Thanks, I found it useful to have this explanation alongside Paul’s. (I think each explanation would have helped a bit on it’s own but having it explained in two different language gave me a clearer sense of how the math worked and how to conceptualize it)
More intuitive illustration with no logarithms: your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don’t know how far.
The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we’ll almost certainly make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we’ve swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is “Swim west as far as you can.”
Thanks, I found it useful to have this explanation alongside Paul’s. (I think each explanation would have helped a bit on it’s own but having it explained in two different language gave me a clearer sense of how the math worked and how to conceptualize it)
More intuitive illustration with no logarithms: your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don’t know how far.
The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we’ll almost certainly make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we’ve swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is “Swim west as far as you can.”