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Comment by cato_the_elder | Hacker News Reader

Descartes put it well: "Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess." [1]

Entrepreneurs are no exception.

However, I don't think entrepreneurs have a reputation of being infallibly rational. Scientists are much closer to having that kind of status, so I think studying their irrationality would be more interesting.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1013067-good-sense-is-of-al...

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I don’t think the general public sees entrepreneurs as inherently rational, but many entrepreneurs, especially Silicon Valley types, certainly think that of themselves.

Edit: typo

I don't think the study says anything particularly surprising. It's well known that people are often not as rational as they think they are, and this is especially true of entrepreneurs. They are often so confident in their own abilities and judgment that they fail to see when they are making mistakes. This can lead to them making poor decisions and ultimately to the failure of their businesses.

Agreed. The American cultural conception of entrepreneurship includes delusion, failure, unethical behavior (recent TV series come to mind).

Scientists and possibly medical professionals are still intuitively treated as rational and correct. Just think about how people shorting consensus medical or scientific opinion are treated in popular media / society compared to those criticizing entrepreneurs and capitalists.

I think you got your use of the words criticizing and shorting swapped around. :-) (not that I wouldn't love to be able to short studies that I think will be understood in the fullness of time to be flawed.)

I like to use short metaphorically, outside of financial contexts. For example, the decision to own guns is short civilization, as others have put it.

You may be interested in prediction markets for study replication, where you can a real (financial) short position against bad studies: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-p...

I don't imagine that science can be very rational if it is not open to criticism.

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