4 ms·
> by acting in the world you are making predictions with numbers on them all the time! This was a key insight for me several years ago. Pretty much any time yo
by rcthompson 4y ago
> by acting in the world you are making predictions with numbers on them all the time!
This was a key insight for me several years ago. Pretty much any time you make a choice, you are implicitly making a probability calculation, something along the lines of "which of my options has the highest expected value/probability of success?" You may not be putting specific numbers on things, but you are necessarily making an inference about which of several numbers is largest. So the question is not whether you should be making predictions based on probability (you don't have a choice) but instead how you should be doing so.
- webmaven 4y ago> Pretty much any time you make a choice, you are implicitly making a probability calculation, something along the lines of "which of my options has the highest expected value/probability of success?" That's not quite right. The calculation is more along the lines of "which of my options has the highest risk-adjusted reward?" A 10% chance of getting $1,000 is more attractive than a 50% chance of getting $100. It should be noted though that there are other ways to model the decision, such as regret minimization and its variants.
- rcthompson 4y agoIt depends on the choice being made. If you're considering one of several routes on the way to work, you don't care about arrival time, you only care about probability of arriving before a certain time. In any case, the calculation isn't the point. My point is that in any non-trivial choice, you are necessarily making such a calculation, even if only approximately.