# Teddy Wright — Models

Generated 2026-06-11 from theodorewright.dev. Every model writeup on the site as one markdown file.

**About:** I have a problem where I think about way too many things at once and can't quite pin one down. So writings here span evolutionary biology, game theory, philosophy, the extremity to which modern society is different than what we evolved in, and whatever else I feel connects to the strange place the earth is and how we all appeared with consciousness here and have to deal with it.

**Site status (as of 2026-04-29):** Trimming the front pages and tightening the model and dashboard rosters.

**Contact:** theodorewrightwork@gmail.com · https://substack.com/@theodorealan · https://github.com/theodorewright11?tab=repositories

# Models

## How to parent optimally
*2026-04-28 · draft*

Confidence, stakes, reversibility, disclosure, etc.

Draft. A four-axis framework for parenting decisions where the right move depends not just on expected value but on how reversible the decision is, how high the stakes are, how confident the actor is, and how much of the reasoning is disclosed to the affected party.

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## Why certain harm and suffering gets more attention than others
*2026-04-28 · draft*

Vividness, recency, identifiability, narrative fit, etc.

Draft. The premise: perceived harm is actual harm passed through a salience filter — vividness, recency, identifiability, narrative fit. Two harms of equal magnitude can produce wildly different moral weight depending on how legible they are to attention.

Formalization and an interactive dashboard will land here once the literature scan is done.

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## Why continuing is rational once you exist
*2026-04-27 · published*

Once you exist, you hold an option on future states. The asymmetry between starting and continuing is structural, not psychological.

## Intuition

Once you're alive there's more rational incentive to keep living than there would have been to start living in the first place — and this isn't sunk cost bias but a real structural difference in the decision architecture.

Once you're alive you hold an option — the right to keep experiencing future states. That option has value independent of current conditions because the future is uncertain and you can't re-enter once you exit. From outside existence, you don't hold the option, so the comparison is asymmetric for a structural reason, not a psychological one.

## Equations

Pre-existence (no option value):

`EV(exist) = G − B + w(E − C)`

In-existence (option value added):

`EV(continue) = G_future − B_future + w(E_future − C_future) + OV`

The option value itself:

`OV = ∫ max(future good states, 0) · f(states) d(states)`

You integrate probability-weighted future good outcomes across all possible states; bad states contribute zero because you retain the choice to exit later.

## Variables

- **G** — expected good experiences
- **B** — expected bad experiences
- **E** — positive externalities generated for others
- **C** — costs imposed on others
- **w** — weight on others' utility relative to your own (0–1)
- **OV** — option value

## Try it

<OptionValueDashboard client:load />

## Key insights

- OV is only zero when the future is perfectly certain to be uniformly bad — almost never true.
- Depression artificially truncates the right tail of future good states, collapsing *perceived* OV without changing actual OV.
- Pre-existence EV can be negative while in-existence EV is positive — entirely because of the OV term.
- This vindicates the asymmetry without appealing to sunk cost.

## Consent-adjusted natalism extension

`EV(create life) = p · k · (G − B + w(E − C)) + (1 − p)(−B)`

where `p` is the probability the person would endorse their own existence, `k ∈ [0,1]` is a quality-of-circumstances scalar, and `(1 − p)(−B)` is the moral penalty for imposing harm on a non-consenting subject.

Anti-natalism and pro-natalism disagree specifically on: whether `G − B` is reliably negative in bad circumstances, what `p` actually is empirically, and how much unique irreplaceable value each life generates.