Thread by @beaglerush

@EvilSoully True randomness isn't what we start out thinking 'random' looks like. Probability is far more complex than we first think. Having guaranteed options gives you a safety net to allow you to take riskier options and then fall back on the sure things.

@EvilSoully Nothing is guaranteed, and you can't control that, but you can push the odds in your favour as much as you can, that's what you can control. Similarly, bad things and loss will happen to you, but what you have control over is how you deal with and move past them.

@EvilSoully The "no win scenario" is sometimes real, and if you can't deal with that, you're liable to make things even worse by refusing to accept it. But sometimes it's the opposite - sometimes you have to ignore the odds and go for the insane option because a slim hope is all you have.

@EvilSoully Knowing the difference between the two is critical - get it wrong and you make an unavoidably bad situation worse. Get it right and you pull it out of the fire when everyone else has looked at the problem and just given up hope and called it impossible.

@EvilSoully Risk is an important part of life and decision making - 'never taking risks' is not, as you'd think, the least risky way to live. Never taking risks means you never do anything that has a chance to fail, which is of course crippling. No, you have to know *which* risks to take.

@EvilSoully And perhaps most crushingly, ethics and pragmatism are often at odds in the worst way. Should you ever leave a dying soldier behind? What if staying to save them gets even more soldiers killed? Pride and ego often play a part in that.

@EvilSoully As an impartial robot I can view a situation and say "it's unlikely we save this soldier, and very likely we get more people killed if we try." So the right decision is to leave them, right? But that's "not who I am". It's not "who we are". And so emotional decisions are made.

@EvilSoully There are times where I've pulled it out and made that work, and there's times where scores more people have died for that same type of decision. Often the difference between the two results was luck. Does that make those successes the right call, or the failures wrong decisions?

@EvilSoully Or is it the opposite? Is risking everyone for the slim chance of saving an injured person still the wrong call, even though we got lucky and it worked *this time*? Is praising and cheering for "heroic" calls against all odds wrong because it's encouraging future recklessness?

@EvilSoully XCOM is a fascinating lense to view this through, where no matter your call, the lives saved or lost are digital. And while this particular example is about combat, the concept itself is relevant to life in general, I believe. As is the rest above.

Learned a lot from Jake.

@EvilSoully Also DnD and roleplaying games are another place I've learned and grown a lot from for similar reasons. I often cite the story of me playing Only War where I risked a platoon's life to save a child in a warzone who was in hindsight obvious sniper bait. "Hero" is a dangerous idea.