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Chesterton-Miller Behavioral Fence: when you see people behaving in a seemingly suboptimal way, ask what you’re missing about what they’re actually optimizing for. Behavior is rarely suboptimal, but assumed cost functions are usually wrong.
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I actually first started thinking this way as a critical response to behavioral economics models. I think almost all of that is badly flawed. If you poke at their various “biases” you can usually find a Chesterton-Miller fence.
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Sure, one should start by assuming there is rationality of some sort at play; but one should also leave open the possibility that irrationality may, in fact, be at work. As Larry Summers famously remarked about the foolishness of the EMH: "There are idiots. Look around."
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I think these conversations suffer from deep diffs in such foundational things as the value of one’s own life and mental state in the implicit, unconscious cost function. If find it hilarious that we try to convince people of vaccine rationality when they believe in *religion*
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