I’m just a regular guy who stumbled on LessWrong some time ago, and it has helped me see a lot that I was missing in this world and, yes, to change my mind. Much of this stuff is hard to grasp for a man with limited math skills, but I think I may have an innate grasp of heuristics in some cases. At any rate, I have long made it a practice to budget an amount for a particular gift, and then seek out the smallest, most precious object that that amount will buy, rather than the biggest and most bountiful. (Except for children under 7 or so years of age—for them a big box trumps a small box no matter what’s inside.) And I am not fooled by marketing tricks as often as my peers seem to be. Thank you all (commenters too!) for this great body of information. I intend to read every word in the whole wiki.
I’m just a regular guy who stumbled on LessWrong some time ago, and it has helped me see a lot that I was missing in this world and, yes, to change my mind. Much of this stuff is hard to grasp for a man with limited math skills, but I think I may have an innate grasp of heuristics in some cases. At any rate, I have long made it a practice to budget an amount for a particular gift, and then seek out the smallest, most precious object that that amount will buy, rather than the biggest and most bountiful. (Except for children under 7 or so years of age—for them a big box trumps a small box no matter what’s inside.) And I am not fooled by marketing tricks as often as my peers seem to be. Thank you all (commenters too!) for this great body of information. I intend to read every word in the whole wiki.