Very good thought experiment. The point is correct. The problem is that in real life we almost never know the probability of anything. So, it will almost never happen that someone knows a long shot bet has 10x better expected value than a sure thing. What will happen in almost every case is that a person faces irreducible uncertainty and takes a bet. That’s life and it ain’t such a bad gig.
Sounds like a cause X, helping people gain clarity on tractable subsets of the general issue you mentioned… although as I write this I realise 80K and Probably Good etc are a thing, their qualitative advice is great, and they’ve argued against doing the quantitative version. (Some people disagree but they’re in the minority and it hasn’t really caught on in the couple of years I’ve paid attention to this.)
I think the uncertainty is often just irreducible. Someone faces the choice of either becoming an oncologist who treats patients or a cancer researcher. They don’t know which option has higher expected value because they don’t know the relevant probabilities. And there is no way out of that uncertainty, so they have to make a choice with the information they have.
You can’t know with certainty, but any decision you make is based on some implicit guesses. This seems to be pretending that the uncertainty precludes doing introspection or analysis—as if making bets, as you put it, must be done blindly.
Very good thought experiment. The point is correct. The problem is that in real life we almost never know the probability of anything. So, it will almost never happen that someone knows a long shot bet has 10x better expected value than a sure thing. What will happen in almost every case is that a person faces irreducible uncertainty and takes a bet. That’s life and it ain’t such a bad gig.
Sounds like a cause X, helping people gain clarity on tractable subsets of the general issue you mentioned… although as I write this I realise 80K and Probably Good etc are a thing, their qualitative advice is great, and they’ve argued against doing the quantitative version. (Some people disagree but they’re in the minority and it hasn’t really caught on in the couple of years I’ve paid attention to this.)
I think the uncertainty is often just irreducible. Someone faces the choice of either becoming an oncologist who treats patients or a cancer researcher. They don’t know which option has higher expected value because they don’t know the relevant probabilities. And there is no way out of that uncertainty, so they have to make a choice with the information they have.
You can’t know with certainty, but any decision you make is based on some implicit guesses. This seems to be pretending that the uncertainty precludes doing introspection or analysis—as if making bets, as you put it, must be done blindly.
No, irreducible uncertainty is not all-or-nothing. Obviously a person should do introspection and analysis when making important decisions.