There's a museum in NYC called spyscape. They have you play a series of personal assessment games to evaluate different metrics - one of them was your risk tolerance. In this game you have four or five chances to inflate a balloon, each of which can randomly pop, with a goal is to maximize the total air inflated. My instinct was to inflate the first balloon all the way to distruction, because otherwise you have zero information to know when you should stop. The second balloon I also inflated a bit recklessly, but stopped around the failure level of the first, though maybe slightly higher. The third popped at a relatively lower level, and so I played the last two slightly more conservatively.

I thought it was a fascinating test, and there must be an optimal strategy, but I had trouble rationalizing/verbalizing my approach. Anyway, it's nice to see the real world analog to this problem and that the optimal strategy can be rationalized with math!