2023-01-31

• I was reading some Yudkowski. He cited an interesting study about people changing decisions. The bottom line is people change their minds less than they think. I’ll probably butcher the specifics somewhat, but that’s fine for the purpose of this blog. The study involved asking people to make some decision about a future course of action. Then, the participants were asked to assign a probability to the idea that they would change their mind and do something different. The 24 participants, on average, said there was a 33% chance they would change their mind. Thus, if their prediction was right, something like 8 out of 24 would end up doing a different thing when the time came to act on the decision. In reality, only 1 out of 24 actually changed their mind. I’m not sure what actual odds you’d give to that outcome, but it does seem surprising. I’m also not sure if this replicated, so could be total nonsense. But the general idea seems kind of sound: we make a decision and change our minds much less frequently than we expect. Now, to turn it on myself. I’ve been dating Elena for a while. Recently someone (a close individual) asked me “what probability would you assign that you and Elena end up married?” I answered “70-80%”. On the one hand, I was trying to communicate the idea that I was pretty confident Elena and I will get married, but could still be surprised by something down the road. I figure there’s still more stuff for us to learn about each other, and some of that stuff could make it better for us to not to get married. And there’s a very good chance that we will get married. Ok, so combining it all. If I told Yudkowski about my probability, he’d probably respond with “well, based on how most people communicate confidence in future decisions, you are more like 95% certain. You might be the 1 in 24, but you are probably one of the 23 in this case.” The person I was talking to graciously took my response at face value, so I avoided this rationalist challenge (and I’m glad I did). But it’s also interesting, and a little disconcerting, to see the parallels between my actions and those of the people in the study. I think if I’m being more honest, I’m mostly managing expectations of others by saying 70-80%. I feel like I’d have a lot more explaining to do if I said I was 95% confident in something like a marriage and then it fell through. 70-80% is socially much safer.
  
• You know how some people describe “hidden gems” of travel? Like how people will talk about “Bali in the 70s” as some sort of utopian travel experience. Who knows if it was actually better than Bali today, but the concept of a “hidden gem” is at least fun to think about. I want to extend the idea to other domains. Specifically, I want to find the “hidden gems” when it comes to healthcare. Where are the places in the world that offer pretty good care at non-absurd prices. The default answer is to say something like “Europe”. And that’s fine. But I don’t that counts as a “hidden gem”. For more background, I’m increasingly conscious that real estate and healthcare are used as chokeholds on the lives of ordinary people in America. I sort of intellectually understood this before, but am increasingly concerned that I will be trapped by one or both of these systems. To become free, you need to build a system that gets you out from under the boot of both of these industries. Real estate is somewhat tractable by “buying a house”. But healthcare is imo harder. The best approach I have now is to get citizenship somewhere that has solid, govt run care. Looking to the EU is an obvious thing to do (and I am lucky to have stumbled into having a partner that has EU citizenship). But I wonder if there are places elsewhere, like some Caribbean island, that would serve as a good alternative as well. Maybe there’s a place with good quality care that will sell you citizenship for like 50k. Who knows. Would be an interesting thing to look into. I bet the FIRE folks have a lot of thoughts here.
  journal
  
• this is just a dinner
  
• Be prepared to talk about difficult things
  
• The facts as I recall them
  • Things were fine in the apartment
    • Elena didn’t feel super welcome, having a dog, some neutral vibes
      • I decided it wasn’t worth working on
        
    • was already too much to go back and forth. I was happier in the uptown apartment
      
    • we can work on that later
      
  • I wanted to move out, was important to me to take the next step in my relationship
    
  • then I did
    
  • Kept paying rent bc you didn’t have a job and that would impact your apt search
    
  • Took the roomie search on myself
    
  • found pete
    
  • now we are here
    
• well that went fine. Not sure what I had to worry about. Which makes sense. I don’t have much of a model of what Lucas would be upset about. He mentioned birthday and unplanned move out scar tissue. But those things seem like we’ve already talked about them and are fine. Pretty frustrating tbh. Not sure what more I could do in the move out. Didn’t seem to require almost any effort on his part. And the bday is…whatever.

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