Recursive conditional probability as in bayes rule.
People are not good at statistics. We tend to imagine more or less than 100% chance when dividing it between possibilities. Instead, try this:
If theres something certain to happen but less certain when, imagine a row of a calendar (or however you visualize sequential days) with different amounts of paint on certain days. Maybe its likely in the next few days but a small chance it could take a few weeks. So spread the paint in those proportions. Its always 1.0 total paint. For uncertainty, leave some of the paint blurred and you dont know where it is. As the days pass and the thing still hasnt happened, you move that chance... (read more)
Work is a failure case, a hole you dig yourself out of. You're doing things in the fun category when you see a danger coming. Your fun will end because you'll be hungry or lack a place to sleep if you dont fix the problem. This is especially true of people who can choose how much work they do and money to make instead of being trained into a schedule. "Work expands to fill all available time" --Parkinson's law. Its like a gas that spreads until you need to do a little more.
If we extend the concept of making beliefs pay rent to structures in computer memory, then AIs could better choose which structures are more valuable than they cost when many objects are shared in an acyclic network. Each object at the bottom could cost 1, and any objects pointing at x equally share the cost of x plus 1 for themself. If beliefs are stored in these memory structures, then a belief would be evicted when its objective cost exceeds some measure of its value, and total value would be in units of memory available. When some beliefs are evicted, those they depended on would become more expensive to others who depend on them because the number of beliefs sharing the cost decreases. On the other hand, if many beliefs depend on a certain structure in memory, those many sharing the cost each pay less.
The map is not the territory, but most people are happy to take the lack of dangers on their map as evidence of the safety of the terrirtory, so they dont update their maps.
I wish people were more scared of the dangers that cant yet be measured, like the chance a very large gamma ray could hit Earth for a short time then be aimed somewhere else. How do we know major extinctions in the past werent related to unknown behaviors of spacetime from outside where we measure? Or maybe the "constants" in the wave equations of physics sometimes vary. Is it really a good deal to let individual businesses hold the pieces of this knowledge to themselves instead of putting all our knowledge together to figure out whats possible?
Often, jobs are created just before before increased production of valuable products in the same buildings and by the same people. Similarly, there is an increase in use of the company bathrooms which happens on the same days that more valuable products are built. From both of these, for the same reason, we could infer that creating jobs and using the bathroom more often stimulates the economy.
We like to have power. You can jump or not jump. Its your choice. The more you consider jumping, the more power you have to choose between jumping and not jumping. Something you're already certain to do or not do lacks the feeling of a powerful choice.