Accountability

I’m actually getting better at just writing random stuff in my blog rather than caring about the quality of the stuff I write. That’s an improvement at least.

In terms of breaking bad habits, I was really efficient today, but that’s more of a result of me feeling like I have a million things to do rather than some magical spur of motivation. I should think more about the implications of this at a future date.

Productive Thought

In both Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Misbehaving by Richard Thaler, they both talk about a human tendency to somehow do worse with MORE data. People tend to emphasize negative things much more strongly than positive things–they’re also not great at rationalizing proportions. For example, if you only see 1 bad thing out of 10, you’re probably like, “eh, that’s not so bad!” But all of a sudden, when you see 1,000,000 bad things (albeit in 10,000,000 cases), all of a sudden all you can think about is the million instances that something can go wrong.

This is definitely something that I have witnessed in my own life–when I first got into stock trading, checking my stocks every day actually made me feel as though I was performing worse (I probably actually was). Only after I deleted my stock trading app for a month and then rechecked was I pleasantly surprised to see that I somehow was doing much better (I would’ve most likely continued making bad trades because of all the information I was consuming).

However, this isn’t all bad, but it’ll be interesting to see if, now that I’m aware of this, I can be more analytical and catch myself in the act when MORE information causes me to make worse decisions. In any case, humans can be remarkably, contradictionally dumb sometimes (myself especially included).