= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
John_Maxwell_IV comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (109)
I suspect (perhaps "fear") that, outside of very specific goal-oriented fields like entrepreneurship, this is more likely a symptom self-deception about our goals.
You tell yourself that your ultimate goal is, for example, to make the world a happier place. And so it is for this ultimate reason, that you decide to be a video game programmer. What a coincidence that you're a video game enthusiast that always dreamed of making the next Mario Bros. What a coincidence that it happens to pay extraordinarily well.
And if someone points out that you could probably increase world happiness more by, say, donating some of that money to charity, naturally you can come up with some convoluted explanation of why this is not (at least provably) so.
I think even more so though, it happens on a small scale. When I'm working, I take breaks to cruise the internet. Ostensibly, to recharge and give my brain a break. While this is indeed what I'm doing, this explanation has usually run dry within 10 minutes. After this point, my actual goal has become putting off work because something else seems more interesting, and I'd be lying to myself to claim otherwise.
In short, we sometimes fall short of our "goals" because they're actually not our goals. Canonically, this.
Doesn't that sound like status quo bias?
I frequently point out to fellow students at my school that given the existence of videorecording technology, seeing live lectures is the equivalent of having scribes copy books by hand after the invention of the printing press. No one says "yeah, you're probably right"--at least not without fairly substantial discussion. I'm pretty sure everyone's first instinct is to figure out why I'm wrong.
I'm not sure, given the ability for feedback between instructors and students. This only works well for extremely small class sizes. For those 300 student monstrosities, yeah, videotape is better.
Or medium-sized classes where the teacher asks a lot of questions, for the students who do most of the answering. It's not an absolute rule. The point is that if a student asks/answers 0.5 questions per class (a very high average), there's no way the benefit of that outweighs not having to pay the teacher and being able to speed up consumption of information by 1.4
Crank that slider a bit further - QuickTime 7 on OS X does it really well, and I do most of my video watching at 2.5x.
I'm on Ubuntu using VLC and if I recall correctly, it's pretty friggin' hard to make anything out once you get to 2x speed. I don't think that's the barrier for me, anyway.
VLC's algorithms are not very good, and out of the box it only moves in x0.5 increments (there's a setting to change that, but it's hard to find). Quicktime 7 is awesome at it (look for the A/V Controls), but Quicktime 8 can't do it at all.
(A small note (probably for others, rather than JM-IV): it takes time for your brain to get used to very high speed audio - if you can't follow at first, give yourself a few minutes to adapt)
Hm. I might try to get Quicktime working on Linux if you think sped-up lectures are more effective means of learning stuff than reading pdfs and so on.
I think that different modes of presentation of the same content is a great learning hack, and verbal presentation without a speedup takes too long.
Generally though, given a transcript, I'd prefer to read.
The particular part about you quoted, regarding whether to donate, does actually sound like status quo bias. I'm not sure if it hits the nail on the head in this example, you would need to know his mind to say so.
I was trying to imply that he was in video games for selfish reasons: because it would be a fun job for him and the pay is good. So I expect that he's keeping the money because simply because he really likes money. If the situation were reversed, and he was already donating a chunk to charity (for some reason), I would expect him to gradually stop doing this. However, If you believe him when he says his goal is to save the world, and not think as I do that his motivations are mostly selfish, then status quo bias could definitely be a suspect here. In real world cases it's certainly a worthy consideration.