Never delete code or results!!!
There’s a tool I’ve been interested in using (if it exists), basically a jupyter notebook, but which saves all outputs to tmp files (possibly truncating at the 1MB mark or something), and which maintains a tree history of the state of cells (i.e. if you hit ctrl-z a few times and start editing, it creates a branch.) Neither of these are particularly memory heavy, but both would have saved me in the past if they were hidden options to restore old state.
I’d also add that if you had a bug, and it took real effort/digging to find an online solution, archive the link to that solution in a list (preferably with date tags.) This has been preferable for me over painstakingly re-searching / trying to search through browser history when needed.
I’ll probably end up thinking about this in the background for a while, and jotting down any interesting cases in case they can accumulate into a nice generalizable thing (or maybe I’ll stumble upon someone else who’s made such an analysis before.)
Where I see your example sharing a common idea is that one party makes what appears to be a suboptimal decision (e.g. if they just wanted to attract top talent, a salary at the top of the salary spectrum would suffice), and it leaves the other party to infer what might be the true reasoning behind the decision that would lead to it being an optimal decision (i.e. it assumes the other party is rational.)
Another case I’ve seen recently was in a thread discussing the non-shopper problem.
Here an exchange also happens, except this time it’s your $ for something you have little domain knowledge over. I imagine the peak probability for someone concerned about quality but without a good way to assess it would fall somewhere around a standard deviation above the mean price.