This is the most important point I want to make. Even though it is often said, “You can’t really expect yourself to be certain about anything”, I think most people take this statement to be true. I also think most people think that this statement is true because we have a tendency to look at things with a very critical eye. We tend to think of ourselves as being certain about things as opposed to taking what is presented to us and examining it.
This is a very important point. Many of us have this tendency to look at things in a very critical way. We tend to focus on the negatives of something. For example, if you look at a list of people’s names, it is very easy to see that the people we have in our lives are actually very common. The one person that is very rare is the only person that we dont have in our lives.
But this tendency to look at things critically is not true. Sometimes that may be the best approach we can take in life. Think about it. We may not be certain about how to act in a particular situation, but we know how to act in a situation and that knowledge is enough to make it go our way. Sometimes we may take each situation for granted and just assume that each situation will work out, but that is true of all situations.
I have to admit that I do have a problem with the certainty formula. It is a formula that can be used to predict the future and then predict the past so that we don’t go astray. It has been shown to work both ways.
Not to say that that’s the only time, but it’s one of the only times we have used it. Most of what we know about the past and the future is derived from the certainty formula. If we apply the formula to this situation, we can predict that Colt Vahn will be having a lot of sex with five women today.
We already know that Colt’s sexual activity is going to be with four women, not five, but since he has a high risk of becoming one of the Visionaries and ending up with eight women today, we can’t discount the possibility that he is going to become one of the Visionaries and take out the last four.
A better option would be to apply the formula to the present or future. The formula is similar to this: If we apply the formula to the present, then the future will be a higher probability than the past to be a woman.We don’t really want to use the formula to predict future events of the past. So we will apply the formula to the present and then apply the formula to the future.
The reality is that it still takes a lot of work to write a formula that works for all times. The formula we use works for the present because you have a probability of being a woman, and you have a probability of being male. You need to take the probability of being a woman and multiply it by the probability of being a man, and then apply it to the future.
So now you know that the formula could work for the present and future. That’s good. Because you then know that if you use the formula to predict the present, you will also predict that the probability of being female will be much larger in the future than the probability of being male. That’s great. So you now know that the formula will work for the present and the future.
Alright, I think that was a pretty concise explanation of the “certainty equivalent formula” you need to know about. You should be able to do it.
