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dude I literally tried to define a made up word because you kept bending words to mean nonstandard things and you responded by disagreeing with the definition of a word I just made up? also: almost surely is not the only thing that matters! outliers matter.

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I'm not disagreeing with the definition of the word qwer! I am disagreeing that you are trying to maximize the EV of anything.

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Like, fine, to be pedantic: a) if only one sequence will end up happening, there are no interaction effects between them b) So you have a set of possible outcomes and probabilities o_i and p_i c) because of (a), U = sum_i[p_i*f(o_i)] for some function f d) (cont'd)

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f here is whatever wacky nonlinear function you want. d) define qwer == f(o_i) e) you are trying to maximize the EV of qwer

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I think we diverge at (c) in the prior tweet, or (e) here. This is in some senses an ideological disagreement, not a mathematical one. You're saying, "hey, I don't know what outcome I'm going to see, so what I'm going to do is weight each by their probability and sum." (ctd.)

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On the other hand, we're saying, "hey, I don't know what outcome I'm going to see, so what I'm going to do is pick a strategy that will lead to better outcomes for me with probability 1." You're absolutely correct that we miss out on some extremely good outcomes this way.

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When I was first learning about this, the frustrating part was that I got taught starting in Econ 101 and then as a professional trader that EV is *the* thing that matters. But! It's just a particular number. I now believe maximizing another number fits my preferences better.

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really glad that you're phrasing this clearly! FWIW I think that the paper fails pretty badly to make this prominent. It's a key assumption underpinning it. I do object a bit to "probability 1". That is not a meaningful statement in practice, rather it's "high probability".

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Furthermore, this is just one rabbit hole which doesn't address my other objections (which are that the assumptions in the paper missed a ton of key points and make no sense in practice, with this just being one example)