- To indirectly find out what a person of the opposite sex thinks of her/himself ask what she thinks are the big differences between men and women.
- Letters of recommendation usually exaggerate the quality of the candidate but writers can only bring themselves to go so far. To get extra mileage try phrases like “he’s great, if not outstanding” and hope that its understood as “he’s great, maybe even outstanding” when what you really mean is “he’s not outstanding, just great.”
- In chess, kids are taught never to move a piece twice in the opening. This is a clear sunk cost fallacy.
- I remember hearing that numerals are base 10 because we have 10 fingers. But then why is music (probably more primitive than numerals) counted mostly in fours?
- “Loss aversion” is a dumb terminology. At least risk aversion means something: you can be either risk averse or risk loving. Who likes losses?
Cheap Talk
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November 27, 2012 at 12:58 am
Watchmaker
Perhaps “loss aversion” tells us that losses measured in something tangible (i.e. money) translate into a large amount of negative utility. My understanding is that “loss aversion” and “risk aversion” are the two translations in prospect theory.
November 27, 2012 at 7:10 am
twicker
Re: #1: interesting. I’ll try it out soon.
That said, I’m not sure if it will tell you what s/he thinks of her/himself; I think it’s more likely to expose what experiences s/he has had with the opposite sex, and more particularly what bad experiences s/he has had (going to the idea that losses loom larger than gains 🙂 ). Also highly dependent on her/his education (I tend to hang out with psych people, and we’re likely to bring up whatever the latest literature says about the issue).
Re: #2: Better idea: be honest — including honestly discussing some flaws. Even though many people recommend discussing flaws, so few do that simply by doing it, or by bringing up their actual, honest limitations, you’ll make everything else seem more credible. Then again, that might be what you mean with, “he’s great, if not outstanding:” you let them know that the person is really good, and, by allowing for the fact that they’re not perfect, they perceive that “really good” as being more valid (and, thus, closer to outstanding) than if you’d just left it as “really good/great.”
Re: #3: I wonder what the actual probabilities are for winning when making the same move twice at the opening? If they’re actually lower, then it’s not the sunk cost fallacy (but I know very little about the probabilities in chess, so it absolutely might be a sunk-cost fallacy). BTW, making the same move twice in RoShamBo is actually a great strategy (even better: throwing the same move three times). Your opponent almost certainly expects you to change things up, and, thus, will throw things that you can beat (are you the one I learned that from?).
As always – thanks for the thoughts! 🙂
November 27, 2012 at 9:51 am
noname
Isn’t #4 because the heart’s rhythm is in fours? I feel like I heard that somewhere…
November 27, 2012 at 12:18 pm
Tanmay
#3: Not a fallacy. Against IM level players and higher, playing the same move twice leads to a drastic drop in winning probability. The basic reason is that the player who moves the same piece twice in an opening loses “momentum”.
As an aside: didn’t it occur to you that if moving the same piece twice could work, at least one of the top players in the past 100+ years of intensely competition would have tried it?
November 27, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Tanmay
I meant “moving the same piece twice”, not “playing the same move twice”.
November 27, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Alex F
Can you elaborate on the concept of “momentum” in chess?
November 27, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Evan
I think what Tanmay means by momentum is more commonly referred to as tempo. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo_(chess)
November 27, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Evan
#3: This is bad coaching, for exactly the reason mentioned. The better way to phrase it, and the way that I implicitly came to understand the instruction when I played chess as a junior, is not to place a piece somewhere where you expect to need to move it again in the opening.
November 27, 2012 at 4:24 pm
ali
this. it might be optimal to do it in a single game, but if you find yourself having to do this, it means there is likely some issue generally with your opening play.
November 30, 2012 at 6:06 pm
PD
It seems to me that Western music is most often counted in multiples of two or three (which obviously include four). This makes some sense as it’s simple to coordinate beats if they are structured this way as opposed to grouped into fives or sevens. Other culture’s musics that tend to have more complex time signatures typically subdivide their beats into groups of two’s or three’s anyway.
January 18, 2013 at 5:46 pm
Adham
that everyone is in supoprt. The LA event was featured over on Hollywood Blvd by the Hollywood Walkway. We had a turn out of over 3,500, it was packed, same thing with the European and the other events during that time. 40 events and of them they all sold out. The one’s your referencing in the video wasn’t a supoprted event, so some failed while other’s prospered? Why don’t you show media Coverage of every 40 Official event or does that not help your case in propaganda? By the way, Peter does not believe his critics are apart of some massive conspiracy. He is referring to nut cases that are conspiracy theorists to latch on to anything as a disregard for the truth that is not lying, it’s a subconscious cultural reaction against that which they see threatening. That’s what he refers to as the Circus. The Circus is essentially a cultural anthropological classification. I mean read the trial of Socrates, the Athenians were portrayed as the Circus in Rome. You sir are as usual engage in bullshit, and by bullshit I mean H.G. Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit.
December 1, 2012 at 6:18 am
Pedro F.
#2
@twicker: the problem with being honest is that if you are in an equilibrium where most people exaggerate, then the admission committee expects people to exaggerate, and so if you say (honestly) that your student is ‘very good, but not great’, they will take it as meaning that he is actually not very good, but just okay, and you tried to help him.
#3
It might be not a sunken cost fallacy, but a case of (sharply) decreasing marginal benefits of moving pieces in the beginning.