On average I think people suffer more from the opposite mistake. Refusing to go all in on something and commit, because they want to keep optionality open.
It could be drifting from one relationship to another, pushing off having children (but freezing eggs just in case), never buying a house and settling down in a community you like, never giving up everything to get that job you've always dreamed of, whatever it is that matters to you.
Life is often much richer and more fulfilling when you give up optionality for the sake of having your best shot on the things that are most important to you.
That said the extent these things remove your optionality is overstated. You can always get divorced, sell your house, move locations, find a new job, go back home, put your kid up for adoption, etc. Scrap that last one, having a child really does pretty permanently limit your optionality. But they go better when your mindset is one where making this work is your only option, there are no other alternatives.
For example marriage goes best when:
Doing so requires a kind of doublethink, but most people are capable of it fairly easily.
I broadly agree. As part of that mindset: often, even if you think you've played yourself into a hopeless situation where no sequence of moves could avoid a loss, you should still continue taking moves that keep you in the game for as long as possible. The longer the game goes on, the more chances there are for your doom to dispel itself. Your opponent may make a blunder, you may spot a path to victory you'd missed, some external event may perturb the gameboard, a miracle may happen. Cling to survival tenaciously, no matter how pointlessly stubborn it seems.
Necessary caveats:
(Obvious AI-doom implications: extending the timelines to extinction makes sense even if we have no idea regarding what we could do with more time, even if we expect that time to be wasted.)
When faced with tradeoffs, you should value the ones that mean you still get to make more trades. Never put that on the line.
What about this: you can press button A or button B. If you press button A, you get a million dollars but then have to sit out round two. In button B, you play a game of chess against someone and the winner gets $10. Surely you should press A?
The heuristic you've described is probably good in a lot of situations but it's definitely not universally applicable.
This is only temporary, and although I would obviously click A, I can't help but wonder what "round two" might involve, in this game where millions of dollars are casually being handed out.
And more importantly, I would argue that once you've made a million dollars off a game you have for all intents and purposes won because now you have enormous resources to leverage in the real world, the one that matters. So the cost of losing (limited) game-leverage is fine, because you have gained so much in the game you actually care about.
Worth noting that Dumbledore himself is also not the king on his own chessboard. He deliberately removes himself after setting things up so that, in some sense, he continues to get to make more moves anyway, possibly even up to and including his own future return.
Another way of pointing to the same concept is how a chain as a whole is a resilient thing, but this is because each link has enough give to absorb strain. So a system is made durable not by its components being unbreakable, but by ensuring that individual parts can bend/fail/adapt. A society can hence be enduring only if its parts can be sacrificed for the whole. If a single specific part is worth you more than anything else, the system/society may be traded away for it.
(I think this thought is from Nassim Taleb, but I am paraphrasing a lot and cannot pinpoint the exact source, likely it is Antifragile)
This is the idea behind maximal entropy regularization, e.g. in soft actor-critic. I'm curious what a chess bot trained purely to maximize future discounted entropy would look like, where it only gets to "keep playing" if it wins the game. I've made a few attempts at training it myself, but I'm not quite good enough at RL. Maybe I'll try again soon.
I.
There's a lesson I first read in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, whose importance I did not realize for a decade.
Spoilers for Methods of Rationality abound. Beware.
II.
The line "one king upon [the] chessboard" appears twice in HPMOR. The first time, it's in a conversation that is about tradeoffs.
Harry just paid a lot of money in order to protect a friend of his.
On my first reading I thought the mistake being made was about making trades, haggling over price, and about incentivizing people to blackmail you. Which is the surface text involved here, and the situation in this scene! Dumbledore has said something which sounds deep and wise and yet doesn't quite connect usefully to the situation, which is this bit about chess and sacrificing. Notice, though, that Dumbledore doesn't actually say what the king is.
The second time we get that line, it's later in the story. Dumbledore's final message, read posthumously[1] is talking about the end of the world. Dumbledore has used a method of seeing the future to learn
After talking about the actions Dumbledore took based on the prophecies, the message continues.
(emphasis mine)
That's the key insight I didn't realize; Dumbledore is done being cryptic and trying to give Harry the best practical advice that he can, and his last words are about when the game actually ends. Dumbledore is saying this after he himself has been removed from the board and can no longer take actions.
The most important piece, the one with infinite value, is the one that means you still get to take a turn.
III.
When faced with tradeoffs, you should value the ones that mean you still get to make more trades. Never put that on the line.
It's like the Kelly criterion says, you never bet your entire bankroll. Once you lose a bet like that, you don't get to make any more bets, and there's no way to recover.
Games are generally designed so that as long as you're still sitting around the table, you still get to affect the outcome. Games with many players might have someone lose and be eliminated, and then that player sometimes spectates and sometimes wanders off to finish the last of the pizza or goes home for the night.
(I want to note another reading where this is supposed to be talking about the people of Earth being the objective. As long as we live, we're still racking up points.)
But once there's nobody left on your team who can take actions, you're locked into whatever the current state of the board happens to be. Even a very good position in chess, one where you've got both your rooks and both your bishops and the other fellow only has three pawns and a knight total, is not going to be a victory for you if you stop being allowed to make moves and they are.
Sometimes in a team game it can make sense to trade away your individual actions if you help your team and trust them to carry you all to victory. This is essentially what Dumbledore did, sacrificing himself for Harry. But you really have to have a team mentality, and even then you're not sitting at the table able to steer.
IV.
When I'm making decisions and tradeoffs these days, one of my prime considerations is whether a move means I'm no longer able to influence a situation.
(To be clear, I'm not generally faced with tradeoffs where I wouldn't be able to take any actions anywhere - or at least, not more than most of us do deciding whether to risk the chance of heart attack and eat that next slice of bacon.)
That can come in many forms.
In a game of Magic: The Gathering, I need to keep cards in my hand and creatures on the field. The game mostly assures me that I'll get to keep having turns (unless the other person does something very odd and specific, like chaining together Time Walks) but those turns might not let me do anything but draw and pass. When contemplating tradeoffs, I lean towards keeping at least one option open in case a better tradeoff comes along.
When helping manage a conflict, if everyone involved stops listening to me I stop being able to influence things. If they stop telling me things, then I lose the ability to even know what's going on. This leads me to prioritize leaving doors open at least a crack.
When I'm messing with a computer system, I'm careful to keep track of what needs to be operational in order for me to keep changing things. Once upon a time I was remoted into a system, sent a shutdown command thinking I'd just turn it off and on again, and then realized I had turned it off without having a way to turn the thing back on again. (Server farms have answers for this, but a desktop sitting in my apartment while I'm on my laptop hundreds of miles away does not.) Anyone who has ever messed up something low level and important in their operating system has had that sinking feeling where you're working through what you need to do to fix the thing that lets you type words into a file.
When I'm running operations for an event, it is tempting sometimes to leave HQ or worse, the venue. Doing so has the danger that, even though it's temporary, I'm no longer able to change course as easily. Even if I am the best suited person to handle something, I still often delegate to keep myself able to react. And this is a very temporary situation!
And of course, you should keep your eye on the larger game.
V.
If I die, I stop getting to make decisions.
For me, my decisions no longer mattering and where I can't even theoretically change things is pretty scary. I don't like that feeling. I will sometimes make what look like strange lopsided tradeoffs just to stay in the game, and when I'm not doing that it's generally after staring at the board and making my last best move to try and lock things into the best course I can before turning away from that game.
Organizationally, that means I spend a lot of time shoring up and empowering adjacent organizations. I don't need my team to have all the keys. I'm cheerful about the usual capitalist competition and when I was in for-profit companies I was on board with outselling and out-earning everyone else, but I also wrote up a lot of what I was working on and swapped general tips with engineers at other companies.[2] The king on the chessboard for the company is avoiding going bankrupt. (Though for the people involved of course it's their own careers.)
Professionally, that means planning for succession. If I get hit by a truck tomorrow, I always want my role to be reassigned, thinking of my job description as the active thing that will still try and make decisions.
On a personal level, I really, really do not want to die. I don't really trust other people to make the actions I would make.
Dumbledore has more fellow feeling for other people than I do, I think. It probably helps that he's gotten to nurture Harry, that he leaves behind a legacy of other people he trusts to try and make the world better by his lights.
Consider if there's some feature of the landscape where, if you lose it, you no longer get to take actions.
For all intents and purposes anyway.
Nothing NDA'd, but "yeah, lookups are expensive, have you tried this workaround?" or "the framework's been doing well for me, if you haven't tried it maybe give it a shot."