This is pretty well-known in gaming circles—when you’re behind in a quantized-outcome game (where place matters, not points), increase the variance. Take risks, be aggressive. It doesn’t matter if you lose by 1 or 10000 points—take any chance, however small, to pull out the win.
In reality, no game is ever one-shot. Even for professional sports coaches, we care about a lot of factors beyond “who won”. In board or card games, you want to make sure your friends want to play future games with you, and that everyone has a good time. In sports, they want the fans to be entertained enough to buy future tickets, and the coach wants to look competent enough to keep their job.
It’s VERY common for a team to go from down 30 to down 20, and the post-game analysis praises the choice of plays and how well the losers did in an impossible situation. That’s a big factor even when the coach doesn’t know the betting spread and whether their knees will get broken if they make/blow it.
I don’t think that for most humans there IS an actual end goal. Even on one’s deathbed, one isn’t talling up scores or making evaluations. Some of us do have preferences for things long after our deaths, but even then they’re directional (more happy sentient beings rather than fewer) rather than win-conditions.
This is pretty well-known in gaming circles—when you’re behind in a quantized-outcome game (where place matters, not points), increase the variance. Take risks, be aggressive. It doesn’t matter if you lose by 1 or 10000 points—take any chance, however small, to pull out the win.
In reality, no game is ever one-shot. Even for professional sports coaches, we care about a lot of factors beyond “who won”. In board or card games, you want to make sure your friends want to play future games with you, and that everyone has a good time. In sports, they want the fans to be entertained enough to buy future tickets, and the coach wants to look competent enough to keep their job.
It’s VERY common for a team to go from down 30 to down 20, and the post-game analysis praises the choice of plays and how well the losers did in an impossible situation. That’s a big factor even when the coach doesn’t know the betting spread and whether their knees will get broken if they make/blow it.
I don’t think that for most humans there IS an actual end goal. Even on one’s deathbed, one isn’t talling up scores or making evaluations. Some of us do have preferences for things long after our deaths, but even then they’re directional (more happy sentient beings rather than fewer) rather than win-conditions.