[SEQ RERUN] Just Lose Hope Already

From the comments:

Probability of success if you continue: small. Probability of success if you give up: zero.

Doug, that's exactly what people say to me when I challenge them on why they buy lottery tickets. "The chance of winning is tiny, but if I don't buy a ticket, the chance is zero."

I can't think of one single case in my experience when the argument "It has a small probability of success, but we should pursue it, because the probability if we don't try is zero" turned out to be a good idea. Typically it is an excuse not to confront the flaws of a plan that is just plain unripe. You know what happens when you try a strategy with a tiny probability of success? It fails, that's what happens.

--Eliezer Yudkowsky

This was a great addition and probably should have been in the post, so I'm reposting it here for everyone

As it is, I appreciate this post for reminding you that quitting is sometimes the better option. It reminds me of a time when I was doing something or another, failed, and quit. A friend, trying to look on the bright side, said "Well, at least you gave up."

It would be nice if there was some kind of practical gauge provided in the post. We can easily identify it in others, but how do we know when we are guilty of it ourselves? When do we know to give up?

Not wanting to pose questions without thought, I have a couple possible ideas:

• If you can't find 10 people who think what you are doing is a good idea, it probably isn't. Hacker News pointed me to that one.
• If what you are doing causes you no end of soul-crushing despair, occupies a gigantic proportion of your thoughts, and still rates terrible returns (according to your self-report), then you should probably think about giving up soon.
• If you take some time to look at how your actions impact others, and find that it negatively impacts someone at least half as much as it positively affects you, you should really think about quitting. Doing the math here is probably intractable, but if you are doing anything that involves the equivalent of millions of dollars, you should really try to do the math.

That would be my first stab at this question.

One problem with this post, which is also seen in various other posts in the sequences and many LW posts in general, is the tendency to jump to conclusion that people's behavior is irrational. Neither of these examples (Casey Serin and the LTCM people) strikes me as being obviously irrational, in the sense that these people would be acting against their own interest clearly and to an unusual degree.

This is especially true of the LTCM example. While it might be possible that this venture was really a mistake for Merton, Scholes, and the others involved (from the perspective of their own self-interest), the way this conclusion is reached in the post and the idea that they would have something to learn from being lectured about this topic are just childishly naive.

I think this post would have been a lot more interesting if Eliezer had used it to explain the sunk cost fallacy, which is generally the reason that people don't want to give up on ventures like this even if they've already lost a lot of money. Still, it was a decent post and I liked the fact that it was short and to the point.

I remember a situation from a few months ago when a female friend of mine was being romantically pursued by a guy who she was not even slightly interested in. He had indicated to a few of her friends that he was going to ask her out, and they had told him that she was certainly going to say no. She liked someone else, she wasn't interested in you, etc. He responded by making a poker analogy, and saying that if he didn't try, the probability of success was zero. They pointed out that the plan was not going to work, and he was going to come off looking really stupid. Don't forget to factor the negative penalties of plans not working into your expected utility calculations.