Okay, I absolutely love this post! In fact, if you were to break it down into three posts, I would probably have been a serious fan of all of them individually.
Firstly, the expected utility formulation of lateness is excellent and explains a lot of my personal behaviour. I’m aggressively early for important events like client meetings and interviews, but consistently tardy when meeting for coffee or arriving for a lecture. Whilst your methodology focussed on unobservable shifts to the time axis, I suspect there are also interesting gains to be made in reshaping the utility curve — for instance, by always carrying reading material, like korin43 mentions in another comment.
Secondly, your approach to self-blinding is fantastic. I do a lot of Quantified-Self research and self-blinding is one of the most challenging and essential components of interventional QS studies. I really like how your protocol builds from the theoretical formulation you created and acts as a convolution on the utility function. I had a little nerdgasm when reading that part!
Thirdly, the fact that you collected and visualised data to evaluate the methodology is outdone only by how pretty your plot is.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to comment on your excellent use of humour. I chuckled multiple times whilst reading. Expertly balanced and timed to resonate with the tone of the technical content.
Okay, I absolutely love this post! In fact, if you were to break it down into three posts, I would probably have been a serious fan of all of them individually.
Firstly, the expected utility formulation of lateness is excellent and explains a lot of my personal behaviour. I’m aggressively early for important events like client meetings and interviews, but consistently tardy when meeting for coffee or arriving for a lecture. Whilst your methodology focussed on unobservable shifts to the time axis, I suspect there are also interesting gains to be made in reshaping the utility curve — for instance, by always carrying reading material, like korin43 mentions in another comment.
Secondly, your approach to self-blinding is fantastic. I do a lot of Quantified-Self research and self-blinding is one of the most challenging and essential components of interventional QS studies. I really like how your protocol builds from the theoretical formulation you created and acts as a convolution on the utility function. I had a little nerdgasm when reading that part!
Thirdly, the fact that you collected and visualised data to evaluate the methodology is outdone only by how pretty your plot is.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to comment on your excellent use of humour. I chuckled multiple times whilst reading. Expertly balanced and timed to resonate with the tone of the technical content.