How Should We Take Risk Into Account in Decision Making?

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There's no incompatibility between not wanting more information and still being rational, he says. How we think about ourselves is an additional fact that might vary from person to person. Do you want to be the kind of person that does pretty well no matter what? Or do I want to go for things where things might turn out amazing but might turn out horribly? That's something you might have to think about when you choose a job. It's maybe something you have to thinking about when you choosing a romantic partner or a place to live.

Life is rich with moments of uncertainty, where we’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen next. We often find ourselves in situations where we have to choose between different kinds of uncertainty; maybe one option is very likely to have a “pretty good” outcome, while another has some probability for “great” and some for “truly awful.” In such circumstances, what’s the rational way to choose? Is it rational to go to great lengths to avoid choices where the worst outcome is very bad? Lara Buchak argues that it is, thereby expanding and generalizing the usual rules of rational choice in conditions of risk.

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Lara Buchak received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently a professor of philosophy at Princeton. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. She was the inaugural winner of the Alvin Plantinga Prize of the American Philosophical Association. Her book Risk and Rationality proposes a new way of dealing with risk in rational-choice theory.

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