Why isn’t it symmetric? None of the theories are making high-precision predictions of failure either, right? Well, I think that generically when people are planning out how to do something, they search through their hypothesis space for a hypothesis that has a specific indicator of success; they don’t search for a hypothesis that lacks a specific indicator of failure. I just don’t think you can run the neural hypothesis search algorithm in that opposite way.[2]
Interestingly, sometimes when people are in this state of thinking “I can’t see how I will succeed, so I’ll fail”, you can employ the symmetric case to get them to act. That is, you might say to them something like “sure, but do you have any strong reason to think you will fail?” and if they don’t come up with much more than vague musings you can push them to see that they were accidentally risk neutral all along, and then they’ll act.
Interestingly, sometimes when people are in this state of thinking “I can’t see how I will succeed, so I’ll fail”, you can employ the symmetric case to get them to act. That is, you might say to them something like “sure, but do you have any strong reason to think you will fail?” and if they don’t come up with much more than vague musings you can push them to see that they were accidentally risk neutral all along, and then they’ll act.