Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 4,631
The value and risk are idiosyncratic—they’ll vary greatly based on your personality and interaction of your beliefs with the results.
Generally, there’s value in quantifying what you already suspect. And there’s value in getting another data point into the statistical analysis of the tests. But over-focus on a number when you don’t really internalize what it means (and more importantly doesn’t mean) can be distracting or demoralizing.
For most people, the standardized testing they’ve already taken is sufficient—SATs track pretty closely, certainly good enough for most decisions you’d make based on a formal IQ test. Which leaves this in the entertainment category.
To determine if you’d find it worthwhile, write up a paragraph or two about how you’d react for various result bands. I predict that you’ll get most of the value from that writeup, and actually taking the test won’t matter.
It should be possible to find natural experiments as local laws change, but I don’t know of any studies. And it’s _very_ hard to study longer-term effects, as such laws tend to change because of demographic changes, not in advance of them.
I think your motivational model for landlords is fairly accurate—they would prefer to leave a unit empty over renting to a (percieved) risk. In the longer term, this also applies to the supply of rental housing and whether people choose to become (or cease to be) landlords. If the income for a property doesn’t make up for the hassle and expense, maybe the landlord is better off converting to a condo or meth factory.
I think your risk and cost estimates are somewhat naive. Even if evictions are not legally restricted, they never get truly easy. In the case of “problem tenants”, the eviction can increase the chance or magnitude of damage: revenge destruction is not unheard-of (it _is_ uncommon, but perhaps wouldn’t be if more impulsive tenants were more easily moved from room to room). More importantly, the damage is done by the time the decision to evict is made. Evicting a problem tenant doesn’t undo the expense, it just stops the bleeding.
I suspect it will remain the case, regardless of policy or law, that the easiest eviction is not to have rented in the first place. And the easiest way not to take a loss on rental property is not to be a landlord in the first place.
I don’t know any good solutions, unfortunately. There are partial solutions, for some populations, but they can make it worse for other groups. Required renter’s insurance that indemnifies the landlord is a possibility—GREAT for those who appear risky to the landlord but have a solid track record that the insurer can see. Crappy for the reverse—those who appear worse than they are to the insurance company.
Fractional ownership (condo model, but with landlord as part-owner) is another—instead of a deposit, require an investment of a significant percentage of the value. Which you get back (along with capital gains or losses) from the next tenant/owner, not from the landlord. Again, GREAT for a group of people with some financial resources but not enough to own outright. And unworkable for most of the poor.
Just relaxing housing codes may be an economically-viable solution—the landlord takes less risk if the apartment is _already_ pretty damaged. But it’s well outside the overton window for social acceptance—“slumlord” is a strong epithet.
Thanks for sharing. How big is your household, and what risk bands do you consider yourselves in? This is more regimented than anyone I know, except for a few immune-compromised friends (and they aren’t relaxing much based on current trends).
If that were true, and it became common knowledge (universal expectation that everyone else believes it), it would likely reduce the number of people willing to pay that much by quite a bit.
It’s probably not true (it’s one component of value, but likely not the majority), and there’s a lot of emotional investment in not believing it even if it were. so I suspect this is not a world we’ll find ourselves in.
Fair enough. That lack of empirical validation is a hallmark of esoteric decision theories, so is some evidence you’re on an interesting track :)
It gets mentioned around here, usually in a negative light, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across it except when someone here complains or asks about it. It’s not early in any search results, and nobody I follow or correspond with links to it. It’s just one of billions of websites that have no impact on anything.
From what little I’ve seen, it seems more community- and popular-culture-focused than LessWrong is, and the approach has more editorial slant than LW Wiki. I don’t see a lot of overlap between here and there.
I don’t think, unless you have some unstated reason to, you need to have any thoughts on it.
I guess it is, but I’d edit your question to mention that you include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality in your assumptions. Personally, I don’t think that other potential voters are all that similar to myself, so all decision theories lead to the same result (negative EV for voting, when considering only cost of time spent vs chance of pivotal outcome).
I don’t think any of the more interesting decision theories differ from CDT on a trivial expected value calculation, with no acausal paths to the payoffs. How do you see it working? Can you put some probabilities and payoffs in place to show why you think this is relevant?
I want to see more and better terminology in this area.
I think I want less terminology in this area, and generally more words and longer descriptions for things that need nuance and understanding. Dressing up insults as diagnoses doesn’t help any goals I understand, and jargon should only be introduced as part of much longer analyses where it illuminates rather than obscures.
There’s a parallel development that makes any strategy difficult—it’s financially rewarding to misdirect and mis-aggregate the big-picture publications and comparisons. So you can’t spend less time on details, as you can’t trust the aggregates without checking. See also Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Without an infrastructure for divvying up the work to trusted cells that can understand (parts of) the details and act as a check on the aggregators and each other, the only answer is to spot-check details yourself, and accept ignorance of things you didn’t verify.
Without looking, I’ll predict it’s a neologism—invented in the last ~25 years to apply to someone the inventor disagrees with. Yup, google n-grams shows 0 uses in any indexed book. A little more searching shows almost no actual uses anywhere—mostly automated dictionary sites that steal from each other, presumably with some that accept user submissions.
I did find one claim to invention, in 2017: http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/236053 . Oh, and earlier (2008), there’s a book with that title: https://www.amazon.com/Alethophobia-Manoucher-Parvin/dp/1588140474 .
I still submit that this is a word in search of a need, which mostly exists as a schoolyard insult dressed up in Latin.
I think there are different sets of “we” that you might be addressing the question to. The instinct to use government is understandable, but without an understanding of what is actually monopolized, it’s unlikely to be effective. Note also that the network effect is a recognition of a whole lot of value being created, at least some of which is NOT captured by the monopoly. Simply reducing the effect (by limitation or forced disaggregation) could easily hurt consumers a lot, in addition to hurting the monopolist.
For some values, forced interoperability (published least-common-denominator APIs and specifications) can help, but they’re slow and the providers are very well trained in how to extend them to preserve their value-add in protected(monopolistic) ways.
And the fundamental network-effect value is _very_ hard to open up. That value is identity/addressing. The exact right balance of (feeling of) privacy and accessibility is fragile and not very portable.
I _really_ want to believe that posting this comment multiple times was an intentional demonstration of how opinions can be unevenly weighted. If so, brilliant!
This allegory misses me by far enough that I have no clue what it’s intended to demonstrate.
Past friends and family might actually judge quite harshly.
And will certainly judge more harshly if it seems like a rash decision, which they will if you haven’t talked about before or asked anyone’s opinion. More importantly, it’s about collecting data—even if they lie, they’ll reveal information about their beliefs and expectations. You need this data!
Any nosejob should wait until trying out the really good cost/benefit propositions.
That’s not quite what I meant—there’s no reason not to both if you’re convinced that both are beneficial. I meant to suggest that this is an avenue to gather evidence about how (some) people treat you differently based on appearance, and that evidence can be used in your calculation about a nose job.
Don’t serialize when you can be parallel. Don’t blindly wait to try out one intervention at a time. DO wait when you have a reason, when there’s data you need from the sequencing and separation of interventions.
Also, if you haven’t already, watch Roxanne (1987). It will provide a great set of comebacks and reactions for when people react to the size of your nose.
I think, from past comments, you’re a cis hetero male, as am I. Most of what I say here applies to anyone, but some subcultures or demographics may have sufficiently different beauty and behavior norms as to override other considerations.
Being (more) conventionally attractive has advantages. Being known to focus on physical attractiveness has disadvantages. And most importantly, attractiveness is different for different evaluators. It’s quite likely that even if a change is judged as an improvement by your average contact, it can be significantly negative to some important people (your family, close friends who liked you how you were, people you have yet to meet who just prefer natural looks).
This is something you probably can’t average out—the distribution and the specifics matter.
I don’t mean to argue for “don’t do it”—all evidence I have indicates that people who get plastic surgery are happier after than before. I know maybe a dozen people in this category (all women, and more boobs than face, but it’s still evidence), and the only one who regrets it (at least enough to share with me) was a case of something going wrong and requiring further surgery and pain to get a smaller overall improvement than expected—she did not believe she’d chosen wrongly.
I do mean to argue that you can collect evidence much more than you’ve shared here. Asking people can be awkward, but no more awkward than explaining the bruises and talking about it afterward. People and doctors will sometimes lie, but more often will only partly obscure their true beliefs. The extremely common tactic is to tell a few close friends and relatives that you’re considering this surgery, and ask what they think. You’re not looking for a number or a final result from that, you’re looking for general attitudes and specific reaction to your options.
Also, when interviewing doctors, ask for references—they’ll be skewed, but still nonzero value as evidence. There _have to be_ subreddits and forums about the topic, and about sub-groups you particularly care about where you can ask (anonymously if you want) about opinions on size of schnozz and on remediation of such. Also skewed, but once you recognize that you don’t want averages, but distributions of attitude across groups, that’s not too harmful to your choice.
You can also collect some evidence by investing smaller amounts of time/money and seeing if that has any noticeable effect—which may be valuable on their own as well. Pay for a really nice haircut, and hire a personal shopper or consultant for a wardrobe upgrade.
I’d like to see it, and even more I’d like to see the tweaking and objections from people who see the levels as exclusive and incremental, rather than filters which can be simultaneously used or switched among as needed.
Here’s a prediction I haven’t seen anywhere else: due to border closures from COVID-19 and Brexit, the value of dual-citizenship is going up (or at least being made visible). This will lead to an uptick in mixed-nationality marriages.
The _vast_ majority of interesting decisions are uncertain and have multidimensional risks and payouts that defy such calculation. Even something as trivial as “how much to pay for a residence” has massive variance in the monetary outcome _and_ unknown impact on quality of life, ease of social experiences, what work options there are, etc.
Sure, if you see a 3:1 chance to get paid even money, you should bet half your resources on it (that’s not your current net worth, actually—it’s the discounted value of your future cash flows, independent of this bet. For young folks, it’s likely a large multiple of your current net worth). But you will _never_ see such an opportunity.