“Hedging and Survival-Weighted Planning” by Vaniver

This wasn't intended to be a topical post, but Claude Mythos's system card is out, and... well. I wrote years ago about decision analysis, which often focused on atomic actions in small situations. In the real world, people take large numbers of actions in very large situations, where there is uncertainty not just over which of a few consequences will happen, but over what sort of consequences are even possible.[1] Dealing with the computational constraints becomes a major part of practical wisdom, rather than the basic math of the ideal case. Actions need to be considered as part of a portfolio; outcomes need to be considered based on their impact on a vector of intermediate variables instead of their ultimate impact on a single utility. Heuristics (like "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure") and their evaluation is often more important that tracing out specific outcomes or assigning probabilities to them. In particular, in financial markets people often talk about "hedging". For example, suppose you're a farmer that grows wheat and has dollar-denominated loans and expenses. You might find that the variation in the price of wheat is larger than your expected profits, and want to [...] The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbukyGHJiBsJSPs7w/hedging-and-survival-weighted-planning --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.