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We make most decisions based on incomplete information, often trusting in good luck
As living organisms, we continually make decisions about what to do next to survive and, if possible, to achieve reproductive success. Often we do not have much time, either to avoid imminent dangers or to take advantage of helpful opportunities. So, like other living things, our species has evolved to make most decisions based on incomplete information, generally the result of probabilities that our brains learned implicitly from previous experience.
Even when time would permit decisions to be based on more complicated reasoning, which would require more mental energy (literally, in the form of brain cell metabolism) and would distract us from other decisions to be made, we often jump to conclusions. And often we decide to take chances, trusting to luck, as when we buy lottery tickets, even knowing that the odds are against us.
And it’s interesting that currently popular “AI” text generators rely mainly on probabilities of word sequence continuations rather than more complex representations of knowledge and inference.
So now, as the United States is about to re-inaugurate a person for President who is well known to be a functionally illiterate narcissist with a gift for glib salesmanship, it is interesting and disturbing to me and others that now, not only have roughly half of the voters in the United States decided to take another chance on that person, but they seem to value his own habit of making decisions from “gut instinct” rather than detailed analysis.
Good luck with that lottery!
