EA - EA and “The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed” by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA & “The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed”, published by Lizka on April 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: When we're unsure about what to do, we sometimes naively take the "average" of the obvious options — despite the fact that a different strategy is often better. For example, if you're not sure if you're in the right job, continuing to do your job as before but with less energy ("going half-speed") is probably not the best approach. Note, however, that sometimes speed itself is the problem, in which case "half-speed" can be totally reasonable — I discuss this and some other considerations below.I've referenced this phenomenon in some conversations recently, so I'm sharing a relevant post from 2016 — The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed — and sketching out some examples I've seen.The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speedThe central example in the post is a time when the author was driving along a long stretch of road and started wondering if she’d passed her hotel. So she continued at half-speed, trying to decide if she should keep going or turn around. After a while, she realized:If the hotel was ahead of me, I'd get there fastest if I kept going 60mph. And if the hotel was behind me, I'd get there fastest by heading at 60 miles per hour in the other direction. And if I wasn't going to turn around yet -- if my best bet given the uncertainty was to check N more miles of highway first, before I turned around -- then, again, I'd get there fastest by choosing a value of N, speeding along at 60 miles per hour until my odometer said I'd gone N miles, and then turning around and heading at 60 miles per hour in the opposite direction.Either way, fullspeed was best. My mind had been naively averaging two courses of action -- the thought was something like: "maybe I should go forward, and maybe I should go backward. So, since I'm uncertain, I should go forward at half-speed!" But averages don't actually work that way.[1][...] [From a comment] Often a person should hedge bets in some fashion, or should take some action under uncertainty that is different from the action one would take if one were certain of model 1 or of model 2. The point is that "hedging" or "acting under uncertainty" in this way is different in many particulars from the sort of "kind of working" that people often end up accidentally doing, from a naiver sort of average. Often it e.g. involves running info-gathering tests at full speed, one after another.Opinions expressed here are mine, not my employer’s, not the Forum’s, etc. I wrote this fast, so it’s definitely not an exhaustive list of examples or considerations and is probably wrong in important places.Assorted links that seem related to the postFalse compromises & the fallacy of the middle / the argument to moderation / the middle ground fallacy (example link - I don’t know what the right term here is, or if there’s an excellent explanation)Dive in and the explanation of “split and commit” hereWhere I’ve seen the “half-speed” phenomenon recentlyI think that I’ve seen multiple instances of each of these in the past few months. I’m not sure that all of these directly stem from the phenomenon described above — there might be better descriptions for what’s going on — but they seem quite related.Jobs. Someone is unsure if their role is a good fit (or if it's the most impactful option, etc.) for them. So they continue working in it, but put less energy into it.What you might do instead: set aside time to evaluate your options and fit (and switch jobs based on that), consider setting up some tests, see if you can change or improve things in your current job (talk to your manager, etc.), decide that it’s a bad time to think about this and that you'll re-evaluate at a set time (schedu...