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.
Without looking at outcomes of a decision-making process it's hard to know whether it's optimized.
Which is why I said optimizing, not optimized :-) Externalizing the decison-making process and then evaluating it using numbers is a way of optimizing it, not necessarily meaning it is the perfect optimized decision-making process. I decided to share my story right now because I thought the benefits to others in the LW community of me sharing it right now would higher than me having lived in the house for a while and then sharing it. Besides, by the time I live in the house, post-factum justification would be playing a potentially confounding role.