Great job, you two! Don't forget to give your elephant and rider some time to "discuss" the findings internally before making the final judgment. I find that my elephant will slowly come around unless there's something important I've overlooked, which is a major risk when doing explicit calculations. For instance, I notice there's no representation of location, which tends to be a very important factor in deciding where to live.
Thanks for the praise!
The location is pretty much the same for both places so we ruled it out. Appreciate your attention to this point, though.
Yeah, my elephant is slowly coming around as well. I myself was pretty surprised that the first choice lost out, it's a factor of many smaller diffuse points about the second-choice house combining to outweigh the couple of really big nice points about the first-choice house. Mathing it really helps deal with attention bias :-)
My wife and I have been going to Ohio Rationality Dojo for a few months now, started by Raelifin, who has substantial expertise in probabilistic thinking and Bayesian reasoning, and I wanted to share about how the dojo helped us make a rational decision about house shopping. We were comparing two houses. We had an intuitive favorite house (170 on the image) but decided to compare it to our second favorite (450) by actually shutting up and multiplying, based on exercises we did as part of the dojo.
What we did was compare mathematically each part of the house by comparing the value of that part of the house multiplied by the use of that part of the house, and had separate values for the two of us (A for my wife, Agnes Vishnevkin, and G for me, Gleb Tsipursky, on the image). By comparing it mathematically, 450 came out way ahead. Hard to update our beliefs, but we did it, and are now orienting toward that one as our primary choice. Rationality for the win!
Here is the image of our back-of-the-napkin calculations.