15 Comments

Yes, I see that my most important decisions seems to be rather random: carrier choice, relation and immigration directions. Not really random, but not as well researched as smaller ones. One reasons is that there is not much space for trail and error in big decisions, so there is no much experience in evaluation them.Another is fear of mistake which is almost paralysing.

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Humorous potentially intentional meta typo at "its all small stuff"/"it's all small stuff".

Productivity.txt

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"I trust my doctor" can lead to mistakes, but it's way safer than "I did my own research" in the vast majority of circumstances.

Not always true. A doctor has incentives to "not" pursue your best health which you the patient do not have. A doctor:

1) Has financial incentives to prescribe drugs, tests, and procedures. Even if he doesn't directly profit from them, any treatment will likely require further visits and further payments from you the patient.2) Often to protect himself from being sued for malpractice, he has to recommend tests even if they are really not advisable, but only because the current medical regime prescribes them--such as PSA tests and colonoscopies.3) Most doctors will follow current medical algorithms and not bother to evaluate alternatives.

Most decisions doctors make are based on current medical establishment algorithm. If you can learn those algorithms, but also learn about their errors and other alternatives, you can often treat yourself better than a negative incentive-compromised doctor.

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Unions have significant numbers of workers who trust them. Why wouldn't they take on more of an agent role?

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Most small decisions also have default options available.

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People are already eager to see tax career agents as slave owners, even though they have no power but to advise and promote. They'd find it far more easy to see employers that way.

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And I support that.

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I think the reason why we think less hard about big decisions is that there is usually a default solution which is not ideal but we can expect to be far from the worst possible. Trying to improve on that on the individual level will initially increase the variance of the outcome much more than the expected value, and we strongly don't wont important decisions to go disastrously. In addition, it is hard to figure out how much effort is enough to reduce the variance.

Health decisions are the perfect example: "I trust my doctor" can lead to mistakes, but it's way safer than "I did my own research" in the vast majority of circumstances. And even researching which doctor to trust can easily lead you to a charlatan unless you are very careful.

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Cars can last indefinitely as long as you keep replacing parts. That's an inspiration for gerontologists like Aubrey de Grey.

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He does want to better incentivize doctors & lawyers by collecting track records and paying for results.

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You point out that people trust expert medical advisors and lawyers too much, and say this over-trust leads to bad outcomes. Your solution is to give people even more paternalistic advisors to make the decisions for them? It sounds like your cure is the same as the disease.

You do mention that your advisors would be better incentivized. How about we just better incentivize the doctors and lawyers, instead?

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To cosign what 5ive wrote: there's no mystery here. We resort to heuristics on these "biggest conflicts" because they are the hardest and messiest, and it's the most difficult to weigh the different interests involved.

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"Yet when it comes to thinking about repairing our bodies, our thinking tends to get less thorough and analytic. We would rather just trust our prestigious doctor, and those who conferred prestige on them, and not think about the subject."

I don't believe this correct at all. One of the biggest issues with health care delivery is people not trusting their doctor. Biochemistry and human pathology is very complicated! When someone has liver cancer, or if a child has meningitis, I don't know what the thought process is that leads them to try acupuncture or vitamin-C instead of the prescribed standard-of-care. But the correct thing to do is to simply listen to the experts. People certainly don't do this when they are on a plane. They don't second guess the expert who is landing it about how much gas they need or whether the angle of approach is too shallow. Passengers on a plane shut up and let the pilot do his job, which is the correct move.

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Why do you think labour hire companies don't evolve more of an agent role with regard to their employees. Regular companies do put some effort into training and moving employees to roles, but why not more effort?

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I suspect you could do a study of car repair that showed a similar lack of effect of more free "car care" on car longevity?

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