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Anyone find it difficult to "work hard" for reasons that essentially boil down to disbelief? For example, I play some multiplayer games, mostly RTS and MOBA games. I can see some interesting ways to improve at those games. For the RTS games, some of the ideas I had involved a spreadsheet, of course, and an autohotkey script that would make an additional save game every time I pressed the build worker key so that I could easily compare different decision branches while hill climbing toward an optimal build order. I can see some experiments I could perform in Dota 2, such as running a custom game on 2 computers to explore how I could take advantage of blind spots in enemy vision, or doing some mathematical modeling and running a solo game to figure out the exact patterns of how waves of enemy creeps cascade and yoyo from losing to overwhelming the enemy creeps.
But then I think, hardly anyone even bothers to consistently watch replays. At least, that's my perception. These ideas I'm having, they're weird. I've never heard anyone talk about doing this sort of thing. Would someone really try this hard to win at a video game? Well, eventually, I had the chance to join some high skill discords, and, yes, they made spreadsheets, the were timing things down to the second, they were re-running test ideas dozens of times until perfect, they'd spend hours testing and looking for bugs. Turned out that really was how some people got good. I had the right ideas, but I couldn't believe in them because I couldn't believe others were trying that much because up to that point, I hadn't been trying that much so that must be how others acted too, because otherwise they'd have talked about the extra things they did.
It's all these soft spaces where you can take the time to figure out best ways of getting upvotes on reddit, best ways to get lots of clicks on youtube and it's hard to believe that someone would resort to something like giving their comments an initial boost through alt-accounts so they can ride their initial higher visibility to thousands of upvotes, but that was exactly what incredibly reddit popular and actual scientist Unidan did.
Which all kind of circuitously leads me to the following point here. If it's so easy to have such a bias like "nah, everyone's just playing it straight for the most part" even in the face of seeing that sort of belief overturned multiple times, how much are we discounting the possibility of various conspiracies by a similar kind of bias in favor of ordinariness? If these sorts of weird and trying too hard kinds of tactics are effective at getting you to, say, the top .1% in some endeavor, then even if people willing to bend the rules or go to insane lengths are rare, they could easily make up a substantial proportion of such a small sample of people. For example, could Epstein have actually been running a business model of offering up underage girls to the rich and powerful, surreptitiously recording it, and then blackmailing them? It seems insane, it seems something at least 95% of people wouldn't even dare try, it seems high risk, but if you could pull it off, would you not be a rich man?
In my case, not really, but that's largely because I am one of those strangely obsessive people who will spend hours per day on sometimes obscure endeavours to the detriment of my own health and sanity and wellbeing.
That being said, I think your overall point is pretty compelling that most people might have a bias in favour of ordinariness, since most people obviously cluster closer to the mean than those who occupy the extremes of achievement. The people in the top 1% of anything are not representative of the general population and it's likely that you can't expect most people to be able to predict their behaviour all too well - people are susceptible to the typical mind fallacy even when trying to model the behaviour of very atypical people. Though obviously the question of whether there are a significant amount of actual high-level conspiracies that people dismiss out of hand due to their extrapolation of their own behaviour onto people that simply don't act like them probably can't be answered with much certainty.
Yeah, I guess that was mostly a rhetorical question of sorts than an actual one. I mean, I have these doubts because I'm not used to working hard. It's a weird process to work more than you're used to in the sense of voluntarily doing not just more volume, but inventing new tasks for yourself to do. Like, is it normal to write a short story using every word you looked up that day? I don't think many people at all do that, but I can't deny that my own experience has shown me that merely looking up words does not cement their meanings in my memory and merely remembering their definitions does not then put them into my active vocabulary. So it all checks out logically, but it just feels like I shouldn't do it because what I think of as normal people wouldn't do it and it's probably too tryhard.
True, we don't have access to the underlying information that would help prove it one way or the other. But there's this gnawing sense that most reasonably thought-through conspiracies would work.
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