I think there’s a common confusion (and perhaps an inability below a certain cognitive ability) to recognize the difference between belief, policy, and action. For an even-money bet (losing costs the same utility as winning gains), your policy should be to bet the most probable, and your action, for a 52% chance of red, is to bet red.
There are other kinds of bets where probability means to be more proportionate, but a surprising number of actions end up being binary in result, even if they’re highly uncertain when taking the action.
This leads to vastly over-stating one’s confidence, both when justifying decisions and when advising others about policy and actions.
Is that really a relevant phenomenon? Many of the beliefs I was thinking about (say your opinion on immigration) don’t affect real life choices at all, or at least not in a way that provides feedback on whether the belief was true.
Depends on the belief/claim in question. Agreed that many statements aren’t really “beliefs” in terms of propositional credence in expected experience, but really “positions” in terms of not-very-relevant discussions and debates.
I think there’s a common confusion (and perhaps an inability below a certain cognitive ability) to recognize the difference between belief, policy, and action. For an even-money bet (losing costs the same utility as winning gains), your policy should be to bet the most probable, and your action, for a 52% chance of red, is to bet red.
There are other kinds of bets where probability means to be more proportionate, but a surprising number of actions end up being binary in result, even if they’re highly uncertain when taking the action.
This leads to vastly over-stating one’s confidence, both when justifying decisions and when advising others about policy and actions.
Is that really a relevant phenomenon? Many of the beliefs I was thinking about (say your opinion on immigration) don’t affect real life choices at all, or at least not in a way that provides feedback on whether the belief was true.
Depends on the belief/claim in question. Agreed that many statements aren’t really “beliefs” in terms of propositional credence in expected experience, but really “positions” in terms of not-very-relevant discussions and debates.