[nothrabannosir]

You never have no way of knowing anything. Cogito ergo sum and maybe we’re just a brain in a vat. But in the mean time we can make pretty good estimations, and saying “I expect a significantly better life with P above some threshold and error margin within some bounds” is a meaningful statement. Even in the face of nothing ever being certain.

You allude to it here:

> It's based on the premise that you know with some certainty what would have happened had you taken the opposite choice. That premise is false, you have no idea what would have happened if you had done things differently.

It isn’t false, note the “some”. You can have some certainty about hypotheticals. Experience and pattern matching are powerful tools.

But don’t let that get in the way of the exalted and commendable goal of accepting the past for what it is :)

[bennyelv]

Fair enough - and I agree with your argument. But it begs the question, if you know that the better life was within your grasp with expectation P then why did you not make the opposite decision?

Maybe you know things now that you didn't know when you made the decision. Or the circumstances which you hoped wouldn't come true as a result of your decision did come true so you got the lower probability sub-optimal outcome rather than a better one. Or maybe future you is different to past you and has different priorities which you didn't predict.

Either way, you can only make decisions on the information you have and with the judgement mechanisms you have learnt at that time.

With that in mind, regretting a well thought out decision that you now think was sub-optimal still seems odd to me!