Decius comments on What are the optimal biases to overcome? - Less Wrong

60 Post author: aaronsw 04 August 2012 03:04PM

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Comment author: Decius 06 August 2012 09:02:29PM 2 points [-]

If you have a project which will bankrupt the company if it fails, then it does not have a budget. It has costs. If you have multiple such projects, such that if any one of them fails, the company goes bankrupt, then they all have costs instead of budget.

Note that I'm assigning such a large negative value to bankruptcy such that it is trivially worse to be bankrupt with a large amount of debt as it is to be bankrupt with a smaller amount of debt- if the sunk costs fallacy applies, then there is a fate significantly worse than cancelling the project due to cost overruns; funding the project more and having it fail.

Tricks to avoid long meetings are different than figuring out how long a meeting will last.

Comment author: handoflixue 06 August 2012 09:36:59PM 3 points [-]

Tricks to avoid long meetings are different than figuring out how long a meeting will last.

Thus it instead being in response to the idea that meetings will expand to fill their schedule - if you don't solve that, then scheduling is that much less reliable.

If you have a project which will bankrupt the company if it fails, then it does not have a budget.

Yes it does; even if the budget is "100% of the company resources", that's still a constraint. Given that the odds of success probably drop drastically if you stop providing payroll, paying rent, etc., then it's constrained further. It might also be the case that spending (say) 10% of your resources elsewhere will double your profits on success, but you have a corresponding 10% chance of failure because of it.

90% chance of a major success vs 10% chance of bankruptcy is not necessarily a trivial decision.