The problem is the competition is much better than anticipated. Human irrationality is greatly overstated, because people conflate being bad at explaining why t

The problem is the competition is much better than anticipated. Human irrationality is greatly overstated, because people conflate being bad at explaining why they are doing something with doing something irrational. Humans aren't anywhere near as irrational as portrayed. If they were, they'd be dead. Not just, like, dying today, but dead long ago, and you'd have never been born, because humans would just be dead. Reality does not permit high degrees of irrationality to survive very long. To listen to some people describe it, humans are beings who, when presented with a choice between a cookie now or two cookies in 15 minutes, choose to gouge their eyes out. Rationality studies aren't going to rewire a fundamentally crazy, irrational person into a rational one that is suddenly the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Rationality studies can only clean up some of the rough edges on a being that fundamentally behaves fairly rationally most of the time. There isn't anywhere near as much room for optimization as some people seem to think. And part of the reason for this is, it is very difficult to overstate how bad humans are at explaining why they are doing something. Just, mind-blowingly bad. Study after study reinforces the endless parade of anecdotes from my own life. Everything agrees; people are terrible at this. But, the thing is... doing the rational thing for the wrong reason, or without any reason at all, is still doing the rational thing. Jodie may gossip terribly about Ethel for all sorts of reasons our calm, collected putative "rationalists" declare to be "irrational", and Jodie herself may think she's doing it because Ethel is ugly and smells bad and just pissed her off yesterday, but nevertheless, the goal Jodie doesn't even consciously know she has is likely to be attained, and Jodie's access to better mates is likely to be successfully increased at Ethel's expense. (Not "guaranteed", but likely enough that, well, this strategy has been around since the dawn of recorded history and is still going strong for a reason, you know?) A good chunk of the remaining belief about human irrationality will come from people who aren't clearly looking at the world, and will declare on one level or another that that's an irrational thing for Jodie to want... but... goals are much less amenable to "rationality" than means. That you personally think Jodie shouldn't want that, or shouldn't need to want that, or whatever, doesn't change the fact that Jodie is operating on that goal, and really quite rationally pursuing it. That said, there is room for improvement. But I don't think it's the sort of improvement that leads to fame and visibility very often; it's life improvement. Nobody's famous for really having their life together, and making good decisions. But there are still plenty of people who are better at it and plenty who are worse, and even if there isn't as much room as some people may think to improve that, there's still plenty to make it worthwhile.