gwern comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong

47 Post author: lionhearted 07 September 2010 07:01PM

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Comment author: andreas 07 September 2010 08:36:18PM 13 points [-]

Meanwhile, there's something on-hand I could do that'd have 300 times the impact. For sure, almost certainly 300 times the impact, because I see some proven success in the 300x area, and the frittering-away-time area is almost certainly not going to be valuable.

Your post includes a "silly" and a business-scale example, but not a personal one. In order to answer the questions about causes that you ask, it seems necessary to look at specific situations. Is there a real-life situation that you can talk about where you have two options, one almost certainly hundreds of times as good as the other, and you choose the option that is worse?

Comment author: gwern 09 September 2010 01:13:20PM 2 points [-]

Is there a real-life situation that you can talk about where you have two options, one almost certainly hundreds of times as good as the other, and you choose the option that is worse?

I used to be pretty cavalier about messing with Windows, and would lose my files on an annual or bi-annual basis. I spent a heck of a lot of time tracking down files and restoring from my sporadic backups, not to mention the virus scan time or defragging.

Then the 4th or 5th time I realized that this was crazy, switched to Linux, and learned how to use DVCSes. I'm not sure that this has yet amounted to a 300x improvement in wasted time, but I'm pretty confident that by the time I die it will have.

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