TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
That’s still a better justifcation of your behaviour than the MIT students [edit: Yvain did not actually say MIT!] used—not to mention that you’re able to look back in retrospect and acknowledge the error of your decision.
This sort of suspicion is a good heuristic, if not the best heuristic. Scam artists (by which I mean casinos and carnies) are skilled at making things appear as if you’ve found the loophole in their game, and when you don’t have enough time to examine the loophole thoroughly you’re generally better off assuming it to be false. From the sound of things you were too busy to do this, not to mention that—being unfamiliar with multiple choice tests in general—it caught you with your pants down. You would have had to devote twice the analysis time as a typical North American, who is familiar with these sorts of exams.
Don’t discount the TANSTAAFL heuristic—you made a rational choice based on limited data and available processing time. Your error is wholly different from the errors at MIT.
Ooh, this is interesting. Eliezer says he hopes this wasn’t at MIT or somewhere, and now people are remembering the MIT reference and assuming I go to MIT. Reminds me of that bias where you try to debunk a rumor, and all people can remember is that they heard someone talking about the rumor somewhere and believe it more. What’s that called? There was an OB article on it somewhere, I think.
I should hire Eliezer to come by and make offhanded MIT references during my job interviews.
Dear lord, I just pooped myself. I’m thoroughly familiar with this bias—and I just fell into it.
Isn’t this sort of language manipulation exactly what the PUAs do? Hmm… a potential way of strengthening one’s arguments occurs to me. While in conversation with somebody IRL it should be more effective to phrase things as “Well, Eliezer said...” than “According to Eliezer’s article on...” so as to give the impression of possible first hand knowledge, or at least thorough familiarity with the relevant material.
This is a dark art no doubt, but with most people I find that this is the only way of dealing with them.
(I am not above name-dropping Eliezer to pick up chicks.)
I sincerely doubt that namedropping Eliezer is an effective chick-picking-up technique except under very unusual circumstances! OTOH I have pulled at least once by talking about cryptography, so you never know :-)
TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
That’s still a better justifcation of your behaviour than the MIT students [edit: Yvain did not actually say MIT!] used—not to mention that you’re able to look back in retrospect and acknowledge the error of your decision.
This sort of suspicion is a good heuristic, if not the best heuristic. Scam artists (by which I mean casinos and carnies) are skilled at making things appear as if you’ve found the loophole in their game, and when you don’t have enough time to examine the loophole thoroughly you’re generally better off assuming it to be false. From the sound of things you were too busy to do this, not to mention that—being unfamiliar with multiple choice tests in general—it caught you with your pants down. You would have had to devote twice the analysis time as a typical North American, who is familiar with these sorts of exams.
Don’t discount the TANSTAAFL heuristic—you made a rational choice based on limited data and available processing time. Your error is wholly different from the errors at MIT.
Ooh, this is interesting. Eliezer says he hopes this wasn’t at MIT or somewhere, and now people are remembering the MIT reference and assuming I go to MIT. Reminds me of that bias where you try to debunk a rumor, and all people can remember is that they heard someone talking about the rumor somewhere and believe it more. What’s that called? There was an OB article on it somewhere, I think.
I should hire Eliezer to come by and make offhanded MIT references during my job interviews.
Dear lord, I just pooped myself. I’m thoroughly familiar with this bias—and I just fell into it.
Isn’t this sort of language manipulation exactly what the PUAs do? Hmm… a potential way of strengthening one’s arguments occurs to me. While in conversation with somebody IRL it should be more effective to phrase things as “Well, Eliezer said...” than “According to Eliezer’s article on...” so as to give the impression of possible first hand knowledge, or at least thorough familiarity with the relevant material.
This is a dark art no doubt, but with most people I find that this is the only way of dealing with them.
(I am not above name-dropping Eliezer to pick up chicks.)
I sincerely doubt that namedropping Eliezer is an effective chick-picking-up technique except under very unusual circumstances! OTOH I have pulled at least once by talking about cryptography, so you never know :-)
That’s an interesting point. You may be right, now that I think of it that way.