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What are your personal small-scale failures of rationality?
A failure of rationality would be something that you 100% intellectually know makes perfect sense, but you fail to execute or act on anyways. Avoiding low-hanging examples such as exercising, eating well, etc.
Failure mode 1: Assymetric laziness
When a task has steps A, B, C...Z. Doing all the steps will result in a much superior output than just doing a majority of the steps, sometimes from step A to step Y.
The final few step(s) don't even take that much additional effort. For example often times I make a soup or a stew and skip adding some lemon juice because I will have to walk to the fridge, find the lemon, cut it, then store it properly after use. But all of that is exceptionally easy, and the lemon juice would make the food significantly better.
Another failure mode related to this is, if I start doing something suboptimally, I just continue suboptimally even though fixing it would take minuscule effort. For example at a recent bbq, I could have easily gone to my car and pulled out a foldable table to make it much easier for me to cut and arrange the food, instead, I did not do that for much longer than I should have because going to the car takes effort.
Any tips to not fall for this trap?
Failure mode 2: Asymmetric cost/benefit
Caught a girl smiling at me multiple times at the grocery store. No, I am not hallucinating or overextending the implications of a simple smile, it was blatantly obvious. I'm regretting not approaching and striking up a conversation quite badly. At the moment I thought "nahhhhh it ain't gonna work out". But the cost would have been an awkward conversation, the benefit would have been meeting a girl who might be into me, and probably more.
Even better, if I were immune to awkward conversations and rejections, approaching people becomes a 0 cost affair.
Everyone knows about this, everyone says this, it's so obvious, but no one does it. I can't figure out a scenario in which this an a negative expected value over the long term unless you really really really bungle up all your approaches, or the probabilities of success are much much much smaller than I think they are.
Failure mode 3: Reluctance to shuffle a schedule
When I make a planned schedule, I have a strong tendency to stick to the ordering.
However, things are dynamic and that means schedules should be readjusted frequently. I have a strong reluctance to readjust a schedule even though doing it means I achieve better medium-term time allocation. I almost wasted 6 free hours not doing something yesterday, because I planned it for today, keep in mind, those 6 hours, nothing would have been done.
I ultimately did it, but I aim for a default mental state where that comes naturally and not at cost of much thought and willpower.
Failure mode 4: Low weightage to novel experiences
I should prioritize explore over exploit when it comes to doing new things, trying new food, etc. But I tend to default to exploit. I understand this is just the natural conservative tendency, but I intellectually know exploring has been better for me in the past.
Failure mode 5: Overly pennywise
I recently spent far too long on whether I should buy a 2 USD game on steam. Or pay a road toll of 1.5 USD. These amounts are rounding errors on my total expenses, there is the opposite failure mode where small amounts of daily spending add up to a somewhat substantial amount, e.g buying coffee instead of making it at home. I might have overcorrected against this failure mode.
It seems to me that I default to being thrifty on all expenses not only the big ones, and this creates a lot of unnecessary stress and time wastage than it should.
How would you classify procrastination of sleep? I know intellectually that I prefer not to put down my phone, and that I’m unlikely to go to bed before 2am if I do the Wordle after midnight. However, it doesn’t seem as bad when I’m doing it, versus waking tired at 7 or 8 and shaming myself for it.
Would go into the category above. I was thinking about more generalized and obscure examples than the obvious ones such as optimal lifestyle.
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Steps 3 and 5 are related, in opposite directions: overanalysing. I lose more time perfecting certain things than I could ever gain through perfection. 2 dollars is not a cost worth optimizing. I calculate my hourly wage for most optimizations and it's usually pitiful.
Similarly, I decide to stick to my schedule not because it's the best schedule ever, but because I don't want to put a few dozen 10-minutes 'is this the best schedule for the circumstances?' brainstorming sessions into my schedule. YMMV, but I have enough difficulty sticking to a schedule in the first place, I don't need the additional excuse for sitting around not doing it because it's no longer perfectly aligned with the ticker tape. Some people definitely don't optimize enough. But I'm never at risk of falling into that particular trap, because I'm always jumping into the other.
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Is this common? This has never happened to me. I thought it only happened in movies.
I have noticed it happen maybe 4-5 times in my entire life. But I wouldn't wager its a common occurrence for the average guy, maybe once in a blue moon.
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You've never noticed it happening to you.
On three separate occasions, I've taken a girl out to a restaurant, and afterwards had her comment that the waitress was obviously hitting on me the whole time and that it had been touching/hot/ego boosting that I was focused on her and didn't notice the waitress.
Maybe it's the preselected thing or she just had nre jealousy glasses, but I've never once in my life noticed a waitress hitting on me. So... It's probably happened to you and you had no idea.
Yeah, I've heard those types of comments on rare occasions. I've always been highly skeptical.
But now that I think of it, I have had a strange woman grab my penis, another run her hand down my back, another make a weird comment about wanting to see me naked (when I was a teenager and she was middle aged), and a few compliment my looks. So, you're probably right that I'm only picking up on the obvious stuff. This is all still very rare though.
That's what I assumed on most occasions because it came from a girl I was dating.
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1: Correct practice. I know that learning something or implementing a lifestyle change should be done roughly one at a time, and that the practice should be separated over days across weeks, with variable inputs. Do I do this, with anything? No.
2: I’m going to say it anyway: vegetables — I have kale in my refrigerator right now, but when I look at it I become unhappy and do not eat it.
3: Proper repentance / development of disgust for sins. I have some personal theories on optimal repentance involving cues and associations and boredom to develop a disgust for sins, but I don’t do them.
4: Sitting down and actually writing something worthwhile. I have the topics, I know better phraseology, I know intellectually that there are much better forms of piece development for maximum clarity and enjoyment. I only did this like once.
For the vegetables I usually sneak them in with meat dishes that includes some kind of gravy or sauce to combine everything. For example I make make a homemade version of chinese takeout chicken and brocolli, but with a lot more vegetables than brocolli and a lot of additional squce so that I can just scoop in the vegetables with rice, the sauce makes anything taste good. If you want to cook good tasting vegetables look into the cuisines of Asia and the Middle East.
Also expand more on the sinning/repentance.
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I think most of our cognition happens unconsciously. We build up intuitions and principles over time, then when it's time to evaluate things, we mostly evaluate something based on those intuitions/principles and not all the way from first principles. Doing otherwise would be impossibly time-consuming and would utterly paralyze anyone.
I think that a lot of my "small-scale failures of rationality" come from this though. I'll come up with a fairly good principle, then refuse to rethink it even in situations where it doesn't make sense. Paying $2 for a steam game is a good example; I have a principle of not spending money unless I really should, even when it's a very small amount of money and the time spend deliberating over the decision is worth a lot more than the purchase itself. Another example is work--I have a hard time pulling myself away from my job even when I'm getting absolutely nothing done and know that nothing will be done for the rest of the day because my brain is exhausted.
Somehow, abandoning these (often useless) principles feels extremely dangerous. Eat out once, and maybe I'll start a habit of eating out every day. Give up on work early once and maybe I'll just get lazier and lazier until I get fired. This seems very true to me, so I would characterize this sort of cognitive error less as a flaw and more as an inevitable result of being human.
Side note, I like your "explore vs exploit" term; that's a nice concise way to describe that tradeoff.
Im thinking that allowing some minimum frivolous miniscule spending daily should help me with that. Im thinking I will allocate 3 USD a day maximum for spending on stupid shit without thinking twice. This will add to roughly 100 USD a month and wont kill my wallet. As for eating out you can limit it to once a week.
The explore exploit dichotomy is a common phrase in Reinforcement learning theory.
Ha, yeah that might help, hopefully you don't end up deliberating too often about some meaningless $3.50 purchase.
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