It must be telling of my financial ignorance that I don't understand the second part :-( Could you give an example?
Suppose you can have $100 today or $100 in a year. Since you could do things with the $100 in between, but you could also choose to hold onto it for a year if that turns out to be a better idea, you're likely to prefer $100 today. But most people would take $1,000,000 in a year over $100 today, so the value of getting money a year earlier is finite.
If you are indifferent between $105 in a year and $100 today - i.e. if a 5% return on the money would exactly compensate for a year's delay - then we say your annual "discount rate" is 5%, and the &qu...
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?