Risk Everything (2007) (opens in new tab)

I think it is more about the "risk of ruin" than infinities.

Here is the idea: you go in a casino with $1000, that's your self-imposed limit, you will not die if you lose it, but it means you will stop playing, and you will have no way to recover from your losses, time to go home. That's what ruin is.

And this is something you have to take into account. For example, imagine you find a game where you have 50% chance of losing your bet, and 50% of winning your bet +2%. You can bet up to $1000. In theory, you get the best expectancy ($10) if you play $1000, but since it is your limit, you actually have a 50% chance of losing it all with no other chance to play this profitable game again, the result is you can expect to leave the casino poorer. If instead, you start with smaller bets, slowly ramping up as you play, you will be able to take full advantage of the game indefinitely, and almost certainly end up richer.

Note that in a real casino, games have a house edge, so from a pure money perspective, ruin is not a bad thing because it prevents you from playing more negative expectancy games, and it will happen eventually. But since if like me, you just go there to have fun and consider the house edge to be the price of entertainment, then lowering the risk of ruin is actually the main goal.

>(If death truly had negative infinity utility, it would overpower the benefit of everything and we couldn't do anything.)

It's true death has utility in an economic sense, as one needs not look further than the funeral/death care industry to find utility. But if we are talking about death of the self, the negative infinite utility claim seems more convincing than the non-negative-infinite one. In fact, negative infinite utility might be a near-perfect synonym for death.

And at the risk of sounding overly nihilistic, it may well overpower the benefit of everything/anything, again if we are specifically talking about the self.

It doesn't assume this. That's just the definition of "risking everything". If you loose, then you have nothing left and you are at the bottom.

Can you tell me please what you mean by "infinity utility" here?

Risking everything every time is most certainly not the way to maximize aggregate happiness.

Is it? Sheep can live pretty chill and content lives. I'd take ten as a sheep over one as a lion.

If maximizing expected happiness is the goal then aiming for something achievable with low risk, e.g. stable middle class life, is probably a better strategy than risking everything on a moonshot.

Exactly what I had in mind. Just to make my point more understandable: if I own an apartment and I pursue my dream and sell it so that I can invest it in my startup, that’s risking it all. Does such strategy have a positive outcome in the long run (even if by outcome we only mean happiness however it’s measured)? I doubt that.

Bringing down risk taking to a simple “risk it all” is a trivia that is maybe inspiring but naive.

What’s worse, those kinds of strategies are appealing to people mostly because of survivorship bias: one hears inspiring stories from those who risked it all and made it to the top but rarely from those who loosed it all (those don’t sell too well).

This is a dichotomy that appears across sailing cultures and territories, certainly not unique to Belize or the modern era. The law/rule is made because a) it is often extremely risky to stop and help a stranded vessel for the same reason b) the stranded vessel has little recourse if no one stops to help. If no one helps, the vessel may be doomed. But if you help and the vessel turns out to be pirates (or just so desperate the sailors turn into pirates to save themselves), then you become the stranded one. The solution some governing organizations take is to remove the choice and mandate sailors subject to its jurisdiction stop and help. This is beneficial on a community scale even if potentially fatal in any individual instance. Of course the challenge remains of if we are all alone at sea, how will anyone know back home we didn't stop?

It's only odd because we project our own biases and values onto them: one is a criminal as far as the western law systems are concerned, another is an entrepreneurial foreigner.

But in reality, both are bold, inventive and motivated. The difference is just the capital - financial, social and educational - each one holds, those who have nothing are simply willing to accept riskier propositions.

Don't for a moment think you you can bootstrap a business in a corrupt African state using nothing but your hands and back, with no education, no connections and no money. Even if you are insanely productive and entrepreneurial, without greasing the right hands you will be picked clean by criminal rings, protection rackets, unscrupulous competitors etc. It's hard for a westerner to relate to a life where rule of law is spotty and tends to cover only major crimes.

Does the same apply to the Cubans in the "Risk Everything" story? Should they have stayed to improve their community?

Not only that, but stopping migrants is also a business model in itself; Europe is paying billions to stop migrants, see e.g. https://www.dw.com/en/how-the-eu-spent-billions-to-halt-migr...

Do they? Faced with the prevalent right-wing rhetoric where a not uncommon position is that African migrants either deserve to drown or at least should be kept in camps somewhere far away, their Western defenders tend to adopt a defensive posture that focuses on basic human rights but also easily patronizes the migrants.

The "Risk Everything" story glorifies a young Cuban boat refugee's leadership qualities. I certainly can't remember ever reading an article like that about an African refugee written by an European. It's somehow easier for us to see the best of humanity in someone from Cuba than in someone from Niger, even when they both suffered under dictatorship and took extraordinary steps to escape.

> Those who actually risk everything, like, their lives (say, refugees in boats) do so because the alternative is existentially intolerable. The comparison to entrepeneurs is just... not actually ok.

This is a great summary of the problems with this analogy, thank you. It's always annoyed me when people excuse the bad behavior of landlords and bosses exploiting low-income people with "well, they took a huge financial risk buying that building or starting that business!" Sure they did, but it was a risk to their ability to buy fancy organic steaks, not to their ability to continue breathing oxygen - and if it an unprofitable business investment _was_ going to put them on the street, then they should just go get a job like everyone else. The risks taken by landlord and tenant, by boss and laborer, are not comparable.

> The comparison to entrepeneurs is just... not actually ok.

True but I assume the author understands that difference , maybe he is riding a different wave just that both are looking at endless fall to the abyss.

Just FYI, pretty much all of Thinking Fast and Slow has been caught up in the replication crisis and repudiated. I don't know about the fourfold pattern in particular.

This is detailed pretty will in the book Scarcity, which highlights similar psychological effects among people who have not enough money, not enought time, not enough prestige, not enough room for caloric intake (dieters), etc.

I wish this book were more popular.

And then you miss. You're 50 and broke. Back to square 1.

Plenty of poor kids visit the carnival. Having worked there, lots of kids walking around are poor.

> housing crisis

People have been screaming about a housing crisis for many years now, yet the percentage of owner occupied households is higher than it was compared to all of 1970-1990.

Some things it impacts includes:

1) Your safety net. If you lose, will they help you out so you at least aren't totally destitute?

2) Your social/professional network, and (correlationally) your access/ability to develop one, or funders and other technical assistance.

In this metaphor, once you have decent funding you are no longer a "middle class kid".

Of course, when you can barely afford to live, the Kelly criterion does not do anything at all for you. You have nothing that you can afford to lose. Not even miniscule bets.

If you accept the official poverty line as threshold, that'd be ~13% of people in the US. And the poverty line is ~$14k/year - even if you make double that, the amount of money you can risk is really pretty close to zero.

Any risk in that situation is a super-risky plan with no room for error.

> I feel the urge to just post the wiki entry for the Kelly criterion.

Apparently not that strong of an urge ;-).

For those (like me) who didn't know it yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

> Match your ambition to your means.

"Suck it up" as the ultimate in life advice to those born less lucky lacks a certain something to the more empathetic folks out there.

How do you reduce your bet size when you're betting years of your life?

Or if he'd been raided by pirates, which he seems to suggest is a common enough occurrence to make the general advice "don't stop".

losing all your money =/= risking everything

Many people have more things going on in their lives except their bank account. Family, spouse, children, friends. Losing them is what real loss means to me.

Whenever someone says that, it's immediately clear which country they come from.

God's own... The land of the free.

I am older now and sooo happy I had the luck to be born in a country where studying is not a debt-trap.

If you post your subjective view on a public forum, judgement is literally the only opposing force in a discussion (because subjective differences in opinion cannot be rationalized by objective arguments). Unless you want an echo chamber, I don't see a problem with judgement.

Here is the complete If by Rudyard Kipling;

  If you can keep your head when all about you   
     Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
     But make allowance for their doubting too;   
  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
     Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
     And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

  If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
     If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
     And treat those two impostors just the same;   
  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
     Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
  Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
     And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings
     And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
  And lose, and start again at your beginnings
     And never breathe a word about your loss;
  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
     To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
  And so hold on when there is nothing in you
     Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
     Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
     If all men count with you, but none too much;
  If you can fill the unforgiving minute
     With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
     And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Wolf Larsen from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London;

“Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large. To himself only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was, being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don’t you see? And what have you to say?”

Your life is as valuable as the freedoms and things you can access. If you are living in Cuba with no money, no freedoms and no prospects; your life is worth very little to nothing. It's a no-brainer to jump on a boat and move somewhere else where your life value can increase.

Sailing is a very international activity, and if one is doing large crossings, then meeting sailors from around the world is quite common.

A lot can go wrong on a boat, and sailors - especially, small family crews can be forgiven for putting their safety ahead of a boat full of men that can outnumber and overpower them.

I may not know much about how horrible the US is because I've never been, but refugees are regularly endangered in European waters despite help being technically around. In one case I heard of even the Italian coastguard would do nothing until the UN was called and put pressure on them. The refugees had called emergency services and were ignored, without UN intervention they would have died.

So yeah, you might want to check your bias. This isn't something that just happens in the US, it's a worldwide thing. Refugees are mistreated in Africa, in Asia - everywhere.

I think it really depends on where you are. There are still many places in the world where piracy is real, and where distress can be used to lure naive victims. In other places, piracy isn't an issue and you're legally required to offer help.

You are correct in that the seafaring culture is to always render aid.

Additionally it is also the law and international convention.

https://www.bullivant.com/rescue-at-sea/

“Every master is bound, so far as he can do so without serious danger to his vessel and persons thereon, to render assistance to any person in danger of being lost at sea.”

Sailors are. They intimately know the sea and her dangers, they know looming death and despair during many months of being subjects to powers immeasurably stronger than any human can ever imagine.

I would argue that two blokes on a sailboat doing fun rides in the Caribbean are hardly sailors. I guess when they talked to other 'sailors' who were 'agast', it was the Jonas Grumby/Gilligan type.

It's clearly the "universal" that's the problem there...

This story was told in 2007. A used entry level marine GPS was in the $700 range at that time. Current map was $200 extra. In the boondocks there often isn't much price difference between used and new, so the price could have been in the $1000s also.

A used long-range radio could be cheaper, but not that much.

Both could easily be a year's earnings.

Satellite Phone was in the $10000s.

The fact this tale ended up on HN is in no way surprising to me.