Difference between risk and uncertainty
I was watching this lecture from professor Andrew Loo and he presented a compelling analogy to understand the difference between risk and uncertainty.
The analogy goes as follows:
- urn A with 50 red balls and 50 black balls, pick a color and draw, if you draw your color you win $10,000.
- urn B with unknown quantities, pick a color and draw, same prize.
The question is how much you are willing to bet?
Conclusions:
- in urn A, you know the probability distribution right away and can compute the expected value.
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in urn B, you don't know the distribution (at least, intuitively).
- we can compute the expected value and in fact it is the same as in urn A.
- what is missing here is that we don't have intuition about this distribution, it is hard to grasp the risk.
- when we have no knowledge or no intuition about the risk we call that uncertainty.
- risk is quantifiable from the knowledge of the probability distribution.