From the Vault: The Devil You Know, Part 2
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What is ambiguity aversion and why do we prefer known risks?
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How does the Ellsberg paradox illustrate ambiguity aversion?
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Today is Saturday. We have a vault episode for you. This is gonna be The Devil You Know Part Two, and it originally published 828, 2025. Let's dig into it.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series called The Devil You Know, which is about ambiguity aversion. That's the observation that we prefer risks with known probabilities over risks with unknown probabilities, even if you have no reason for thinking that the unknown risks will be worse. Uh, this preference is captured by the folk saying. better the devil you know than the devil you don't. For the most part, people don't like taking bets when they don't know what the odds are, and will pay up just to avoid having to deal with ambiguity. And this is funny in a way because almost all of the decisions that we make in our actual lives are made with incomplete knowledge and some significant amount of uncertainty about our likelihood of success.
Very few things in reality have clear objective odds like a fair coin flip or a dice roll.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is ambiguity aversion and why do we prefer known risks?
0:00–1:46
2
How does the Ellsberg paradox illustrate ambiguity aversion?
1:46–6:13
3
Why did Nixon’s “Madman Theory” exploit ambiguity aversion?
6:13–9:44
4
What’s the difference between risk aversion and ambiguity aversion?
9:44–13:02
5
How do the Max‑Min (multiple‑priors) and Choquet expected utility models explain ambiguous choices?
13:02–17:48
6
Can negative news or anxiety increase our ambiguity aversion?
17:48–20:10
7
What is the competence effect and how does expertise shape ambiguity aversion?
20:10–24:20
8
How does ambiguity aversion affect vaccine hesitancy and health decisions?
24:20–1:25:16