If you're tempted to respond, "But I love school, and so do all my friends. Ah, the life of the mind, what could be better?" let me gently remind you that readers of economics blogs are not a random sample of the population. Most people would hate reading this blog; you read it just for fun!

-- Bryan Caplan

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

"...frequent purchases can have a substantial effect on your overall financial situation, but indulging in overpayment for convenience on the odd big one-time purchase is an affordable luxury."

I'm not really sure if that explains the behavior as one could also argument that the "cognitive burden" of extra effort for everyday purchases is greater than putting it into those big one-timers.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner

In 1705, Sir Isaac Newton became discouraged after he fell up a flight of stairs.

Unknown

I'm Russian, and I don't think I've heard this proverb before. What does it sound like in Russian ? Just curious.

The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully.

-- Russian proverb

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

-- Oliver Cromwell

In both cases, the tradeoff is the same - drive fifteen minutes to save twenty bucks - but people were much more willing to do it for the cheap item, because $20 was a higher percentage of its total cost. With the $2000 TV, the $20 vanishes into the total cost like a drop in the ocean and seems insignificant.

Evaluating cost savings as a percentage actually makes a certain amount of sense when evaluating policies rather than acts. Cheaper purchases tend to be much more frequent: you probably buy many more shirts than you do big-screen TVs, so expending the effort to find the cheapest source of shirts and evaluate whether it's worthwhile to go out of your way to buy them will save you several times $20 over the lifetime of the policy, whereas the TV is effectively a one-time decision which will only save you $20 total. True, the 15 minute drive time is per-purchase rather than per-policy, but 1) the cost is not just the drive time, but also the effort to research options and the cognitive load of picking and option, which are one-time costs, and 2) a general policy of thriftiness for small, frequent purchases can have a substantial effect on your overall financial situation, but indulging in overpayment for convenience on the odd big one-time purchase is an affordable luxury.

On a different note, another factor to take into account when evaluating commuting times is the possibility of changing jobs. When I bought my house, I specifically looked for a short commute time, but not just to my then-current workplace. I also took into account commute times to other places I might end up working if I changed jobs (other campuses of companies in the area which employ large numbers of people in my field, especially places which employ friends of mine who could refer my for positions). By over-optimizing for my then-current job, I felt I would have increased my risk exposure if I lost my job or became unhappy with it, as well as reducing my ability to take advantage of new opportunities if another employer could make more productive use of me and cut me in on the additional value created.

One mistake I did make in buying a house was very badly underestimating the cost in time, effort, and cash to make repairs and improvements to a house purchased in poor condition. In hindsight, I think I made the right tradeoffs, in that after spending the money I wound up with a house that will suit my needs better and for a longer period of time than I could have afforded by paying the additional cost to buy a house that was already in good condition (this includes the substantial benefit of being able to customize aspects of the house to my desires as I made repairs and improvements), but this was a happy accident despite the major misevaluations I made when planning the purchase.

The truth is that people aren't anything like coherent enough to refuse cryonics for a reason like that.

I agree with almost all of what you say about no grand narrative and mostly just conformity, but I'm not willing to entirely dismiss this explanation as even a small part of the puzzle. It doesn't seem much different than the theories that poor people with few life prospects have higher temporal discount rates and are more likely to engage in risky/criminal behavior because they have less to protect. People aren't coherent enough to think "Well, stealing this watch has a small probability of landing me in prison, but my life now isn't so satisfying, so I suppose it's worth the risk, and I suppose it's worth risking a lot later for a small gain now since I currently have so little", but there's some inner process that gives more or less that result.

If even the few people who get past the weirdness factor flinch away from the thought of actually being alive more, I expect that would make a significant difference.

I'm going to try a test question that might differentiate between "cryonics sounds weird" and "I don't like life enough to want to live even more" on my blog. Obviously no one from here post on that since you already know where it's going.

If you want people to sign up for cryonics, the method with by far the strongest conversion ratio is to train them from scratch in advanced sanity techniques.

Alternate hypotheses: your followers are mostly technophile singularitarians, and technophile singularitarians are attracted to cryonics independently of rationalist training. Your followers believe there may be a positive singularity, which means the future has a reason to be much better than the present and avoid the unpleasantness Darwin describes in the article. Your followers are part of maybe the one community on earth, outside the cryonics community itself, where the highest-status figures are signed up for cryonics and people are often asked to justify why they have not done so. Your followers are part of a community where signing up for cryonics signals community affiliation. Your followers have actually heard the arguments in favor of cryonics and seen intelligent people take them seriously, which is more than 99.9% of people can say.