# My Most Costly Delusion

Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of "rescuing" someone or something. The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued.

But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is 3 hours away and consists of drunk, unfit amateurs.

Or consider a child living in a big, happy, smart family. Imagine this child suddenly decides that his family may run out of money to the point where they won't have enough to eat. All reassurances from his parents don't work. The child doesn't believe in his parents' ability to reason, he makes his own calculations, and he strongly believes he is right and they are wrong. He is dead set on fixing the situation by doing day trading.

What is that if not going nuts? Would those be wrong who ridicule this child and his complete mischaracterization of his own relative abilities? Would it not be an act of benevolence to just stop the child, by any means necessary, from executing his deranged plan and bring him back to the care of his parents?

But now imagine that the child doesn't live in a big, happy, smart family. He is homeless in a town of other homeless children. There *are* some adults, like 20 of them, but all of them are occupied with [preventing the nearby dam from breaking and flooding the town](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F2DZXsMdhGyX4FPAd/on-saving-the-world).

This child doesn't sit and wait for adults to come and feed him, like a responsible, correctly-estimating-his-own-abilities, non-arrogant, well-behaved entity he is supposed to be in the eyes of people from an alternative reality where towns are populated by big hordes of smart competent adults.

He goes outside, makes some tools to catch birds (tools are dangerous, they may hurt him, and they are just a joke compared to professional hunting equipment) and then lights a fire to cook what he managed to capture (the fire may of course burn his fingers, and there are no safety protocols, it is just a fire in a semi-abandoned post-apocalyptic town, and overall that's not how experienced adults would do it).

Is he still an arrogant, inappropriate fool?

Are you still in the position to judge his strategy?

* * *

I knew for a long time about the idea of [heroic responsibility](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility).

But to exhibit heroic responsibility, you have to be a hero, right? Right? Or not? When are you "hero enough" to do it?

As one saying goes:

> You can just do things.

*Can you, really, though?*

Many are irritated by the hubris of this phrase. For there are, of course, reasons to be irritated by it.

And yet, as scary as it may sound, you *have* to just do things, *even if you can't, because no one else is going to do them anyway.*

You have to just do things, not because you have some special power to do things, but because you are forced, by societal incompetence, to do things despite lacking special powers.

You have to just do things, as a green schoolboy, because all adults are busy with something even more important.

And those [who mock you for being presumptuous enough to think you are capable of solving your problems](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing) may very well be right. So what? Does it make you less forced to try solving these problems still?

* * *

So my most costly delusion was that I can leave some problems to be solved by other, more competent people.

To be clear, competent people exist. There are just too many problems and they are too severe for the existing competent people to fill all the problem-solving slots.

More concretely, in my case (and it may not be the case for other people) this delusion manifested as the belief that I should focus on tasks corresponding to my "experience" or previous "area of expertise" rather than on the most pressing tasks, because there are already people in the more pressing fields who have competitive advantages over me, and I am not going to add value on top of them.

That was an extremely naive take, resting on the assumption that pressing areas are not in extreme deficit of people.

It is not to say that you don't need experience and expertise. Of course you need them! My point is that the absence of experience and expertise is not a vindication. You may and you should gain them, especially since it is not as hard as you think to gain them to the level that allows you to add real value. Not because you are super cool and a fast learner (although you may be), but because the bar is set by the supply, and the supply is shockingly thin.

On top of that, because now it is possible to outsource a lot of low-level thinking and tool-level engineering knowledge to AIs, you may be actually plainly [underestimating what you are capable of doing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P2Tfb8d2RooJAt7Zr/you-are-moving-out-of-your-reference-class).

* * *

I totally get that you are incompetent, or rather not competent enough. I am also not competent enough. And in an adequate world, that would be a good argument not to do things.

I thought, as I grew up, I would stop perceiving myself as a child. But what happens in reality when you grow up is that instead of realizing you are an adult, you realize the others are not really adults either, and hence you must do the things yourself, despite being a child.

Being a child is definitely an obstacle, but not an excuse.