Emic and Etic:
I observed that I very often disagree with people who use anime forum avatars. A few of them came close to getting banned (I'm not a moderator anywhere), others made really poor arguments.
Useful Mental Models (2016)
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> suck it up. Taxes have a point. Your comment feels completely out of line. This comment thread is talking about mental models about money. The GP comment isn't complaining about taxes. Most likely, the observation about taxes is to say that earning an additional $1000 income does not translate into the same amount that could be spent. Or something similar, related to the mental model topic they're talking about.
He should probably have elaborated on that then imo. It seems like a low effort post if that was what he was trying to convey. However the comment you're replying to is also a useful mental model. Even though tax is "money spent", it is coming back to you through having a safer environment. Therefore it shouldn't be considered "wasted money" at the very least. Although the last sentence of the comment doesn't add muc…
>He should probably have elaborated on that then imo.
Maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions and react aggressively to innocuous things?
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#63Kent Beck has a similarly-themed list of mental models: https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/a-searching-and-fea... I love the idea of cataloging your interests at this high-level of abstraction, and wish it were more common.
In case there is any interest, I write a bi-weekly newsletter on mental models, covering not just the concept but how you can apply them to your life: https://alexpetralia.github.io/newsletters
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#64It would be good to include some mental models for attitude towards money. Things I have noticed about myself: No problem paying for something that absolutely needs to be done. E.g. repair a leak in the roof. Replace something. Don't notice money spent on regular monthly payments. E.g. mortgage. Don't notice $1000 spent as 50*$20 but more frightening to spend $1000 at once. Fear of loss when investing is big. It feel…
A weird one about myself: Renting a boat at $500/day feels wasteful, but buying a boat for $40,000 doesn't. But I'd have to use that boat for 80 days to get my money back (not counting upkeep, storage, and so on). I probably wouldn't use it that much, not even in two decades.
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#65What does LRU (least recently used) have to do with picking the highest-priority problem? But overall, pretty good overview and I appreciate the links to other sources.
To pick an example out of thin air, think of stage act trying to keep a number of plates spinning. You can keep a number of them going, but the LRU one is the one most likely of falling because it's lost some energy, and you need to check it to keep it up in the air.
That's a great explanation for something the article didn't explain very well.
Still, LRU only works if they are of equal importance. Otherwise, work on the important one, even if you've worked on it more recently than the others.
A related idea is the "tyranny of the urgent". You can't let the urgent things keep you from doing the important things. (I stole this from a booklet with the quoted title, which stole the idea from the manager of a cotton mill.)
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#66Efficient market hypothesis That's a kind of ideological way to phrase the situation. It's easier to just describe the "stable market hypothesis"; however things are organized is the way that market structures have stably gone and thus can't easily be changed (whether market are efficient or not). This includes all the points in the parent plus the point that you may have improved on app/gimzo X significantly over th…
The efficient-market hypothesis is an idea that already has a well-known name. In the article the words are a Wikipedia link.
Indeed, I'm pretty familiar with it. It is well known, not universally accepted and a variety of ideology implications go along with it.
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#67Nice. This is a good addition to "List of cognitive biases", a Wikipedia article I've liked to read from time to time ever since I discovered it, years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases As a Stoic, it's good food for thought to improve your "perception" of life and the world.
I personally find a lot of the material about cognitive biases hard to swallow -- I was forcing myself really hard when I read Kahneman's book. There were some good points but while reading it something just seemed off in a way similar to trying to break down the world into a rigid dichotomy -- likes "is the a ok approximate anwser?" "Yes" "Would I use it?" "Possibly with great skeptism and appropriate weight given t…
I still have to read that book. Thanks for reminding me.
About rigid dichotomies though, including the page I linked, I think it's a cognitive bias in and out of itself.
I take these observations as "food for thought", literally, not ready-made conclusions to swallow. A good basis to reflect upon things, but it's just that, the initial spark.
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally find a lot of the material about cognitive biases hard to swallow -- I was forcing myself really hard when I read Kahneman's book. There were some good points but while reading it something just seemed off in a way similar to trying to break down the world into a rigid dichotomy -- likes "is the a ok approximate anwser?" "Yes" "Would I use it?" "Possibly with great skeptism and appropriate weight given t…
I still have to read that book. Thanks for reminding me. About rigid dichotomies though, including the page I linked, I think it's a cognitive bias in and out of itself. I take these observations as "food for thought", literally, not ready-made conclusions to swallow. A good basis to reflect upon things, but it's just that, the initial spark.
I agree. But I think the value these biases actually provide in helping to understand what is going are more limited than people make them out to be. It's much more powerful to simply internalize the worldview of somebody who knew what they were doing, or several of them -- you're not starting from scratch and you're not using models like a dictionary without knowing how to write.
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#69The funny thing about expected value. Even if the expected value of a one dollar lottery ticket was ten dollars, it still wouldn’t be worth playing.
Re: Useful Mental Models (2016)
#70It would be good to include some mental models for attitude towards money. Things I have noticed about myself: No problem paying for something that absolutely needs to be done. E.g. repair a leak in the roof. Replace something. Don't notice money spent on regular monthly payments. E.g. mortgage. Don't notice $1000 spent as 50*$20 but more frightening to spend $1000 at once. Fear of loss when investing is big. It feel…
Earn $1000 = $500 after taxes. :)
I meant post tax earnings, of course.