Luke_A_Somers comments on Cashing Out Cognitive Biases as Behavior - Less Wrong

13 Post author: gwern 02 March 2012 04:57AM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 08 July 2012 11:30:39AM 1 point [-]

I wonder if they accounted for exceptional circumstances.

For instance, a few hours after we rented one movie, my wife finally went into labor. If we hadn't also gotten food poisoning that evening, we would have already watched the movie by that point.

Similarly, we barely caught a plane once after a truck accident completely stopped the highway for three hours. If it'd been any worse, we would have missed it, and I would NOT have counted the decision of when to leave as a bad decision.

Comment author: gwern 08 July 2012 03:06:56PM 0 points [-]

Exceptional circumstances are normal; I imagine few people have never run into them...

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 08 July 2012 08:26:37PM 0 points [-]

Point is, how did the quiz deal with them? The summary said '... ever bought clothes..."

Not "... habitually buy clothes..."

Comment author: gwern 08 July 2012 10:17:46PM 1 point [-]

Why would you need to deal with them? As long as the test ranks people correctly, it doesn't matter what the absolute numbers of checked responses are. We can report IQ as 120, 12.0 or 1.20, as long as the rankings are right, it doesn't matter the unit...

Comment author: [deleted] 05 August 2012 09:13:01AM 0 points [-]

The point is the random noise. If someone has missed a plane due to a traffic accident on their way to the airport and someone else hasn't... (OTOH with 34 items, the noise on the average shouldn't be that big.)