I definitely wouldn’t call full Kelly “very conservative.” My point was that in Exampleville and other scenarios with a capped best outcome, a very conservative strategy (e.g., 0.001 Kelly) is trivially superior to even merely conservative strategies if there is practically infinite time to flip coins before you need to act, and flipping coins is a costless activity. So the specification of the constraints is what makes the problem interesting (and realistic). The example shows that there are constraints where very agressive betting makes sense; the rest of the post needs to demonstrate how those scenarios—or at least somewhat similar scenarios—might occur in real life.
Bets don’t have to be in USD or anything else that is a store of value. One could imagine that the “currency” was virologists in a rapidly-moving pandemic. You can put them on safe research that will save a modest number of lives or tell them to roll the dice on speculative research with a possible big payoff. You can’t really “store” their labor for a possible better bet that may appear ten years down the road, or use it for something else very effectively.
I definitely wouldn’t call full Kelly “very conservative.” My point was that in Exampleville and other scenarios with a capped best outcome, a very conservative strategy (e.g., 0.001 Kelly) is trivially superior to even merely conservative strategies if there is practically infinite time to flip coins before you need to act, and flipping coins is a costless activity. So the specification of the constraints is what makes the problem interesting (and realistic). The example shows that there are constraints where very agressive betting makes sense; the rest of the post needs to demonstrate how those scenarios—or at least somewhat similar scenarios—might occur in real life.
Bets don’t have to be in USD or anything else that is a store of value. One could imagine that the “currency” was virologists in a rapidly-moving pandemic. You can put them on safe research that will save a modest number of lives or tell them to roll the dice on speculative research with a possible big payoff. You can’t really “store” their labor for a possible better bet that may appear ten years down the road, or use it for something else very effectively.