Probabilistic decision-making as an anxiety-reduction technique 2018-07-16T03:51:49.970Z

Comment by RationallyDense on In Defense of Attempting Hard Things, and my story of the Leverage ecosystem · 2022-01-02T00:53:52.963Z · LW · GW

I think a lot of it might have to do with the non-linear way cleanup needs to scale with the number of people. If you have 10x people living in a space, they are probably creating around 10x as much of a mess. And because there are 10x people there are 10x people experiencing the messes. So with the broken glass example, you probably have 10x broken glasses per time period and 10x people wandering about risking to find a small glass shard you missed. So cleaning up a broken glass in a 40-persons household needs to be way more thorough than in a 4 persons household.

(It's also why using glassware near your personal pool is fine while using glassware near a public pool tends to be prohibited.)

Comment by RationallyDense on Teach People to Recognize the Sound of Covid? · 2020-11-07T18:06:06.510Z · LW · GW

It sounds like they identify coughs of people who know/believe they have COVID. I suspect that might affect how those people perform their forced cough as opposed to people who don't think they have COVID.