Today's post, Make an Extraordinary Effort was originally published on 07 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
It takes an extraordinary amount of rationality before you stop making stupid mistakes. Doing better requires making extraordinary efforts.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was On Doing the Impossible, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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First of all, different utility functions (carrying the wooden stools was obnoxious but I'm starting from a position of "walking is [normally] fun," and even annoying strenuous exercise ends with me feeling virtuous.)
But the more important answer is that the friend with car wasn't coming for about 2 hours from the moment when we started walking, it was already late at night (around 9) and we wouldn't have been able to pick up the other furniture at 11 in all likelihood (plus waiting for 2 hours was boring). Also we're on a tight deadline to acquire all our furniture, for an event at our house this weekend.