John on Thinking in Bets

Hm, a question map, cool. In presumptive reasoning (as I mean it), the question is not what side of an argument is true but what side deserves the burden of proof. The conclusion of presumptive reasoning serves in a situation where you might not ever find out which side is true. Hopefully you are open to finding out, but either way, you will act as if one side is true, and the other(s) false. I suspect that doubt is less of a response to ignorance per se and more of a response to dissatisfaction with the conditions driving presumptive reasoning in a particular instance (for example,when the costs of being wrong are high or when the payoff of remaining ignorant is undesirably low). I suspect that it is not the fear of ignorance that bothers people in general, but rather the consequences of acting on ignorance. "So what if I am wrong about this?" is a common question whose answer effects intellectual integrity and interpersonal honesty. Whenever your ignorance doesn't personally matter, doubt is less of a problem for you. For example, you might suck at poker but if you are only there to hang out and have money to burn, you don't care. Less paranoia implies less doubt implies less concern but not necessarily more certainty. The chronically doubtful are not less certain but they are more concerned. However, the fashionably uncertain don't appear to me to be either genuinely doubtful or genuinely concerned. You know, the Bayesians. Conceptualizing personal (relevant) consequences can be a problem for people, as is evident in the case of vices, near-term payoffs with long-term costs, and any situation in which interpersonal honesty only protects others and not you. Without those conceptualizations, doubt is less of an issue even if one's own forgetfulness or lack of imagination is personally obvious. You *could* feel uncertain but you won't. Convenient and common when your attention is elsewhere. Forming the questions that "change our ways" is valuable, even though they are sometimes only mobilizing our existing knowledge in the moment.