I think my problem is with this “Judge Retrospectively” thing. Here’s what I think:
Decisions are what’s to be judged, not outcomes. And decisions should be judged relative to the information you had at the time of making them.
In the lottery example, assuming you didn’t know what number would win, the decision to buy a ticket is Bad regardless of whether you won or not.
What I got from this:
you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought
Is that you think that if you had a (presumably random) number in mind, but did not buy a ticket, and that number ended up winning, then your decision of not buying the ticket was Wrong and that you should Regret it.
My problem is that this doesn’t make sense: We agree that playing a lottery is Bad (Negative sum game and all that), and we don’t seem to regret not heaving played with the specific number that happened to have won. Which is good, since (to me at least) Regretting decisions made in full knowledge you had at the time of decision seems Wrong.
If this is not what you meant and I’m just bashing a Straw Man, please tell me.
I think there’s a difference between a decision made badly and a bad decision. Playing the lottery is a decision made badly, because you have no special information and it’s -EV. But if you win, it’s a good decision, no matter how badly made it was—the correct response is “That was kind of dumb, I guess, but who cares?”.
Of course, the lottery example is cold math, so there’s no room for disagreement about probabilities. It’s rather different in the case of things like literary analysis, to get back to where we started.
I think my problem is with this “Judge Retrospectively” thing. Here’s what I think:
Decisions are what’s to be judged, not outcomes. And decisions should be judged relative to the information you had at the time of making them.
In the lottery example, assuming you didn’t know what number would win, the decision to buy a ticket is Bad regardless of whether you won or not.
What I got from this:
Is that you think that if you had a (presumably random) number in mind, but did not buy a ticket, and that number ended up winning, then your decision of not buying the ticket was Wrong and that you should Regret it.
My problem is that this doesn’t make sense: We agree that playing a lottery is Bad (Negative sum game and all that), and we don’t seem to regret not heaving played with the specific number that happened to have won. Which is good, since (to me at least) Regretting decisions made in full knowledge you had at the time of decision seems Wrong.
If this is not what you meant and I’m just bashing a Straw Man, please tell me.
I think there’s a difference between a decision made badly and a bad decision. Playing the lottery is a decision made badly, because you have no special information and it’s -EV. But if you win, it’s a good decision, no matter how badly made it was—the correct response is “That was kind of dumb, I guess, but who cares?”.
Of course, the lottery example is cold math, so there’s no room for disagreement about probabilities. It’s rather different in the case of things like literary analysis, to get back to where we started.