suzanne

Karma: 50

suzanne 6 Nov 2011 14:38 UTC
9 points
on: 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey
I’ve taken the survey, and realised that I really need to practise making probability estimates.

suzanne 27 Aug 2011 11:24 UTC
12 points
on: Bayesian Reasoning Applied to House Selling: Listing Price
You might want to consider a list price which is precise to $100 or $1000 rather than a round number, because the anchoring effect seems to be stronger when a price is more exact. The original paper is behind a paywall, but there’s a summary in this article.

They looked at five years of real estate sales in Alachua County, Florida, comparing list prices and actual sales prices of homes. They found that sellers who listed their homes more precisely—say $494,500 as opposed to $500,000—consistently got closer to their asking price. Put another way, buyers were less likely to negotiate the price down as far when they encountered a precise asking price.

suzanne 10 Oct 2010 18:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Request: Interesting Invertible Facts
I know what you mean, and I worried about that when I posted those examples. The problem is that I can’t tell if I’m suffering from the hindsight bias when I’m trying to evaluate “Could I believe both this statement and its inverse, regardless of which one was presented as the truth?” In these cases, I can come up with fake rationalisations for both (even though one is more counter-intuitive), which makes me think that they might be invertible. They would need to be tested on people in experiments like the ones in the article by Meyers.

suzanne 9 Oct 2010 0:09 UTC
18 points
on: Request: Interesting Invertible Facts
Venting when angry leads to less happiness after the initial catharsis.

In romantic relationships, similar personalities attract, rather than opposites.

The blog Barking up the Wrong Tree also collects psychology experiments of this kind. The posts are often based on single studies, so I don’t know how well-established they are, but it’s often possible to reverse the result and invent a plausible explanation. Some examples:
- Spending money on other people makes you happier than spending it on yourself
- Heavy TV-watchers are less happy when given more channel options (which itself is an example of the general finding that having a large number of choices reduces happiness)
- Chronically ill patients may be less happier if they hope for a cure

suzanne 22 Apr 2010 16:57 UTC
8 points
on: Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
Hi.

I’ve been lurking here and on OB for a couple of years. As other people have said, there seems to be a large amount of prerequisite knowledge required to post here. I usually find my own thoughts expressed more clearly by someone else in the comments, so I up-vote rather than just adding noise.