The Power of Expected Value

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Expected value is really a decision-making tool, right? Like by thinking about a decision you have to make in the world, you can think about which one has the highest expected value. For example, if you're playing a betting game, like poker, if you are making relatively small bets, if you try to maximize expected value, you'll actually do the best over a long period. But so that's kind of what I see as one of the most powerful reasons to understand expected value.

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What are "shed" and "cake" projects? And how can you avoid "shed" projects? What is the "jobs to be done" framework? What is the "theory of change" framework? How can people use statistics (or statistical intuition) in everyday life? How accurate are climate change models? How much certainty do scientists have about climate change outcomes? What are some promising strategies for mitigating and reversing climate change?

Cassandra Xia (@CassandraXia) is the creator of Adventures in Cognitive Biases and co-founder of the non-profit Work on Climate. She is fascinated by how human biases affect the actions we take as a society and how to hack human psychology to get the change that we want. She is previously affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, MIT CS department, and Google AI. More of Cassandra's work can be found at cassandraxia.com and workonclimate.org.

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