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by pitched 72 days ago
The opposite of this is also fascinating to me too. There are false beliefs that make people who hold them better in some metrics. Like, the idea that hard work leads to success. We all know there is some element of luck, but even so, people who discount luck and only believe in hard work tend to do better.
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That's a good point. I think this one can be easily be resolved on a factual level, since hard work is one of the few variables you can actually control. But it is more interesting from an emotional point of view, since in many cases that would an article of faith with the implicit fear that it might not be true.

There are variations of this, such as composition theory in art getting good results based on completely false assumptions, but these tend to fall under epistemic underdetermination.