DaFranker comments on Checklist of Rationality Habits - Less Wrong
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This is awesome. I might remove the examples, print down the rest of the list, and read it every morning when I get up and every night before going to sleep. OTOH I have a few quibbles with some examples:
For some reason my brain is more comfortable working with numbers that with visualizations, instead. That can be bad for signalling: a few years ago there was a terrorist attack in London which affected IIRC about 300 people; my mother told me “you should call [your friend who's there] and ask him if he's all right”, and I answered “there are 10 million people in London, so the probability that he was involved is about 1 in 30,000, which is less than the probability that he would die naturally in...”; my mother called me heartless before I even finished the sentence.
There's a huge difference: someone living in Silicon Valley on $70K + x and considering whether to stay there or move to Santa Barbara and earn x would be used to living on $70K + x; whereas someone living in Santa Barbara on x and considering whether to move to Silicon Valley and earn x + $70K or stay there would be used to living on x. This would affect how much each of them would enjoy a given amount of money. Also, the former would already have a social circle in Silicon Valley, and the latter wouldn't.
Huh, no. If they are likely to respond badly, I want to believe they are likely to respond badly. If they aren't likely to respond badly, I want to believe they aren't likely to respond badly. What is true is already so, owning it up doesn't make it worse. The solution to that problem is to think twice and re-read the email and think about ways to make it less likely for it to be interpreted in an unintended way before hitting Send.
The thing is, it seems quite clear that the problem wasn't about how likely they are to respond badly, but that Anna (?) would visualize and anticipate the negative response beforehand based on no evidence that they would respond poorly, simply as a programmed mental habit. This would end up creating a vicious circle where each time the negatives from past times make it even more likely that this time it feels bad, regardless of the actual reactions.
The tactic of smiling reinforces the action of sending emails instead of terrorizing yourself into never sending emails anymore (which I infer from context would be a bad thing), and once you're rid of the looming vicious circle you can then base your predictions of the reaction on the content of the email, rather than have it be predetermined by your own feelings.
(Obligatory nitpicker's note: I agree with pretty much everything you said, I just didn't think that the real event in that example had a bad decision as you seemed to imply.)