worldoptimization
Things I just realized: a lot of the philosophy we’ve been doing in my class this quarter is based on the assumption that people don’t want to maximize their expected utility, they want to maximize their minimum possible utility over all outcomes.
Like on the one hand, now Rawlsian philosophy makes sense. On the other hand, this just seems empirically false? Like, if that were true, wouldn’t that mean that no one would take any risk ever?
dataandphilosophy
Thank you thank you thank you!
I am a big fan of prospect theory for this: the actual Rawlsian position is obviously false when you go to an extreme, but he is tapping into an intuition that we are more afraid of catastrophic events. Prospect theory integrates this in a sensible way.