Overly Convenient Excuses

Dated Feb 1, 2015; last modified on Sun, 14 Mar 2021

The Proper Use of Humility

Confessing your fallibility but doing nothing about it braggery, not humility. Designing fail-safe machinery is good humility. Dismissing evidence for evolution because we can’t really know for sure that evolution is correct is misplaced humility.

The Third Alternative

Sometimes we justify questionable policy by claiming its absence is undesirable, e.g. believing in Santa makes children behave nicely, and therefore Santa-ism is the best of all possible alternatives.

Searching for alternatives can’t go on forever - we need a stopping criteria. But sometimes this criteria is subject to our subconscious influences, e.g. settling for an altruistic alternative that still has some personal convenience.

Lotteries

Lotteries make people invest their dreams into a tiny probability. Buyers can’t temper their anticipation by a factor of 0.0000001.

Suggestion: let the lottery pay out every 5 years on average, at a random time. Buy in once, and get a few years of epsilon chance of becoming rich!

But There’s Still A Chance, Right?

Theory allows us to calculate probabilities that are tiny. However, we do not know when to discard the result, especially after going through the trouble of calculating it. Why maintain a belief whose likelihood is \(\frac{1}{10^{100}}\), but discard one whose likelihood is zero?

What if I made some incorrect assumptions when estimating my priors, and consequently, the true probability is \( > \frac{1}{10^{100}} \)?

0 and 1 Are Not Probabilities

$$ O = \frac{P}{1 - P},\ \ \ P = \frac{O}{1 + O} $$

Transforming probability to odds gives us valuable interpretations:

  • How easy is it to get to absolute truths? \(O(1) = \infty \).
  • How do movements in the different scales differ?
    • \(O(0.502) = 1.008\), \(O(0.503) = 1.012\)
    • \(O(0.9999) = 9,999\), \(O(0.99999) = 99,999\)