In the Face of Uncertainty, Buy Options.
18th February 2018
Eric S. Raymond gives us some good advice.
A useful way to sort the decision challenges we face is into situations of high uncertainty versus low uncertainty. These call for vary different adaptations. In a situation of low uncertainty there is a single optimal choice; your effort should go into determining what it is and then executing it as hard and fast as possible. Unless uncertainty rises during execution (for example because you discover you made a serious mistake in your problem analysis), deviation from plan is most likely to be a mistake. Buying options is wasteful.
In a situation of high uncertainty you don’t know what your best choice is up front; there’s a broad range of possible ones that might be optimal, and there may be choices you can’t yet see. In this situation, what you need to do is enable yourself to collect on as many of the options as you can identify and afford to buy. Your hope is to be able to narrow the range of conditions you need to cope with as you learn more.