I would be interested in your extension of your last sentence. â They are extremely unlikely and thus not worth bearing mindâ. Why is this true?
When I said âI think both of these âstoriesâ Iâve told are extremely unlikely, and for practical purposes arenât worth bearing in mindâ, the bolded bit meant that I think a person will tend to better achieve their goals (including altruistic ones) if they donât devote explicit attention to such (extremely unlikely) âstoriesâ when making decisions. The reason is essentially that one could generate huge numbers of such stories for basically every decision. If one tried to explicitly think through and weigh up all such stories in all such decision situations, one would probably become paralysed.
So I think the expected value of making decisions before and without thinking through such stories is higher than the expected value of trying to think through such stories before making decisions.
In other words, the value of information one would be expected to get from spending extra time thinking through such stories is probably usually lower than the opportunity cost of gaining that information (e.g., what one couldâve done with that time otherwise).
When I said âI think both of these âstoriesâ Iâve told are extremely unlikely, and for practical purposes arenât worth bearing in mindâ, the bolded bit meant that I think a person will tend to better achieve their goals (including altruistic ones) if they donât devote explicit attention to such (extremely unlikely) âstoriesâ when making decisions. The reason is essentially that one could generate huge numbers of such stories for basically every decision. If one tried to explicitly think through and weigh up all such stories in all such decision situations, one would probably become paralysed.
So I think the expected value of making decisions before and without thinking through such stories is higher than the expected value of trying to think through such stories before making decisions.
In other words, the value of information one would be expected to get from spending extra time thinking through such stories is probably usually lower than the opportunity cost of gaining that information (e.g., what one couldâve done with that time otherwise).