4knowable

risk

Visakan Veerasamy
December 19, 2020
  • let me see how quickly I can speedrun this: people have different concepts and assessments of risk, and different ideas about how much risk they think are willing to tolerate. people also vary in terms of how effective they are at protecting themselves from negative consequences.
  • major variables: the birth lottery (1), your skill as a player (2), and circumstances beyond your control (3) – some of which can be anticipated to some degree, some of which cannot. Of the latter, some can be prepared for and others cannot… it gets very layered and recursive
  • what I think is interesting is how much time & energy people spend on trying to convince each other of the relative “rightness” of the positions they hold. I believe it’s possible to drop most of that behavior and come out net positive for it in terms of outcomes
  • I have a pretty calibrated sense of how right I am about most things. I’m not trying to win arguments, I’m trying to learn. Sometimes I *forget* this because I accidentally end up surrounded by argument-win-seekers, and unconsciously start mimicking the game they’re playing

post to be updated over time

2024oct19— the question I have for myself here is, how does this usually come up? How do people misunderstand risk? Sometimes it’s when I’m talking about stuff I’ve done, and people say things like, that’s lucky, that’s risky— and my sense is, sure, in a sense, but to what degree? And that’s the part that always seems underexamined. You have to know the actual upsides and downsides to things. For example, if the cost of talking to a person is negligible, and the potential upside is something like a 0.1% chance of finding a wonderful spouse, and/or your best friend for life, then I believe you should keep taking that bet until it pays off.

Here I suppose I’ve come to find that not everybody evaluates the cost the same way. Some people find it very painful to talk to people. I believe it’s possible to reduce this pain by addressing the root causes of why it’s painful. I wrote Introspect largely because of htat.