Sometimes I’ve seen people be encouraged to pursue a risky career strategy. And I think people should pay more attention to who is giving the advice, how it benefits them, whether they are in a position to know the odds, and what are the downside risks to the encourager if their advice goes wrong, etc. Because I’ve seen many cases where someone was encouraged, and encouraged, and it was almost irresponsible for them to be encouraged so much against high odds of failure. (I am referring here to the type of encouragement that is optimistic, rather than the type of encouragement that indicates something is unlikely but makes an argument that it is worth it anyway.)
From a societal standpoint, it often makes sense to prod people into taking risks, for example if people are too personally risk-averse. But the incentives are often not aligned. I will give a few examples, though I’ll avoid some of the particularly devastating ones I’ve observed to preserve the anonymity of the affected parties.
For one, consider an academic advisor to a PhD student. The advisor’s incentives are likely to try to push the student into the top academic job they can get. A lot of people are sensitive to the needs of the student, but not everyone is. Suppose an advisor thinks the student could get a non-academic job if they went on the job market early but they have an outside chance of an academic job if they went on the job market later. The student might be encouraged to stay in the program longer in the hopes of getting an academic job, but they could easily end up without an academic job even after staying longer. If the student knows the risks and can make the decision, that’s fine. But the advisor can only benefit, in a self-interested sense, from playing up the odds of success. If the student fails, it’s no skin off the advisor’s nose (again, apart from altruistic preferences).
And consider the flip side: if you’re asked to give advice, and you give a more negative assessment than the recipient has in mind, not only might your advice be rejected, but now the recipient might also dislike you. Even without any other outside incentive to be overoptimistic, this gives an advice-giver the incentive to shade their assessments up. If the person succeeds, they will thank you for it, and if they don’t succeed, they probably won’t hold your advice against you.
Further, being overoptimistic can sometimes be helpful in getting the necessary work done, because it can be motivating. Being realistic can be discouraging. So it is not only individuals who might be overly optimistic in their advice. Sometimes there can be institutional pressures towards optimism (e.g., competitions that want to encourage many high-quality applications though the odds of success are low).
I’m not saying we should always tell people our unfiltered assessment. People sometimes don’t want to hear that. And I’m sympathetic to the view that optimism can be helpful at the societal level. But I haven’t described the most egregious cases I’ve observed. And I do think some people are overly trusting of encouragement and don’t think through the incentives of those giving the encouragement. For example, one should be careful about accepting bad jobs in the hopes they might, with dubious odds, lead to a better job someday. And people are naturally attracted to hearing good news about themselves. It’s easy for people to update on the good more than the bad (e.g., Eil and Rao 2011). Be careful out there and always consider who is giving the encouragement and their (perhaps subconscious) incentives.