Sorry, Newton didn't "make bets", he was not a Silicon Valley VC. He worked on problems that he found interesting and that he believed would reveal eternal truths established and maintained by God.
Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus).
All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
Newton didn't investigate alchemy and theology because he was trying to diversify his fame investment portfolio. To see him this way is to do a disservice to him and to history.
That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality).
Newton presumably pursued understanding the unknown, which means he chose his own suffering/work that was different from any objective based on making bets to get ahead in life at the time.
I think it's entirely fair to point out that Newton wasn't betting at the time. He was discovering purely for the sake of discovery.
When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive.
Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes.
Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Isaac_Newton
Edit: I just ran the quote through Google Translate. Still, merely casting God as being ultimately responsible is a step forward from interweaving theology throughout your physical theories.
http://inters.org/Newton-Scholium-Principia-Mathematica
"This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all: And on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God Pantokrator,or Universal Ruler...." and, like, this stuff is all over the place in the Principia. You cannot separate Newton the theologian from Newton the mathematician from Newton the physicist.
Expending resources, whether time or money, on something with an uncertain outcome is a bet. I'm not sure what the objection is to using that term. Nobody said Newton was a Silicon Valley VC.
Edit: WOW, after reading the commentary on the poem, I never realized how wrong I was. The poem is a joke, he's saying it didn't really matter which path he took. All these years I took it so seriously, which apparently is a common mistake dating back to the very first time the poem was read in front of an audience.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poe...