https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ev-2
Gotta optimize for life not just numbers
if the thing giving the choice was considered trustworthy by lenders it might be possible to trade the 10T ev for 5T guaranteed.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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It really helps if you define "value" in a material sense, rather than an abstract numerical figure.
The utility of money has a diminishing return at extraordinary volumes. But I could see a contrary scenario:
You are broke. You can receive:
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Half the money you need for a life saving operation.
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A 50% chance for all the money you need.
Game:
This skill has a 50% chance to deal a critical hit, or completely miss!
“You mean, critical hits which deal something like 30% extra damage?”
I actually like it when games do that sort of thing, keeps you on your toes, shoutout to Backpack Battles
You can still reason about expected value in this situation, just $ is not really what you want to optimize for.
When you view it as “100% chance of being able to afford anything” vs “50% chance of being able to afford anything” it becomes more clear.
Meanwhile, you ask a near trillionaire to pay even 10% taxes and they act like you’re actively breaking their legs and throwing them onto the street to starve.
Marginal value of money at 10T is almost zero.
Yeah, it's obviously logarithmic or something. There is diminishing value in money. I think the way you put it makes it very intuitive though.
Yes, in financial theory it's called a "utility function". Log functions are frequently used to represent risk averse patterns.
You see the expected value fallacy thing pop up in real life when the lottery hits big digits. “Did you hear? The jackpot is over $1 billion! Let’s go buy tickets.”
Let’s be real, after $100 million, or honestly even $10 million, increasing the jackpot doesn’t change how much effect that money has on your life very much. At that point, likelihood is a lot more important.
But every time the jackpot peaks, it’s like all of these intelligent, thoughtful people around me lose their ability for rational thought. Why would you buy a lottery ticket now, but not when the jackpot was $500 million a month ago?
At least some of them are just having fun with it, they don't really expect to win anything.
Wasn't that the whole deal of SBF? I think he said if he could flip a coin between destroying the world or making it more than twice as good, he'd do it. And then he loaned other people's money to himself to gamble on it.
This is referenced in the alt text, I looked it up:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sbf-dangerous-decision-making-philosophy-124600175.html
Yet when asked exactly that in a March 2022 podcast with Tyler Cowen, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was quite willing to play that game–and keep playing it, over and over again. Cowen asked SBF about the high likelihood of destroying everything by going double of nothing on a series of coin flips. SBF responded that he was willing to make this trade-off for the possibility of coin-flipping his way into "an enormously valuable existence."
Fortunate that he went bust on only a few billion worth of stolen money and not the fate of humanity, though the same can't be said for the rest of the delusionally arrogant megalomaniacs running things
Fortunate that he went bust on only a few billion worth of stolen money and not the fate of humanity
SBF could only exist as a high stakes gambler because he kept getting stacked by equally buffoonish, but less famous, bank executives.
SBF crapped out. The gambler mindset persists. We just have one less idiot rolling dice.
The set of things I can do with 20T but not 1T is very small
10T*
*10T + half a shiny button
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Sometimes you can tell Zach is very active on Bluesky -- they've been yelling at each other about a study where people were offering $50k vs a 50% chance at $10m that I am very grateful hasn't been getting play on fedi.
edit: what have I done
edit 2: to be fair they are actually fighting over $50k vs $1m and I just have a terrible memory
That one is actually very hard and not a simple no brainer. 50k is good but not live changing much. 10M would completely change the live, even allow one to never work again and still have a decent living standard.
50k could be life changing for a lot of people. That could pay for a decent chunk of education/training, be used to start a business, or cover a deposit for a home. All major steps up for those currently struggling.
What business is 50k starting?
There are a lot of businesses that cost so little to start it may as well be nothing. But you need to eat until they get off the ground.
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a study where people were offering $50k vs a 50% chance at $10m
That's very different than $10T v $20T.
But I'd also like to know who is running around giving away all this money to begin with.
The premise is fanciful no matter how you slice it.
Wait, what? That seems so trivial. As a sanity check (and assuming I'm reading this right): unless you're utterly destitute or you're ground floor on some insane, foolproof investment opportunity but have no spare capital, you literally always go for the expected $5 million, right?
I'd 100% take the guaranteed 50k. 50k would help me enough that I'm not willing to risk the 50% nothing.
Yeah, the ratio of this dilemma is an interesting one. If it was a guaranteed 5 million or even 500k, I'd damn well take the guaranteed option. I also hate leaving things to chance. Even as a fraction of the 10 million, either of those would be life changing.
But for 50k, I'm not so sure. It'd help iron out a few immediate financial wrinkles, but it wouldn't change anything I'm doing today. I'd still be going to work, still keeping my expenses the same, and keeping my living situation as-is. So it wouldn't ruin me to have 50k less to spend, I just wouldn't be able to pay off loans or accrue savings as quickly without it.
And then I think that if I were to take the guaranteed sum, I'd end up lying awake at night wondering what could have been if I'd gone with the 10 million and won the coin toss. That might end up eating me up inside.
I also hate leaving things to chance.
But that's a security bias. If you were more prone to risk taking, you'd be doing the opposite even if the payout was - say - $150k. Or even $75k.
And then I think that if I were to take the guaranteed sum, I’d end up lying awake at night wondering what could have been if I’d gone with the 10 million and won the coin toss.
This all seems to boil down to psychological impact rather than material benefit.
I understand the justification but just don't think it holds in 2026 unless you're in a worse position than even paycheck-to-paycheck. 50% is solid odds for that reward, there's a difference of two orders of magnitude, those two orders of magnitude are actually meaningful, and $50,000 in 2026 money is "tread water a little more comfortably for a while" money while $10 million – 200x more – is still "invest and go do whatever you want" money.
It's all about your current situation. For a lot of people 50k could be what they need to get out of an immediate bad spot that could start to spiral (credit card debt etc.), and give them the needed breathing room to stabilise their situation.
For my own part, I would probably just dump the 50k directly into my mortgage in order to reduce my recurring expenses a bit. It would make me live a bit more comfortably, but wouldn't be life changing in any way. In other words, I would probably flip the coin. However, I can definitely understand why someone else would choose differently.
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Will you give this opportunity to 100 of us? Because we will be pooling our wins. If so, the latter, if it's just me, the former.
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Depends on how many times i can flip the coin.
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