Oddbean new post about | logout
 The thing about gambling is some win, some lose.  
 Yes, but the thing we've been seeing, the last few decades, is that everyone is placing bets. We don't know what the future holds and we can only extrapolate out from the past or guess. Every action carries some risk and reward, often in inverse correlation to each other. 
 To people who aren't me and don't know me well, I look like the absolute kween of high time-preference behavior. My whole life has just been a series of seemingly crazy decisions, that had everyone staring in mute horror, but that I was making very deliberately and that always worked out well.

I simply have an abnormally high risk-tolerance and I don't dither. I just decide and execute. Decide and execute. Decide and execute.
I'm like my dad: Shit or get off the pot, bro.

But maybe that really is extremely high time-preference behavior, so they're actually right about me. I think strategically (future-oriented), but I execute like my hair is on fire (high time-preference). 
 😆 
 Can confirm wife is decisive and I’m the analysis paralysis guy 🙋🏽‍♂️💀 
 got you a winner 
 It's true. Marriages who manage to successfully unite those two personality types seem to work very well and the spouses do better together than either would, apart.

Those who can't get the mix right, dramatically implode. 😬   
 you dont have to tell me twice. hahaha 
 Sounds like me.
Future oriented, act fast, course correct faster. 
 Fail fast, fail safe, move on. Resilience and investigative rigor, rather than timidity.

In God I trust, everything else must face periodic review. 
 I've noticed that this drives a lot of people nuts because I'll seem really confident that I've made the right choice about something (like Bitcoin, LOL) and then suddenly waver or sound like a skeptic.

I just have this complex mental flowchart for every decision I make, so if someone points out that I forgot a logic gate or an external input three levels up, I'm immediately like, hold up... let's go back and review this from START, again. 🤔  
The algorithm is dead. Long live the algorithm. 
 Not believing your own bullshit / checking yourself or the process is the way! 
 yeah, Robert Greene's book The 48 Laws of Power has one that goes:

Audacity can always fix the errors caused by audacity. 
 yeah, i'm similar... i'll sit there with something on my mind for days on end and then suddenly do it all at once 
 Yeah. Sudden flurry of activity, like a flock of birds taking flight. Once I've made a decision, it has to be executed immediately or I feel trapped.
Drives absolutely everyone around me nuts because it looks like inactivity and then they get hit by a train.
Someone less high time-preference would be wealthier and more successful, on average, but have less potential to the upside because they'll eschew risk. And they'll feel less like they have true agency.

It's a classic CEO trait, I suppose, and something typical for military officers or inventors: "moving boldly and swiftly" or "acting quickly on asymmetric information". 
 if ya gotta jump into the cold water no point in going slow

once you've done this sort of thing a few times you learn that hesitation is death, always every time you get flutters as you leap you fall 
 And then, if it works out, they tell you that you "got lucky".

No, I just have bigger balls than you do and I'm more inquisitive than you are. You could have made the same choice, but you didn't. The End. 
 yeah, and i got plenty of stories of landing on my face, one time nearly killed me 
 Same. 🤝 

Well, oh well. No risk, no fun, and YOLO. 
 To me, time preference is about the timing of unpleasantness/sacrifice. A high time preference decision is one that defers unpleasantness to a later date, with a pleasant outcome right now. A low time preference decision accepts unpleasantness in the immediate/short term, with the outlook of pleasantness later on. We all make both types of decisions (both large and small), but some people are more prone to one type. 
 Yes, but I execute immediately because I find inertia incredibly unpleasant. That's why I think I'm a 50/50 mix, at best, rather than someone low time-preference, who focuses on some distant goal and plods toward it, diligently. 
 strategically low time preference, tactically high time preference 
 🎯  
 I'm not sure I'm that far off. I haven't really been able to learn that about myself yet. I would say my past/current behaviors put me deep into low time preference. 

> I'm like my dad: Shit or get off the pot, bro.
Mine too XD

 
 I'm probably like that because I was raised by a military officer. Or I inherited his personality, or something.
Here are our options, we got five minutes to make the correct decision or our ass is grass. WHAT IS THE ANSWER, SOLDIER?

My ancestry is a bunch of soldiers and cops and competitive athletes, on both sides. Must rub off. 😅  
 my family on both sides for several generations have been nurses and orderlies, pretty much 
 analysts and monitors 
 ah yeah, and engineer/tinkerers haha... my opa built several houses, so did my father, so did my grandfather, he was also a mathematics teacher and was grumpy with me for my dad not pushing me to get into computers more (and he did eventually get a computer and i was a pig for it of course) 
 Almost all of the men are engineers, technicians, and electricians or farmers. People who like "things".
My father is a network engineer and my mother is a budget analyst. 
 😆
Forrest Gump scenes !