Risk Aversion Quotes

“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.”
― Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

“Human individuals and human organizations typically have preferences over resources that are not well represented by an "unbounded aggregative utility function". A human will typically not wager all her capital for a fifty-fifty chance of doubling it. A state will typically not risk losing all its territory for a ten percent chance of a tenfold expansion. [T]he same need not hold for AIs. An AI might therefore be more likely to pursue a risky course of action that has some chance of giving it control of the world.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“The scarcity mindset in dating often goes hand in hand with the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy says that it is bad to lose something we have invested time, money, energy or emotions into, regardless of whether that something is still actually doing anything for you. Humans are highly risk averse creatures, so we tend to prefer NOT losing something over potentially gaining something, even if we don't like what we would lose.”
― Dr. Liz Powell, Building Open Relationships: Your hands on guide to swinging, polyamory, and beyond!

“Those whom even love cannot shake from their habitual aversion to risk and inertia are those who are truly unredeemable.”
― Cristina Nehring, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century

“In this chapter I focused on the dopamine-driven reward system and its role in delivering life's goodies. But there's a mirror-image brain network, often called the loss avoidance system, whose job it is to call our attention to risk. If the reward network chases shiny fruit, the loss avoidance system worries about bad apples.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.”
― Adam M. Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

“She takes a cautious approach to toasting bread. She does it by degrees, nervous of burning it. But the trouble is, by popping it up and down five times to check on its progress, she provides herself with plenty of opportunities to forget about the toast entirely and burn it to a crisp. Her cautious approach to toasting, I fancy, actually has the unintended consequence of making it more likely she'll burn her breakfast. Is there a life lesson in this, I wonder?”
― Ben Aitken, The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple

“Play it safe long enough, and you’ll start calling fear ‘wisdom.”
― Joseph C. Kunz Jr., Money's Dirty Little Secrets: How to Break the Rules, Get Filthy Rich, and Laugh All the Way to the Bank