In the course of any workday, on the now very rare occasions I find myself thinking about such meta-level junk instead of the math at hand, I remind myself that it is a wasted motion—where a ‘wasted motion’ is any thought which will, in retrospect if the problem is in fact solved, have not have contributed to having solved the problem.
If you rule out doing anything except X, then you won’t get much out of accurately evaluating the plausibility of X. The point of considering likelihood of success is that there are always other options, including cutting one’s losses. But to rule out all competing options requires some assessment of their plausibility relative to X.
A lot of meta-level fretting has the property of being one-sided—it’s about a single option considered in isolation, not about two alternatives. If there’s a concrete alternative that’s supposed to help humanity more and has a decent chance of being actually correct vs. the sort of thing one dutifully ought to consider, I am usually totally happy to consider it. (You’ve seen me ask ‘Can we have a concrete policy implication, please?’ or ‘Is there an option on the table for what we should be doing instead, if that’s true?’ at a number of discussions, right? This is often what my ‘wasted motion’ heuristic looks like when it fires.)
If you rule out doing anything except X, then you won’t get much out of accurately evaluating the plausibility of X. The point of considering likelihood of success is that there are always other options, including cutting one’s losses. But to rule out all competing options requires some assessment of their plausibility relative to X.
A lot of meta-level fretting has the property of being one-sided—it’s about a single option considered in isolation, not about two alternatives. If there’s a concrete alternative that’s supposed to help humanity more and has a decent chance of being actually correct vs. the sort of thing one dutifully ought to consider, I am usually totally happy to consider it. (You’ve seen me ask ‘Can we have a concrete policy implication, please?’ or ‘Is there an option on the table for what we should be doing instead, if that’s true?’ at a number of discussions, right? This is often what my ‘wasted motion’ heuristic looks like when it fires.)