Epistemic status: I was told to argue this position.
For a long-term project (say, for example, finishing a PHD rather than mastering out), the true utility you’ll derive from it is a random variable with some true mean and variance. Maybe finishing the PHD will take 8 years and you’ll never get that TT position you dream of, maybe it’ll take 5 and there will be a perfect job for you at the end. You can’t know the true mean utility, your guess of the mean is an estimator, which is itself a random variable. I think your argument was that sometimes your estimate of the mean utility will be negative, but that the true mean utility will be positive. So you should stick through and see if it improves. But the inverse can also be true—you can have cases where your estimate of the mean is positive and the true mean is negative. So “stick with things even though your estimate of the mean utility you’ll derive from it is negative because it might actually be positive in reality” seems like as logical a rule as “drop things even though your estimate of the mean utility is positive because it might actually be negative.”
Epistemic status: I was told to argue this position.
For a long-term project (say, for example, finishing a PHD rather than mastering out), the true utility you’ll derive from it is a random variable with some true mean and variance. Maybe finishing the PHD will take 8 years and you’ll never get that TT position you dream of, maybe it’ll take 5 and there will be a perfect job for you at the end. You can’t know the true mean utility, your guess of the mean is an estimator, which is itself a random variable. I think your argument was that sometimes your estimate of the mean utility will be negative, but that the true mean utility will be positive. So you should stick through and see if it improves. But the inverse can also be true—you can have cases where your estimate of the mean is positive and the true mean is negative. So “stick with things even though your estimate of the mean utility you’ll derive from it is negative because it might actually be positive in reality” seems like as logical a rule as “drop things even though your estimate of the mean utility is positive because it might actually be negative.”