I thought this was based off of historical data, although I don’t remember the source and could easily be wrong.
If I am not wrong, it should be interpreted as: “It has rained 30% of the time we have had similar weather conditions in the past.”
Cosmos
Karma: 775
I ticked the boxes, out of amusement that they existed. I’m also curious if the tickers and non-tickers systematically different.
I’m another paleo dieter. It seems like that diet is overrepresented among rationalists and individualists from my experience, but that is just personal empiricism.
I take a positive view towards the morality of meat consumption. We are doing it because it is practical and delicious—we simply have a weaker preference for not doing unnecessary harm to animals. Once vat-grown meat becomes widely available, I predict that our cultural sentiments surrounding meat consumption will rapidly change such that only vat-grown meat will be acceptable to eat.
This just reminded me of microcredit in developing countries. The loans are often given to a group of several people, rather than one individual, and the repayments have to be made in public in the village. The group self-selects individuals likely to repay (so they don’t have to suffer for the non-repayment of others), and the public nature of the credit put their reputation on the line.
This suggests a method of implementing “do stuff to avoid social status loss”—when you wish to commit yourself to doing something, you should make a public announcement to a group whose image of you matters. That way if you back down, you lose credibility in your social group.
If I play Carcassonne against my opponents and whomp them thirty times in a row by repeating my best known strategies I will have gained nothing. If I decide to use the game as a learning experience to test new strategies I can create an opportunity to learn, but am no longer playing to win.
If you can already win consistently, why do you seek new strategies? I would seek a new game (or at least new competitors) where you don’t yet consistently win.
More generally, I think this is an example of exploration (learning) vs. exploitation (winning) strategies. Personally, I think that people are more risk adverse than is otherwise optimal, so we should attempt more exploration than we normally do before settling into an exploitation routine.
The fix isn’t to try to reduce k, which is obviously not directly possible[...]
Why is this obvious?
And could indirect measures do it?
I agree that discounting plays a huge role in akrasia. There are immediate costs, but longer term gains. This implies that the solution to akrasia is to lower your discount rate. Problem solved.
...now, how does one go about doing that?
I agree that I also convert these contracts to sunk costs. That service works for people who use the standard heuristics, however I doubt it would help most of us very much.
There are variants on this model you might find more attractive, however. Some services will set up a contract to donate your money to a particular charity that you strongly disagree with, if you don’t meet your goals. That gets around the sunk cost problem, since you will still take a contingent personal loss if you fail to meet your goals.
I think the issue you raise here boils down to that of having a credible commitment to punish in the event of defection. It is very credible that the company you work for will indeed fire you if you don’t do your job. Roland in the comments suggests “Find a romantic partner who is willing to give you a kick in the ass if you procrastinate.” This is another external source of commitment, although it might or might not be credible—will your romantic partner want to inflict enough harm to get you motivated?
The key is to be able to generate a credible commitment with yourself, and from my own personal experience I think this is possible. I take promises very seriously—if I make an agreement with someone, I will fulfill it, which means I don’t make a promise unless I am serious about keeping it. So far, anyway, I have yet to break a promise.
In order to overcome akrasia, I hijack this obligation system for my own use. I can make a promise to myself to do something. But where is the loss aversion? After all, can I credibly punish myself if I decide to break the promise? The reason it works is because if I make this explicit promise to myself and then subsequently break it, I can no longer say I have never broken a promise.
Unfortunately, because the stakes are so high, I only rarely make these kinds of commitments. I still struggle daily with akrasia for small decisions.
All scientists, mathematicians, philosophers have this same goal, they just differ in which topics and questions they think are (a) most important and (b) most effective for updating the map.
I think comparative advantage plays a role in this. If you happen to be good at numbers for whatever reason, you go into a more quantitative field, and that is how you can best contribute to the expanding frontier of knowledge.
I would have been more interested in psychology, I had a budding interest in high school, but I was uncomfortable with the shades of gray. I preferred the rigor of mathematics—even if the conclusions were just about numbers rather than something that really matters like people.
I was very mathematically inclined from a young age, but after learning calculus I began to look elsewhere to further my knowledge. I turned towards the social sciences, which led me down a less quantitative path. I think the difference is between the study of physical systems of relatively few variables, versus complex biological systems with many interactions between many individual components. That simple mathematical precision is infeasible when dealing with complexity, it requires a different set of analytical skills and tools, which I found myself much more inclined towards.
2: One big question I’m still uncertain about: why do some people, despite it all, find science really interesting? How come this is sometimes true of one science and not others? I have a friend who loves physics and desperately wants to solve its open questions, but whose eyes glaze over every time she hears about biology—what’s up with that?
I am one of those people who find science really interesting, although this is not limited to one or two disciplines, so I can’t shed any light for you there.
I find science to be interesting because I think that it is a process that discovers truth, meaning correct correspondence to reality. Understanding the objective world better allows us to interact with it more efficiently—look at what engineers have accomplished. Truth allows us to win.
Edit: Let me clarify: I find the results of science fascinating and revealing, but I think the actual work you have to do to further science can be quite tedious. I want to glean the insights, but I know I can direct my efforts elsewhere more effectively.
Models are also dangerously seductive. You’re gaining precision at the expense of correspondence to reality, which can only be a temporary trade off if you’re ever going to put your knowledge to work.
I most strongly object to modeling as used in economics. Modeling is no longer about getting traction on difficult concepts—building these stylized models has become a goal in and of itself, and mathematical formalization is almost a prerequisite for getting published in a major journal.