On one hand, AFAICT the math here is pretty fuzzy, and one could have written this post without it, instead just using the same examples to say “you should probably be less risk averse.” I think, in practice for most people, the math is a vague tribal signifier that you can trust the post, to help the advice go down.
But, I see this post in a similar reference class to Bayes’ Theorem. I think most people don’t actually need to know Bayes Theorem. They need to remember a few useful heuristics like “remember the base rates, not just the salient evidence you came across”, and “think about relative likelihood ratios between multiple hypothesis.”
Nonetheless, an important aspect of The LessWrong Project™ is building a unified worldmap, looking to understand the lawfulness that underlies our heuristics, and when our cleanest laws don’t quite apply to our messy situations, keeping an eye out for how we could someday later better integrate everything into a single unified model.
My understanding of the Kelly Criterion makes it something like “idealized Bayes Theorem but for instrumental rationality instead of epistemic.”
I’d kinda like there to be a version of this post that’s more rigorous, that attempts to take some of Jacob’s fuzzy examples and do more math to them (maybe just a couple, to fully illustrate the idea). I confess this is the sort of thing I don’t expect to really be directly helpful to anyone – probably most people read this post, absorb the general lesson of “you should be less risk averse” and move on with their day. But it’s nice to have more details available when you peer under the hood.
On one hand, AFAICT the math here is pretty fuzzy, and one could have written this post without it, instead just using the same examples to say “you should probably be less risk averse.” I think, in practice for most people, the math is a vague tribal signifier that you can trust the post, to help the advice go down.
But, I see this post in a similar reference class to Bayes’ Theorem. I think most people don’t actually need to know Bayes Theorem. They need to remember a few useful heuristics like “remember the base rates, not just the salient evidence you came across”, and “think about relative likelihood ratios between multiple hypothesis.”
Nonetheless, an important aspect of The LessWrong Project™ is building a unified worldmap, looking to understand the lawfulness that underlies our heuristics, and when our cleanest laws don’t quite apply to our messy situations, keeping an eye out for how we could someday later better integrate everything into a single unified model.
My understanding of the Kelly Criterion makes it something like “idealized Bayes Theorem but for instrumental rationality instead of epistemic.”
I’d kinda like there to be a version of this post that’s more rigorous, that attempts to take some of Jacob’s fuzzy examples and do more math to them (maybe just a couple, to fully illustrate the idea). I confess this is the sort of thing I don’t expect to really be directly helpful to anyone – probably most people read this post, absorb the general lesson of “you should be less risk averse” and move on with their day. But it’s nice to have more details available when you peer under the hood.