Well now I want to test this. Do we have anyone here who thinks they know a thing or two about the stock market? If so would they be amenable to an experiment?
I'm thinking that they would agree not to look at any stock price information for a day (viewing all the other news they want). At the end of the day they are presented with some possible sets of market closes, all but one of which of which are fake, and we see if they can reliably find the right one.
I will participate if you'd like to try, there are some problems with the experiment though
Good observations.
Sometimes I procrastinate for weeks about doing something, generally non-urgent, only to have something happen that would have made the doing of it unnecessary. (For instance, I procrastinate about getting train tickets for a short trip to visit a client, and the day before the visit is due the client rings me to call it off.)
The useful notion here is that it generally pays to defer action or decision until "the last responsible moment"; it is the consequence of applying the theory of options valuation, specifically real options, to everyday decisions.
A top-level post about this would probably be relevant to the LW readership, as real options are a non-trivial instance of a procedure for decision under uncertainty. I'm not entirely sure I'm qualified to write it, but if no one else steps up I'll volunteer to do the research and write it up.
I work in finance (trading) and go through my daily life quantifying everything in terms of EV.
I would just caution in saying that, yes procrastinating provides you with some real option value as you mentioned but you need to weigh this against the probability of you exercising that option value as well as the other obvious costs of delaying the task.
Certain tasks are inherently valuable to delay as long as possible and can be identified as such beforehand. As an example, work related emails that require me to make a decison or choice I put off as long as is politely possible in case new information comes in which would influence my decision.
On the other hand, certain tasks can be identified as possessing little or no option value when weighted with the appropriate probabilities. What is the probability that delaying the payment of your cable bill will have value to you? Perhaps if you experience an emergency cash crunch. Or the off chance that your cable stops working and you decide to try to withhold payment (not that this will necessarily do you any good).
I liked this talk a lot, but after some reflection I think I have to disagree with the main premise. He tries to draw a distinction between memory and experience, but in reality just having memories has no impact on the rememberer until they actively recall those memories. It is the recollection of memories which impact us, and this is an experience -- we are essentially re-experiencing a skewed interpretation of the experience we had before.
Same with imagining or planning for the future; our brains are merely trying to emulate for us the experience that, according to our internal models, we will have in the future given a set of circumstances being projected forward in time.
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I'm still interested, what changes would you suggest?
Sorry for the slow reply, want to do this over email? im gbasin at gmail