James Robert White

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Part II: The glass isn’t half-empty or half-full. It's just complex or simple

In the previous article, I presented the problem of gut instincts and personal preferences in decision-making and argued that we need a more scientific model of the basis for risk-taking and risk-aversion in decision-making. In this final part of the article I will explain how we can begin to construct a theory of rational risk-aversion and risk-taking based on the children’s game 20 Questions. 20 Questions, A Recap In one version of game ‘20 Questions’, which I used to play as a child, one player writes down the name of a celebrity, alive or dead, and the other player has to guess the celebrity. The guesser is only allowed to ask questions with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer and is only allowed 20

The glass isn’t half-empty or half-full. It's just complex or simple

Using gut instincts Are you a glass half-empty or half-full kind of person? The question paints optimism and pessimism as a personality trait. Whether, or not, we seem to be pessimists or optimists, risk takers, or risk-averse for that matter, the question reflects something interesting about how we characterise each other’s decisions and decision-making. In today’s world, we still, as a society, take a lot of decisions based on ‘gut instinct’. Although we often have data and increasingly we use that data to help us make informed decisions, in a lot of ways, when it comes down to it, we are still led by our own intuitions and our gut. It is all about what we call ‘intuition’. When our person

Ways to be Rationally Complex

Predictability in nature allows complex solutions Surprisingly large parts of our world are simple in the sense that nature’s predictability allows us to design complex systems on top of this ‘simplicity’. As I’ve mentioned in another blog post, ‘Complexity 101’, which is a gentle introduction, scientists using only chalk and blackboard were able to discover the theory of evolution in biology and most of the laws of physics, including gravity, relativity and even quantum mechanics. Although the equations that describe these theories may be complex they in fact exploit underlying simplicity and predictability in the world to describe it very accurately. This gives us, as the users of these eq