At the extreme end, if you know that producing good enough probabilities to solve the decision problem causes more disutility than getting the situation right would win then the right move is not to model it.
How much digits can you get in to your probabilities in a day? How much in a month? Whatever your answer there are highly speculative hypotheses that deal in probabilities in finer granularities than that.
So what happens there is some rounding or a catch all “something weird happens 0.3%” in there. And unknown unknowns loom ever present.
While the 1⁄20 illustrates the exploit of the inconsistency it does a disfavour about its resonablity. Do you think about death chance by meteor when you daily step out outside? If you every time gave similar kinds of risks even a sliver of a thought then you would be a neurotic nervewreck which would have a non-trivial impact to the most likely course of events irregardless of how the probabilities nudge by the inclusion of more scenarios. So you act as if the sky could not fall on your head and maybe take weekly/montly/yearly a different stance when you do wonder whether the sky will fall.
On the extreme other end of being a precommitted simpleton is being vulnerable to a denial of service attack by the slightest suggestion that raises any thoughts. Say “pascals mugging is a possible scenario” to such a person and see them doing nothing else for 10 years while the cognitive wheels spin (instead of what you would expect like AGI research or money making). It might not be possible beforehand to determine whether the field is such that it is important to get the ball running or have enough insight to tap into critical phenomena. Because not everybody is at that self-brooding pole there are things that are not thought through. And at times not thinking it through can be justified.
At the extreme end, if you know that producing good enough probabilities to solve the decision problem causes more disutility than getting the situation right would win then the right move is not to model it.
How much digits can you get in to your probabilities in a day? How much in a month? Whatever your answer there are highly speculative hypotheses that deal in probabilities in finer granularities than that.
So what happens there is some rounding or a catch all “something weird happens 0.3%” in there. And unknown unknowns loom ever present.
While the 1⁄20 illustrates the exploit of the inconsistency it does a disfavour about its resonablity. Do you think about death chance by meteor when you daily step out outside? If you every time gave similar kinds of risks even a sliver of a thought then you would be a neurotic nervewreck which would have a non-trivial impact to the most likely course of events irregardless of how the probabilities nudge by the inclusion of more scenarios. So you act as if the sky could not fall on your head and maybe take weekly/montly/yearly a different stance when you do wonder whether the sky will fall.
On the extreme other end of being a precommitted simpleton is being vulnerable to a denial of service attack by the slightest suggestion that raises any thoughts. Say “pascals mugging is a possible scenario” to such a person and see them doing nothing else for 10 years while the cognitive wheels spin (instead of what you would expect like AGI research or money making). It might not be possible beforehand to determine whether the field is such that it is important to get the ball running or have enough insight to tap into critical phenomena. Because not everybody is at that self-brooding pole there are things that are not thought through. And at times not thinking it through can be justified.