Comment by voxelate on The Treacherous Path to Rationality · 2020-11-07T08:17:42.044Z · LW · GW

I saw the supply chain disruptions coming and made final preparations for it, I saw layoffs coming in my aviation-related job so I updated my resume, took a good severance package, and found a new, remote-based job with significantly higher pay.  And yes, I also significantly re-balanced my portfolio and took advantage of the crash early this year.  In all, I expect about 40% additional income/unrealized gains this year than last.  To me that's more than minimal.

Rationalists that were paying attention get the 1st chance of understanding the implications and making moves (big or small) before a mass of people finally took it seriously in the US.  I'll admit part of it is certainly luck since I can't really time the market or precisely know how gov't policies and actions will affect my stocks.  

It's also hard to know how much of that on my part was explicit reason, I was certainly reading up on the literature about it, but there was not a ton of data.  I did use some social cognition based on the Chinese response under the presumption that they knew more about it since it originated there.

I don't think the COVID response is even the best measure to judge the benefits of being rational, it's just one part of it.  If you want to solve problems, you have to be rational... being irrational is a bad way to solve problems.  

Comment by voxelate on Does playing hard to get work? AB testing for romance · 2020-11-05T05:40:48.936Z · LW · GW

What kind of indicators of interest are you making, how are you making them, and when are you making them?

Comment by voxelate on Does playing hard to get work? AB testing for romance · 2020-11-05T05:38:25.097Z · LW · GW

This is interesting, but in my dating experiences I've not come up with any solid conclusions whenever I tried experimentation.  

I see a few issues with the design of this experiment:

• You're the test designer, observer, and one of the subjects.  There's a ton of room for bias.
• The sample size is only 20 dates.
• There are 16 types of personality types if you assume Myers-Briggs is correct.
• People have a wide variety of mental states before going on dates, and various motivations.
• it is impossible to go on a date, act one way, go back in time and date the same woman, while acting differently, and compare the responses.
• The fact that you're going on dates to do this experiment may affect your actions on the date in a way that you wouldn't act if you were not doing it as an experiment.
• You may accept dates that you might not otherwise accept, for the sake of more data.
• There's multiple subjective datapoint/actions (e.g. "lots of eye contact", "teasing ..more than normal", "generally repressing".

If you want to do this for fun or as a learning exercise, that's understandable.  But I am simply skeptical that you can get actionable conclusions from this.  For actionable conclusions, I suggest reading up on existing studies (but be skeptical of them too).