Currently open threads are weekly and very well received. However they tend to fill up quickly. Personally I fear that my contribution will drown unless posted early on so I tend to wait if I want to add a new top level post. Does anyone else have this impression? Someone with better coding skills than me could put this statistically by plotting the number of top level posts and total posts over time: If the curve is convex people tend to delay their posts.

So should open threads be more frequent and if so what frequency?

I'd like to use this thread to review the "What are your contrarian views?" thread as the meta discussion there was drowned out by the intended content I feel. What can be done better with the voting system? Should threads like these be a regular occurence? What have you specifically learned from that thread? Did you like it at all?

Usual voting rules apply.

As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Thread started before the end of the last thread to ecourage Monday as first day.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Duration set to six days to encourage Monday as first day.

Six out of the last 10 posts are about single meetups. And I care about none of them.

I will look into whipping together some kind of bot that periodically posts threads like the open thread or a meetup thread. Voice your opinion in the comments if you do not want me to do that.

That is all.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

The Kelly criterion is the optimal way to allocate one's bankroll over a lifetime to a series of bets assuming the actor's utility increases logarithmically with the amount of money won. Most importantly the criterion gives motivation to decide between investments with identical expected value but different risk of default. It essentially stipulates that the proportion of one's bankroll invested in a class of bets should be proportional to the expected value divided by the payoff in case it pans out.

Now, nothing in the formalism restricts the rule to bets or money for that matter, but is applicable to any situation an actor as assumed above faces uncertainty and possible payoff in utility. Aside from the obvious application to investments, e.g. bonds, this is also applicable to the purchase of insurance or cryonic services.

Buying an insurance can obviously be modeled as bet in the Kelly sense. A simple generalisation of the Kelly criterion leads to a formula that allows to incorporate losses.

An open question, to me at least, is if it possible to generalise the Kelly criterion to arbitrary probability distributions. Also, how can it be that integration over all payoffs for constant expected value evaluates as infinity?

Finally, how would a similar criterion look like for other forms of utility functions?

I did not put this question in the open thread because I think the Kelly criterion deserves more of a discussion and is immediately relevant to this site's interests.

So I have a conundrum. Imagine that Omega comes to you and offers you two choices:

First choice: You get a moment of moderate pain, let's say a slap and then another slap, so that your face hurts for a couple of minutes with some anguish. Now after that pain has faded and you still have the memory of it, Omega measures your discomfort and gives you exactly the amount of money that gives enough joy to compensate the pain and then a cent. By construction, the utility of this choice is one cent.

Second choice: Omega inflicts on you hell for a finite amount of time. Your worst fears all come true, you are unable to distinguish between reality and this hell, the most painful sensations you will experience. After this finite amount of time is over, Omega deletes all memory of it and gives you essentially unlimited monetary funds but still, this experience does not quite compensate for the previously experienced hell if you would remember it. By construction, the expected value of this choice is negative.[1]

If we go by expected value, the first choice is obviously better. Of course Omega forces you to take one choice or you will just get hell forever, we want our thought experiment to work. But if we go by the decision procedure to choose the option in which our future self will feel best, the second choice seems better. I have not yet found a satisfying solution to this apparent paradox. Essentially, how does a rational actor deal with discomfort to get to a pleasurable experience?

[1] I realize that this might be a weak point of my argument. Do we just simply add up positive and negative utilons to get our expected value? Or do we already take into consideration the process of forgetting the pain? Maybe therein lies a solution to this paradox.