You’re right that certainty helps out with planning, and so certainty can be valuable sometimes. It’s still a bias to unconsciously add in a value for certainty if you don’t need it in this case, even if it sometimes pays off, and so it’s worth thinking through the ‘paradox.’
I wanted to point out that this flaw is not a foolish flaw. That’s how we create plans, we project and create expectations, and the anticipated feeling of loss is frustrating to plan for. In a theoretical example you might make a bad decision, but isn’t it also that this flaw causes you to make good decisions in actual real-world situations? Since they don’t tend to occur in such theoretical forms where you have all the required information available and which lack context.
If you’d actually encounter this problem in a real-world situation, you might end up making a bad decision because of handling it with a too theoretical approach—what if I told you get to play both games and actually get to choose between both, when you come to visit me? But you didn’t have money to pay for the ticket to fly over? What if you took a loan? And without the certainty of A1 you might end up in a bad situation where you’ll lack the means to pay back your loan—in other words a decision making agent with this flaw handles the situation well. But of course you can take all that into account. And as it’s a problem dealing with rationality, I think it’s pretty important to note these things.
You’re right that certainty helps out with planning, and so certainty can be valuable sometimes. It’s still a bias to unconsciously add in a value for certainty if you don’t need it in this case, even if it sometimes pays off, and so it’s worth thinking through the ‘paradox.’
I wanted to point out that this flaw is not a foolish flaw. That’s how we create plans, we project and create expectations, and the anticipated feeling of loss is frustrating to plan for. In a theoretical example you might make a bad decision, but isn’t it also that this flaw causes you to make good decisions in actual real-world situations? Since they don’t tend to occur in such theoretical forms where you have all the required information available and which lack context.
If you’d actually encounter this problem in a real-world situation, you might end up making a bad decision because of handling it with a too theoretical approach—what if I told you get to play both games and actually get to choose between both, when you come to visit me? But you didn’t have money to pay for the ticket to fly over? What if you took a loan? And without the certainty of A1 you might end up in a bad situation where you’ll lack the means to pay back your loan—in other words a decision making agent with this flaw handles the situation well. But of course you can take all that into account. And as it’s a problem dealing with rationality, I think it’s pretty important to note these things.
Anyway I agree with you, Vaniver =)