Optimism Bias

Unable to sleep, Red prowls the Trainer House's practice rooms, passing a competitive trainer drilling her butterfree with silent flag signals before claiming a fireproofed room of his own. He sets up a clicker as a conditioned reinforcer through the pokedex — whose synthesized voice, he notices with a smile, is a filtered version of Daisy's — uploads virtual training, then sets about teaching charmander Smokescreen, the defensive smog a charmander emits only when frightened, especially at night.

He muses, while he waits, on why this matters beyond tactics. Pokemon training is powerful precisely because anyone can learn it; had control of these creatures required rare psychic gifts, humanity would have frozen into feudalism, the many ruled by the few who could hold back the monsters. Instead science leveled the field — Oak's pokedex sharing knowledge between labs and trainers, Agatha going public with her Ghost-type affinity and opening a school at thirteen, Giovanni building society's trainer programs — so that, given wit and will, even a child can change the world.

The training is harder and bloodier than hoped. Charmander is too brave to smoke when merely menaced, so Red surrounds him with looming rhydon, arcanine, and graveler pokedolls until bravery curdles into fear and the black smog finally pours out — clicking the instant it does. But the smoke won't stop cleanly on command, it fouls the room and his lungs, and a panicked Charmander sinks claws into Red's side. He patches the punctures, dons a gas mask, and presses on.

The chapter's spine is his late-night conversation with the butterfree's trainer, Amy, about why he won't simply finish tomorrow. He names optimism bias: people are systematically over-rosy about themselves. Its best-known face is the planning fallacy — the reliable underestimation of how long and how costly a task will be — which is why his Smokescreen estimates ran anywhere from one hour to ten and he naturally "hoped" for one. But the bias runs past planning into danger: he and his friends skipped repellent on day one because catastrophe felt unlikely to befall them specifically, then met eight rattata within hours; asked whether a stranger might have a bad first day, he'd have said the statistics don't care whose day it is. Amy raises Tier 3 threats — the rare, catastrophic dangers people pour millions into fearing — and Red turns it into a point about skewed risk perception: ordinary road deaths are frequent but quiet and unreported, while Tier 3 events are rare, spectacular, and media-saturated, so our pattern-seeking minds badly miscalibrate, dreading the vivid over the likely. That money, he argues, would save more lives spent on ranger outposts and road sensors.

His remedy for the planning fallacy is to forecast from how long similar tasks took before — your own past attempts first, others' times as a fallback — though he concedes a first-timer has thin data to draw on. He can't leave the half-finished training alone; an unaddressed optimization, he says, is like a splinter in his toe, fine until the moment he needs to run. The night receptionist, Mitchell, lured away from a recorded Indigo League match, volunteers to help scare the smoke out of Charmander, waving off Red's warning about — what else — the planning fallacy.

Red pays for his diligence the next morning. After a dream of chasing some rare four-legged, blue-or-purple creature through the trees, he wakes near eight too wrecked to rise, even when Blue strolls out wearing his stolen red cap — Past Red having, once again, made trouble for Future Red.