AllAmericanBreakfast

• AllAmericanBreakfast 10 Aug 2020 22:12 UTC

  4 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  How should we weight and re­late the train­ing of our mind, body, emo­tions, and skills?

  I think we are like other mam­mals. Imi­ta­tion and in­stinct lead us to co­op­er­ate, com­pete, pro­duce, and take a nap. It’s a stochas­tic pro­cess that seems to work OK, both in­di­vi­d­u­ally and as a species.

  We made most of our ini­tial progress in chem­istry and biol­ogy through very close ob­ser­va­tion of small-scale pat­terns. Maybe a similar ob­ses­sive­ness to­ward one semi-ar­bi­trar­ily cho­sen as­pect of our own in­di­vi­d­ual be­hav­ior would lead to break­throughs in self-un­der­stand­ing?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 10 Aug 2020 0:17 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  In pro­gram­ming, that’s true at first. But as pro­jects in­crease in scope, there’s a risk of us­ing an ar­chi­tec­ture that works when you’re test­ing, or for your ini­tial fea­ture set, but will be­come prob­le­matic in the long run.

  For ex­am­ple, I just read an in­ter­est­ing ar­ti­cle on how a pro­ject used a doc­u­ment store database (Mon­goDB), which worked great un­til their client wanted the soft­ware to start build­ing re­la­tion­ships be­tween data that had formerly been “leaves on the tree.” They ul­ti­mately had to con­vert to a tra­di­tional re­la­tional database.

  Of course there are par­allels in math, as when you try a tech­nique for in­te­grat­ing or pa­ram­e­ter­iz­ing that seems rea­son­able but won’t ac­tu­ally work.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 9 Aug 2020 16:23 UTC

  19 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  Math is train­ing for the mind, but not like you think

  Just a hy­poth­e­sis:

  Peo­ple have long thought that math is train­ing for clear think­ing. Just one ver­sion of this meme that I scooped out of the wa­ter:

  “Math­e­mat­ics is food for the brain,” says math pro­fes­sor Dr. Arthur Ben­jamin. “It helps you think pre­cisely, de­ci­sively, and cre­atively and helps you look at the world from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives . . . . [It’s] a new way to ex­pe­rience beauty—in the form of a sur­pris­ing pat­tern or an el­e­gant log­i­cal ar­gu­ment.”

  But math doesn’t ob­vi­ously seem to be the only way to prac­tice pre­ci­sion, de­ci­sion, cre­ativity, beauty, or broad per­spec­tive-tak­ing. What about logic, pro­gram­ming, rhetoric, po­etry, an­thro­pol­ogy? This sounds like mar­ket­ing.

  As I’ve stud­ied calcu­lus, com­ing from a hu­man­i­ties back­ground, I’d ar­gue it differ­ently.

  Math­e­mat­ics shares with a small frac­tion of other re­lated dis­ci­plines and games the qual­ity of un­am­bigu­ous ob­jec­tivity. It also has the ~unique qual­ity that you can­not bul­lshit your way through it. Miss any link in the chain and the whole thing falls apart.

  It can there­fore serve as a more re­li­able sig­nal, to self and oth­ers, of one’s own learn­ing ca­pac­ity.

  Ex­pe­rienc­ing a sub­ject like that can be train­ing for the mind, be­cause be­com­ing suc­cess­ful at it re­quires cul­ti­vat­ing good habits of study and ex­pec­ta­tions for co­her­ence.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 9 Aug 2020 4:48 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mr-hire’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  It was the silence of sul­len agree­ment.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 8 Aug 2020 19:48 UTC

  9 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  Mar­kets are the worst form of econ­omy ex­cept for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 8 Aug 2020 18:52 UTC

  14 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  What gives LessWrong stay­ing power?

  On the sur­face, it looks like this com­mu­nity should dis­solve. Why are we at­tract­ing bread bak­ers, pro­gram­mers, stock mar­ket in­vestors, epi­demiol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, ac­tivists, and par­ents?

  Each of these in­ter­ests has a com­mu­nity as­so­ci­ated with it, so why are peo­ple choos­ing to write about their in­ter­ests in this fo­rum? And why do we read other peo­ple’s posts on this fo­rum when we don’t have a prior in­ter­est in the topic?

  Ra­tion­al­ity should be the art of gen­eral in­tel­li­gence. It’s what makes you bet­ter at ev­ery­thing. If prac­tice is the wood and nails, then ra­tio­nal­ity is the blueprint.

  To de­ter­mine whether or not we’re ac­tu­ally study­ing ra­tio­nal­ity, we need to check whether or not it ap­plies to ev­ery­thing. So when I read posts ap­ply­ing the same tech­nique to a wide va­ri­ety of su­perfi­cially un­re­lated sub­jects, it con­firms that the tech­nique is gen­eral, and helps me see how to ap­ply it pro­duc­tively.

  This points at a hy­poth­e­sis, which is that gen­eral in­tel­li­gence is a set of defined, gen­er­ally ap­pli­ca­ble tech­niques. They ap­ply across dis­ci­plines. And they ap­ply across prob­lems within dis­ci­plines. So why aren’t they gen­er­ally known and ap­pre­ci­ated? Shouldn’t they be the com­mon lan­guage that unites all dis­ci­plines?

  Per­haps it’s be­cause they’re harder to com­mu­ni­cate and ap­pre­ci­ate. If I’m an ex­pert baker, I can make an­other deli­cious loaf of bread. Or I can re­flect on what al­lows me to make such tasty bread, and spec­u­late on how the same tech­niques might ap­ply to ar­chi­tec­ture, paint­ing, or math­e­mat­ics. Most likely, I’m go­ing to choose to bake bread.

  This is fine, un­til we start work­ing on com­plex, in­ter­dis­ci­plinary pro­jects. Then gen­eral in­tel­li­gence be­comes the bot­tle­neck for hav­ing enough skill to get the pro­ject done. Sounds like the 21st cen­tury. We’re hit­ting the limits of what’s achiev­able through sheer per­sis­tence in a sin­gle spe­cialty, and we’re learn­ing to au­to­mate them away.

  What’s left is cre­ativity, which arises from struc­tured de­ci­sion-mak­ing. I’ve no­ticed that the longer I prac­tice ra­tio­nal­ity, the more cre­ative I be­come. I be­lieve that’s be­cause it gives me the re­sources to turn an in­tu­ition into a speci­fied prob­lem, en­vi­sion a solu­tion, cre­ate a sort of Fermi-ap­prox­i­ma­tion to give it defi­ni­tion, and guidance on how to de­velop the prac­ti­cal skills and re­la­tion­ships that will let me bring it into be­ing.

  If I’m right, hu­man ap­pli­ca­tion of these tech­niques will re­quire de­liber­ate prac­tice with the gen­eral tech­niques—both syn­the­siz­ing them and prac­tic­ing them in­di­vi­d­u­ally, un­til they be­come nat­u­ral.

  The challenge is that most spe­cific skills lend them­selves to that nat­u­rally. If I want to be­come a pi­anist, I prac­tice mu­sic un­til I’m good. If I want to be a baker, I bake bread. To be­come an ar­chi­tect, de­sign build­ings.

  What ex­actly do you do to prac­tice the gen­eral tech­niques of ra­tio­nal­ity? I can imag­ine a few meth­ods:

  1. Par­ti­ci­pate in su­perfore­cast­ing tour­na­ments, where Bayesian and gears/​policy level think­ing are the known foun­da­tional tech­niques.

  2. Learn a new skill, and as you go, no­tice the prob­lems you en­counter along the way. Try to imag­ine what a gen­eral solu­tion to that prob­lem might look like. Then go out and build it.

  3. Pick a spe­cific ra­tio­nal­ity tech­nique, and try to ap­ply it to ev­ery prob­lem you face in your life.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 8 Aug 2020 7:21 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: What are some low-in­for­ma­tion pri­ors that you find prac­ti­cally use­ful for think­ing about the world?

  The Lindy Effect gives no in­sight about which of the two books will be more “rele­vant“. For ex­am­ple, you could be com­par­ing two poli­ti­cal bi­ogra­phies, one on Don­ald Trump and the other on Jimmy Carter. They might both look equally in­ter­est­ing, but the Trump bi­og­ra­phy will make you look bet­ter in­formed about cur­rent af­fairs.

  Choos­ing the timely rather than the time­less book is a valid rule. There‘ll always be time for the time­less liter­a­ture later but the timely liter­a­ture gives you the most bang for your buck if you read it now.

  The Lindy Effect only tells you which of the two books is more likely to re­main in print for an­other 40 years. It doesn’t even give you in­sight on how many to­tal copies will be sold of each book. Maybe one will sell a mil­lion copies this year, 1,000 the next, and be out of print in two years. The other will sell a steady 10,000 copies per year for 40 years. The first one still will out­sell it over that pe­riod of time.

  What I find frus­trat­ing about the Lindy Effect, and other low-info pri­ors like Ch­ester­ton’s Fence, is the way they get spun into heuris­tics for con­ser­vatism by con­flat­ing the pre­cise claim they make with other claims that feel re­lated but re­ally aren’t.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 5 Aug 2020 4:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mr-hire’s comment on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  Treat my post as ut­terly worth­less for the pur­poses of ac­tu­ally dis­sect­ing the COVID re­sponse, and use­ful for the pur­pose of a quick sketch illus­trat­ing how a differ­ent choice of lan­guage could help us dis­sect the COVID re­sponse. I find it hard to ex­press their be­hav­ior us­ing the “so­cial vs. phys­i­cal re­al­ity frame.” It’s more nat­u­ral to me to say some­thing like:

  “The CDC didn’t trust the Amer­i­can pub­lic to con­serve the limited early sup­ply of masks for health­care work­ers if they knew that masks were helpful. So they trans­ferred the false in­for­ma­tion that masks were un­helpful, be­cause it was eas­ier to tri­an­gu­late a sin­gle mes­sage that pro­duced the de­sired be­hav­ior to the en­tire Amer­i­can pub­lic than it was to tri­an­gu­late two sep­a­rate mes­sages—one for the un­trust­wor­thy pub­lic who’d buy up all the masks if they knew it would help; and one for the trust­wor­thy pub­lic who would re­frain from buy­ing up the masks even know­ing that the masks would be helpful to them. This de­ci­sion re­duced the trans­ac­tion cost of buy­ing com­pli­ance from the pub­lic in the short run by elimi­nat­ing the tri­an­gu­la­tion prob­lem, but also un­der­mined trust in the CDC to an un­known ex­tent. This may in­crease the trans­ac­tion cost of buy­ing com­pli­ance from the Amer­i­can pub­lic in the fu­ture due to the in­creased price of pur­chas­ing their fu­ture trust.”

  Shoe­horn­ing this anal­y­sis into the trust/​trans­fer/​tri­an­gu­la­tion frame­work for trans­ac­tion costs is both easy for me to do, and feels like it makes my thoughts clearer. I know pre­cisely what I mean by those words. By con­trast, I don’t think that “so­cial re­al­ity” or “phys­i­cal” re­al­ity carve na­ture at the joints, and I don’t think I’ll ever have a defi­ni­tion of them that I trust will be in­ter­preted cor­rectly by my au­di­ence. That’s why I choose not to use them.

  Ob­vi­ously it’s very clunky com­pared to just say­ing it in nat­u­ral speech. But some­times a lin­guis­tic straight­jacket is helpful.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 4 Aug 2020 22:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mr-hire’s comment on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  Oh I com­pletely agree. My aim here wasn’t to give a com­plete ac­count of pan­demic weird­ness, just to show how al­ter­na­tive lan­guage can help us dis­sect the situ­a­tion in a more de­tailed way than seems pos­si­ble with “so­cial re­al­ity vs. phys­i­cal re­al­ity.”

• AllAmericanBreakfast 4 Aug 2020 21:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  The economist Mike Munger iden­ti­fies 3 types of trans­ac­tion costs: trust, trans­fer, and tri­an­gu­la­tion. Tri­an­gu­la­tion is mak­ing a con­nec­tion be­tween buyer and sel­ler; trans­fer is the difficulty in al­low­ing the good to change hands, and trust is the abil­ity of buyer and sel­ler to trust each other to up­hold their promises to each other.

  Every mean­ingful choice starts with a trans­ac­tion. I can’t pound a nail un­less I buy a ham­mer. I can’t go to col­lege un­less I pay my tu­ition. And so these trans­ac­tion costs, which are so­cial in na­ture, will be a part of ev­ery choice we make.

  As the world gets more ma­te­ri­ally abun­dant, we make more choices over the course of a life­time. So it makes sense that so­cial sig­nal­ling oc­cu­pies an in­creas­ing frac­tion of our lives.

  Be­cause of that, it doesn’t seem to me that “so­cial re­al­ity” is some­thing sep­a­rate from phys­i­cal re­al­ity, nor that it’s waste­ful or per­verted. I feel very com­fortable say­ing that we have se­ri­ous trust, trans­fer, and tri­an­gu­la­tion prob­lems in our so­ciety.

  If I had to give an ac­count of the weird pan­demic re­sponse in terms of trans­ac­tion costs, it might go some­thing like this:

  Some peo­ple have high trust in sci­ence, and enough knowl­edge and en­gage­ment with the news me­dia that it’s easy to trans­fer in­for­ma­tion about COVID-19 to them. Other peo­ple have low trust in sci­ence, me­dia, and gov­ern­ment, and their lack of sci­en­tific knowl­edge means that the cost of trans­fer­ring sci­en­tific in­for­ma­tion about COVID-19 to them is high.

  Com­pound­ing this prob­lem, they don’t trust most other peo­ple to know bet­ter than they do, or to ex­plain things to them in a way that’s ac­cessible and re­spect­ful. There are prob­a­bly peo­ple out there who could ex­plain things to them in a way they’d be re­cep­tive to. But tri­an­gu­lat­ing that in­ter­ac­tion would be very difficult.

  Given those difficul­ties, they “don’t buy” that COVID-19 is a se­ri­ous is­sue, and turn to their fa­vorite poli­ti­cian or pun­dit, who re­in­forces their dis­trust and mis­guided no­tions of how the world works, be­cause their con­stituents have an in­ter­est in feel­ing wise and re­spected by pow­er­ful peo­ple, and it’s cheap to tri­an­gu­late and trans­fer that feel­ing in ex­change for a vote. By con­trast, build­ing trust in a smart pan­demic re­sponse, trans­fer­ring in­for­ma­tion about it, and tri­an­gu­lat­ing that in­for­ma­tion with the vot­ers is much more difficult.

  I think that’s a fair ac­count of COVID-19 weird­ness, and I think it gets a lit­tle closer to the causal dy­nam­ics of this par­tic­u­lar situ­a­tion. “So­cial re­al­ity vs phys­i­cal re­al­ity” and “simu­lacra” just feel a lit­tle bit hand-wavey for my taste.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 4 Aug 2020 4:21 UTC

  2 points

  on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  For­give me for ask­ing a re­ally ba­sic ques­tion. But do you find it rea­son­able that we’re liv­ing in a world where ground truth is on its way out? And how can Bau­drillard?

  If we “live in a post­mod­ern world… where mean­ing is com­posed wholly of simu­lacra, which does not ac­tu­ally refer­ence the real world which our bod­ies live in...” what does this mean in prac­tice? Right now I’m starv­ing and I’m about to go pick up a bur­rito from the restau­rant down the road. My back hurts from a long ses­sion in the lab. This situ­a­tion seems pretty real to me, even though I can find el­e­ments in my world that are more dis­em­bod­ied. But hon­estly, most of the stuff I have around me has a phys­i­cal, prac­ti­cal, tan­gible pur­pose.

  It seems like simu­lacra aren’t so much about our di­rect, mo­ment-to-mo­ment ex­pe­rience of life, but how we think about and talk about the sys­tems we in­habit, es­pe­cially on a broad scale. But that seems to me more a con­se­quence of how difficult they are to put into words. It’s easy to find ex­am­ples of de­cep­tive or mis­lead­ing be­hav­ior and speech. But it seems like part of the ar­gu­ment here is not just that there are 4 di­ag­nos­tic cat­e­gories of simu­lacra, but that we’re in the midst of a crisis, or even already in­escapably lost, in a to­tally con­sum­ing fan­tasy world. And I just don’t see that. It doesn’t seem even re­motely true—re­gard­less of whether or not that would be good.

  Can some­body en­lighten me as to how the “we live in the Ma­trix, and it’s in­escapable” per­spec­tive might be rea­son­able, just on an ev­ery­day lived-ex­pe­rience level?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 3 Aug 2020 1:57 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Aaron Franklin Esq’s comment on: Tear­ing down the Ch­ester­ton’s Fence principle

  The cen­tral and origi­nal case of a good use of Ch­ester­ton’s Fence is a pow­er­ful poli­ti­cal figure who chooses to hold off on im­pos­ing a rad­i­cal change on so­ciety through mil­i­tary force, be­cause he wants his economists to in­ves­ti­gate the cur­rent prac­tice for a few years/​decades and un­der­stand its ram­ifi­ca­tions first. When we’re talk­ing about a small group of in­di­vi­d­u­als ex­per­i­ment­ing on a lo­cal level with a new way of do­ing things in their pri­vate lives, that’s a real stretch.

  Since most of us don’t have the ear of our lo­cal dic­ta­tor, it’s these non-cen­tral cases that we’re usu­ally dis­cussing. In such cases, I think the onus is on the re­ac­tionary to ex­plain why a given ex­per­i­ment might need ex­tra cau­tion, as much as on the re­former to un­der­stand the norm’s pur­pose and ex­plain why it’s nev­er­the­less OK to try some­thing new. In­ves­ti­gat­ing norms takes time, and isn’t always a good use of it.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Aug 2020 23:57 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  You’re right.

  I need to try a lot harder to re­mem­ber that this is just a com­mu­nity full of in­di­vi­d­u­als airing their strongly held per­sonal opinions on a va­ri­ety of top­ics.

Tear­ing down the Ch­ester­ton’s Fence principle

• AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Aug 2020 4:06 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pongo’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  I think you’re right, when the is­sue at hand is agreed on by both par­ties to be purely a “mat­ter of fact.”

  As soon as so­cial or poli­ti­cal im­pli­ca­tions crop in, that’s no longer a guaran­tee.

  But we of­ten pre­tend like our so­cial/​poli­ti­cal val­ues are mat­ters of fact. The offense arises when we use ra­tio­nal con­cepts in a way that gives the lie to that pre­tense. Find­ing an in­di­rect and in­offen­sive way to pre­sent the ma­te­ri­als and let them de­con­struct their pre­tenses is what I’m wish­ing for here. LW has a strong cul­ture sur­round­ing how these gen­eral-pur­pose tools get ap­plied, so I’d like to see a pre­sen­ta­tion of the “pure the­ory” that’s done in an en­gag­ing way not ob­vi­ously en­tan­gled with this blog.

  The al­ter­na­tive is to use ra­tio­nal­ity to try and be­come savvier so­cial op­er­a­tors. This can be “in­stru­men­tal ra­tio­nal­ity” or it can be “dark arts,” de­pend­ing on how we carry it out. I’m all for in­stru­men­tal ra­tio­nal­ity, but I sus­pect that spread­ing ra­tio­nal thought fur­ther will re­quire that other cul­tural groups ap­pro­pri­ate the tools to re­fine their own view­points rather than us go­ing out and do­ing the con­vinc­ing our­selves.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 2 Aug 2020 3:28 UTC

  6 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  I’m ex­per­i­ment­ing with a for­mat for ap­ply­ing LW tools to per­sonal so­cial-life prob­lems. The goal is to boil down situ­a­tions so that similar ones will be easy to di­ag­nose and deal with in the fu­ture.

  To do that, I want to ar­rive at an acronym that’s mem­o­rable, defines an ac­tion plan and im­plies when you’d want to use it. Ex­am­ples:

  OSSEE Ac­tivity—“One Short Sim­ple Easy-to-Exit Ac­tivity.” A way to plan dates and hang­outs that aren’t ex­haust­ing or recipes for con­fu­sion.

  DAHLIA—“Dis­cuss, Assess, Help/​Ask, Leave, In­ter­vene, Ac­cept.” An ac­tion plan for how to deal with an­noy­ing be­hav­ior by other peo­ple. Dis­cuss with the peo­ple you’re with, as­sess the situ­a­tion, offer to help or ask the an­noy­ing per­son to stop, leave if pos­si­ble, in­ter­vene if not, and ac­cept the situ­a­tion if the in­ter­ven­tion doesn’t work out.

  I came up with these by do­ing a brief post-mortem anal­y­sis on so­cial prob­lems in my life. I did it like this:

  1. De­scribe the situ­a­tion as fairly as pos­si­ble, both what hap­pened and how it felt to me and oth­ers.

  2. Use LW con­cepts to gen­er­al­ize the situ­a­tion and form an ac­tion plan. For ex­am­ple, OSSEE Ac­tivity arose from ap­ply­ing the con­cept of “diminish­ing marginal re­turns” to my out­ings.

  3. For­mat the ac­tion plan into a mnemonic, such as an acronym.

  4. Ex­per­i­ment with ap­ply­ing the ac­tion plan mnemonic in life and see if it leads you to be­have differ­ently and proves use­ful.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 1 Aug 2020 14:26 UTC

  9 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  Are ra­tio­nal­ist ideas always go­ing to be offen­sive to just about ev­ery­body who doesn’t self-se­lect in?

  One loved one was quite re­cep­tive to Ch­ester­ton’s Fence the other day. Like, it stopped their rant in the mid­dle of its tracks and got them on board with a differ­ent way of look­ing at things im­me­di­ately.

  On the other hand, I rou­tinely feel this weird ten­sion. Like to ex­plain why I think as I do, I‘d need to go through some ba­sic ra­tio­nal con­cepts. But I ex­pect most peo­ple I know would hate it.

  I wish we could figure out ways of get­ting this stuff across that was fun, made it seem agree­able and sen­si­ble and non-threat­en­ing.

  Less nega­tivity—we do sooo much cri­tique. I was origi­nally at­tracted to LW partly as a place where I didn’t feel obli­gated to par­ti­ci­pate in the cul­ture war. Now, I do, just on a set of top­ics that I didn’t as­so­ci­ate with the CW be­fore LessWrong.

  My guess? This is to­tally pos­si­ble. But it needs a cham­pion. Some­body will­ing to ded­i­cate them­selves to it. Some­body friendly, funny, em­pathic, a good performer, neat and prac­ticed. And it needs a space for the ed­uca­tive pro­cess—a YouTube chan­nel, a book, etc. And it needs the courage of its con­vic­tions. The sign of that? Not tak­ing it­self too se­ri­ously, be­ing known by the fruits of its labors.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 31 Jul 2020 23:09 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  I won­der if your prob­lem as a youth was in ag­o­niz­ing over big de­ci­sions, rather than learn­ing a pro­duc­tive way to me­thod­i­cally think them through. I have lots of ev­i­dence that I un­der­think big de­ci­sions and over­think small ones. I also tend to be slow yet ul­ti­mately im­pul­sive in mak­ing big changes, and fast yet hy­per-an­a­lyt­i­cal in mak­ing small changes.

  Daily choices have low switch­ing and sunk costs. Every­body’s always com­par­ing, so one brand at a given price point tends to be about as good as an­other.

  But big de­ci­sions aren’t just big spends. They’re typ­i­cally choices that you’re likely stuck with for a long time to come. They serve as “an­chors” to your life. There are of­ten ma­jor switch­ing and sunk costs in­volved. So it’s re­ally worth­while an­chor­ing in the right place. Every­thing else will be in­fluenced or de­ter­mined by where you’re an­chored.

  The 1 minute/​$25 + 2% of pur­chase price rule takes only a mo­ment’s thought. It’s a sim­ple but use­ful rule, and that’s why I like it.

  There are a few items or ser­vices that are rel­a­tively in­ex­pen­sive, but have high switch­ing costs and are used enough or con­se­quen­tial enough to need ex­tra thought. Ex­am­ples in­clude pets, tu­tors, toys for chil­dren, wed­ding rings, mat­tresses, acous­tic pi­anos, couches, safety gear, and text­books. A heuris­tic and acronym for these ex­cep­tions might be CHEAPS: “Is it a Cur­ricu­lum? Is it Heavy? Is it Er­gonomic? Is it Alive? Is it Pre­cious? Is it Safety-re­lated?”

• AllAmericanBreakfast 31 Jul 2020 16:16 UTC

  7 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  I’m an­noyed that I think so hard about small daily de­ci­sions.

  Is there a sim­ple and ideally gen­eral pat­tern to not spend 10 min­utes do­ing ar­ith­metic on the cost of mak­ing bur­ri­tos at home vs. buy­ing the equiv­a­lent at a restau­rant? Or am I ac­tu­ally be­ing smart some­how by spend­ing the time to cost out that sort of thing?

  Per­haps:

  “Spend no more than 1 minute per $25 spent and 2% of the price to find a bet­ter product.”

  This heuris­tic cashes out to:

  • Over a year of weekly $35 restau­rant meals, spend about $35 and an hour and a half find­ing bet­ter restau­rants or meals.

  • For $250 of monthly con­sumer spend­ing, spend a to­tal of $5 and 10 min­utes per month find­ing a bet­ter product.

  • For big­ger buys of around $500 (about 2x/​year), spend $10 and 20 min­utes on each pur­chase.

  • Buy­ing a used car ($15,000) I’d spend $300 and 10 hours. I could use the $300 to hire some­body at $25/​hour to test-drive an ad­di­tional 5-10 cars, a me­chanic to in­spect it on the lot, a good ne­go­tia­tor to help me se­cure a lower price.

  • For work over the next year ($30,000), spend $600 and 20 hours.

  • Get­ting a Master’s de­gree ($100,000 in­clud­ing op­por­tu­nity costs), spend 66 hours and $2,000 find­ing the best school.

  • Choos­ing from among STEM ca­reer op­tions ($100,000 per year), spend about 66 hours and $600 per year ex­plor­ing ca­reer de­ci­sions.

  Com­par­ing that with my own pat­terns, that sim­plifies to:

  Spend much less time think­ing about daily spend­ing. You’re cor­rectly cal­ibrated for ~$500 buys. Spend much more time con­sid­er­ing your biggest buys and de­ci­sions.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 29 Jul 2020 19:22 UTC

  2 points

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  A check­list for the strength of ideas:

  Think “D-SHARP”

  • Is it worth dis­cussing?

  • Is it worth study­ing?

  • Is it worth us­ing as a heuris­tic?

  • Is it worth ad­ver­tis­ing?

  • Is it worth reg­u­lat­ing or polic­ing?

  Worth­while re­search should help the idea move ei­ther for­ward or back­ward through this se­quence.