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All of David's Comments + Replies

Another Call to End Aid to Africa
David00

It seems to me that there is an implicit assumption in much of this that "charity" = "giving people money without teaching them to fish". But aid can exist in many forums including helping those who receive it to become more self-sufficient. I also find the original post humorous. "Dambisa Moyo, an African economist, has joined her voice to the other African economists..." I think that's some subtle editorializing with the hope of biasing us. Perhaps it should have read, Dambisa Moyo, an African economist, has joined her voice to the other African economists who live in fancy flats in London...:-)

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Posting now enabled on Less Wrong
David00

Ah, thank you, I did not see it. I missed it because it is not called "RSS", which is what I search for on a page if the visible link does not jump out at me. May I therefore suggest that in addition to making it more prominent (it really should be at the top of the page) your designer also add the name RSS to it instead of only "subscribe to this page"? Perhaps "subscribe to this RSS feed"?

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Posting now enabled on Less Wrong
David00

Why is there no RSS feed on Less Wrong? I do all of my important reading through RSS as I suspect many do.

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Planning Fallacy
David40

What a wonderful blog, I just discovered it. This is an old post so I am not sure if anyone is still following it. While I think the article raises some excellent points, I think it may be missing the forest for the trees. Perhaps due to bias :-).

For instance, the article states:

  • 13% of subjects finished their project by the time they had assigned a 50% probability level;
  • 19% finished by the time assigned a 75% probability level;
  • and only 45% (less than half!) finished by the time of their 99% probability level.

The conclusion then seems to be that ev... (read more)

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6DilGreen
As an architect and sometime builder, as an excellent procrastinator, I heartily concur with this comment. The range of biases, psychological and 'structural' factors at work is wide. Here are a few: * 'tactical optimism' : David Bohm's term for the way in which humans overcome the (so far) inescapable assessment that; 'in the long run, we're all dead'. Specifically, within the building industry, rife with non-optimal ingrained conditions, you wouldn't come to work if you weren't an optimist. Builders who cease to have an optimistic outlook go and find other things to do. * maintaining flexibility has benefits: non-trivial projects have hidden detail. It often happens that spending longer working around the project - at the expense of straight-ahead progress - can lead to higher quality at the end, as delayed completion has allowed a more elegant/efficient response to inherent, but unforeseen problems. * self-application of pressure: as someone tending to procrastinate, I know that I sometimes use ambitious deadlines in order to attempt to manage myself - especially if I can advertise that deadline - as in the study * deadline/sanction fatigue: if the loss incurred for missing deadlines is small, or alternatively if it is purely psychological, then the 'weight' of time pressure is diminished with each failure. I'm going to stop now, before I lose the will to live.