the past) never cheats, lies, steals, etc. And if they do it’s for survival or family or some other sympathetic cause.

Or we’re all humans with normal human traits and egos to rationalize just about anything given the right circumstances.

Nobody said they didn't. Point was that people with "old" money who have always been of a higher social class than most believe falsley that they are better than they are, for the previously stated reasons. Yes, they are humans, and that's what happens to humans who are given too much. One of the many horrid things that happens to normal humans.

Yeah, money lies. Overestimating your ability on a memory retention task might not be indicative that money lies, however.

But it might, hence the topic.

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