Poetry and risk aversion
Mar. 19th, 2015 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marnanelA while back a friend said something about risk aversion, and I asked them about it.
There's a setup where you get given two choices. One choice means you'll definitely get £"x". The other means you'll have a "y"% choice of getting £"z", and if you don't you'll get nothing.
This showed me I am very risk-averse. If you ask me to choose between a definite £5 and a 25% chance of £100, I'm still going to choose the £5 because that's my lunch, dammit. For most amounts of money I won't take the bet unless the odds are better than evens. I suppose everyone has a set of heuristics like that, and this is mine.
There have been times when I've worked around these heuristics on purpose-- you may remember the business about Växjö. But that was merely a workaround; it didn't change the heuristics.
I was thinking yesterday that this explains a lot about why I usually don't enter poetry competitions or submit work to journals: the cost of entry is rarely worth the chance of payoff. "Cost of entry" here might include money, but always includes the manual and mental work needed to prepare and submit, the anxiety about not getting it right, and (if simultaneous submissions aren't allowed) losing the ability to use a particular poem for the next four months. And the payoff is small, and the chance of getting it isn't great. So mostly I don't bother.
See also: applying for jobs, asking people on dates, etc, etc.
There's a setup where you get given two choices. One choice means you'll definitely get £"x". The other means you'll have a "y"% choice of getting £"z", and if you don't you'll get nothing.
This showed me I am very risk-averse. If you ask me to choose between a definite £5 and a 25% chance of £100, I'm still going to choose the £5 because that's my lunch, dammit. For most amounts of money I won't take the bet unless the odds are better than evens. I suppose everyone has a set of heuristics like that, and this is mine.
There have been times when I've worked around these heuristics on purpose-- you may remember the business about Växjö. But that was merely a workaround; it didn't change the heuristics.
I was thinking yesterday that this explains a lot about why I usually don't enter poetry competitions or submit work to journals: the cost of entry is rarely worth the chance of payoff. "Cost of entry" here might include money, but always includes the manual and mental work needed to prepare and submit, the anxiety about not getting it right, and (if simultaneous submissions aren't allowed) losing the ability to use a particular poem for the next four months. And the payoff is small, and the chance of getting it isn't great. So mostly I don't bother.
See also: applying for jobs, asking people on dates, etc, etc.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-20 10:05 am (UTC)Some people submit their work to lots of competitions and journals - perhaps for them the cost-of-entry and the cost of failure is low, or the reward is greater. If you can get all the satisfaction of a publication by sharing your work freely online then the reward becomes smaller, if you feel every rejection as an awful thing then the cost becomes much higher.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-20 11:33 am (UTC)