I'm curious how you avoided the typical human bias of not knowing what will make us happy in the future (IE, weighting your choices wrong).
I know you specifically have done a lot of research into what makes humans happy, so I'd be interested to hear how you applied that to this type of analysis.
Easily enough, by modeling myself in a year from now and anticipating what my most likely preferences will be at the time. It's imperfect, of course, but it's quite a bit better than nothing.
Regarding making us as humans happy, I definitely factored that into my analysis. That's why I not only compared the value of each individual part of the house (kitchen, backyard, bedroom) but also the use of that part of the house. For example, the backyard is not really usable for half the year (not counting the view question, which was a separate component of the e...
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.