Who knew, Florence covered Drizzy yesterday.
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Kahneman and Tversky, the guys who first really began to probe human cognitive errors, found in their research that there was a systematic human tendency to either under or overestimate the expected value of a reward that varied as a function of time.
I’ll give you an example. Do you want a dollar today, or 10 dollars in a year? Most people will say a dollar today. How about a dollar today, or 10 dollars in a week? I would take 10 dollars in a week. But does this make sense? I mean, in the first case, I make 9 dollars fewer. Yet, in the second example, I suddenly flip my preference.
It turns out that human motivation is heavily influenced by expectations of how imminent the reward is perceived to be. People overestimate the value of the reward if the reward is imminent, and increasingly discount the value of the reward, the further away it is in time. In other words, your perceived utility of an outcome increases with temporal proximity.
So playing skyrim now is more valuable than an A on your paper until temporal proximity increases the value of that A on the paper, which is when you stay up all night finishing it. One way to try to work around it is to give yourself an immediate reward for forward thinking goal oriented behaviour. You can, for instance, create a situation where you will reward yourself with a tub of ice cream when you’ve put in 4 hours of work. How can you get around it without resorting to this? Have high level executive functionality. Which to some extent can be exercised by simply practicing doing things you don’t want to. So, start small, do 5 minutes of dishes per day. When you have no problem keeping up this routine, add in more tasks with short term punishment but long term reward. You build your way up. However, there are limits.
It’s one of the systematic biases in human cognition that this dynamic duo discovered. They were pretty much the death of the rational actor model in psychology, because we’re not. Their work is the basis for neuroeconomics, which seeks to take into account that humans aren’t rational, that we have systematic cognitive biases, and to reinvent the field of economics so that it has more bearing on reality, and is a reflection of how people really act.
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We had an early Turkey day on account of Esther needing to go to work on actual Turkey day. Mom made a very large Turkey, as always. We had duck and chicken, also. Dunno how that works exactly, but I ate a lot of meat. We also had Challah, because that stuff is delicious. Watched a movie called Killers (Katherine Heigl) which was okay, and chilled out as a family — it was really nice to have this after so long away from home.
I guess that’s how it’s going to be and it won’t be getting better anytime soon. Real life during work post-graduation will mean only 10 days of vacation a year + the week for Christmas. No more winter, fall, and spring break.
Eeesh. Weird to think that I’m not far from that.
Anyway, various pictures from last week, not from tonight’s festivities.
It’s going down.
I can’t wait to run again.
“Lisa Frank is not the name of a woman, it is the name of a movement, a culture, a way of living. It is a theory, a concept, a belief in something greater than yourself. It is the belief that all girls are entitled to dolphins covered with rainbows, jewel-encrusted frogs, and unicorns in acid-trip colors hugging each other. It is the ideology that no notebook is complete until it literally hurts your eyes to look at from so much color saturation. It is the hope that no school supply, no matter how insignificant, will be left un-bedazzled. It is the knowledge that your eraser cap, and that of your granddaughter’s, and her granddaughter’s after her, will not be some boring little nub–it will be a diamond covered with butterflies in a rainbow of colors. It is the dream of a better tomorrow.”
I’m holm! Holmdel will probably always be the world’s most pleasant place to me. Mom and Dad went crazy with renovations — removed the pool while I was gone. I know, right?! Bulldozed it. Makes sense, considering that we haven’t touched the thing in over half a decade. Grandma’s peach tree died, too. Apparently that’s old news but I still can’t believe it’s gone. New dinner table — weird, because it’s not round. But it’s a nice table.
Where to start. Okay, so last Thursday I had class and some work to get done. Then Friday night — PAR all nighter! Had to cheer up a sad friend who recently broke up with his high school girlfriend, so we went to insomnia and fat sandwich and got ice cream at Merry Ann’s. It was 3am by the time we got back, hung out a bit, got some homework done, and went to bed around 7am. Woke at 10am to go to class, did some laundry, and left for Michigan around 4pm in the afternoon.
Sas, Kev, and I stopped at Farren’s Pub in downtown Champaign for some burgers and other yummies before making the drive up. It was pretty good. I got some mushroom and cheese double burger which turned out to be entirely too much meat for my own good. We arrived in Michigan around midnight and ordered some pizza from Cottage Inn. It was pretty delicious. Yeah food and chillin’ is basically all we did.
Saturday in Michigan, Kev and I woke up fairly late (3 or 4pm) and we (and Lehsah) went out to Sava’s in downtown Ann Arbor. Lehsah was awake earlier because she went to the game. It was pretty good — I got their mac and cheese. Pictures when I find my phone. We were really full, so we stumbled around afterwards and wandered around a few places. A comic book store, a cherry shop (everything cherry including root beer, salsa, and other stuff), liquor store, and Zingerman’s Deli. I purchased some olive oil, graham crackers, and a loaf of freshly baked Cinnamon Raisin bread for mom. Watched Blow and 40 Year Old Virgin at night. Both were terrific movies.
Also random story: some dude knocks on Lehsah’s door and I answer, and nobody else is home so he’s like does blah blah live here, and I’m like dunno, and the girls with him are like “he just needs to lie down,” so he goes and lies down and knocks out on the couch. Turns out, nobody in the apartment knows him. So Lehsah’s roomie Amber is like rofl *take picture* and they end up driving him to some frat afterwards because he was actually from Washington DC and didn’t really know where he was. So friggin drunk so early in the day. Hooray for gameday.
Sunday we made the drive back starting around 11am. Sas’s brothers were there also for the ride so it was a packed 5 person trip in a 2-door Honda Civic. I ended up driving about half the way (about 2 hours at the start and 3 hours at the end), so I didn’t feel the effects of the cramped space as much but the back was probably pretty uncomfortable to be in for any extended period of time. Good bonding experience in general — we even cyphered a bit. It’s always fun.
Today I slept in and headed to NYC for my leg pressure testing. It was at East 72nd Street right by East River at the Hospital for Special Surgery where my dad had his operation a few years back — it hurt but not as much as I was expecting. It’s also more sore than I was expecting, though. They numbed up my legs, jabbed some needles inside, then made me run a mile on an incline, then jabbed them again. There was a bunch of blood because of where they were jabbing (unavoidable).
Doctor said my left leg’s pressure’s the highest he’s ever seen. Not cool, but at least now I know exactly what will fix me. Right leg’s pretty bad too but left leg’s worse.
I need to call a number of surgeons tomorrow to see if any will let me go in for an exam this coming week so that I can set up a surgery date over winter break. I’m actually really excited for this surgery — it’s been a long time coming. My legs suck. I want them to be better.
This week’s plans:
* Tuesday: Homework, and Esther comes home! Possibly see a doctor, but most likely that’ll be a Wednesday thing.
* Wednesday: See a doctor hopefully? Early Thanksgiving dinner because Esther’s pharmacy work schedule forces her to be away on actual Thanksgiving. Family time.
* Thursday: Thanksgiving! Family time, homework (unfortunately). Maybe chilling out with people I haven’t seen in a while if they are around and wanna go somewhere during the day.
* Friday: NYC with Lehsah, Kev, Lilia, and whoever else. Hopefully Andrew can come along? Food adventures, and general hanging out.
* Saturday: Family/friends. Maybe sushi day? Dunno. Getting ready to leave.
* Sunday: We leave for Champaign at 3am to beat the Thanksgiving traffic.
I’m a fan of my internet, thank you very much. http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/
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K.Flay. I’m a big fan.
Picture gallery in the middle of this post from my cell, just random things and pictures I forgot to post.
Past 2 weeks: being bipolar, cranky, and PMS’ing like a woman or something because of the hard decisions. But between yesterday and today I think my head has cleared quite a lot.
Friday: Finished Stat400 Exam with an 82%. I have a B in the class, so it’s not terrible for a guy who’s been to class three times all semester. But I hear the final is a killer. And the exams are not easy, they’re just graded leniently. Had to miss large group for CS242 which got moved because of my CS373 exam thursday night. Afterwards I went to Kev’s and hung for a while — Lehsah made dinner and it was delicious! So jealous. Want to move to the apartments quite a bit. But. I’ll only move if two ideas for the coming semester fall through. I still love PAR and my community there. It’s my home. A home that I find physically uncomfortable quite often, but a home nonetheless. And the people make me gush with joy. I love the people here.
Lehsah gave me a cupcake from Cream and Flutter!
Saturday: Woke up real late, went to the football game with Kevin. Didn’t enjoy it. I don’t like football. I dislike the fact that we suck even more. Dinner, tried watching 500 days of summer with friends and got interrupted to go play sardines in the union with other friends. Superfun. Also, I love Merry Ann’s. Delicious as usual. Got back from the festivities around midnight and hung out until pretty late. Ended up reading Eragon – Inheritance until like 7 in the morning before I realized I had a long day ahead of me. Good ideas, Sam.
Sunday: Jeremy got baptized! He asked me to pray at his service 
I was so happy. Made me think really hard about faith, work, and stuff. Work day afterwards — team was me, Aaron Perry, and Brian Bennett. We had no ride, so we walked back from the work day which took like an hour and a half. It was a good bonding experience. The weeding work we did was hilarious. Aaron kept burring me. Aaron Burr. Hahahaha.
Today: Interview with StumbleUpon. They found me through my github and even though I told them my deadline is this Thursday they’re okay with that. Which was cool. I hadn’t expected to be interviewing with the research team, but apparently that’s the position they think I might fit into best so that went down. Pretty decent.
Sat in Siebel for most of the day. Lecture was boring and I spent a lot of time just reading Eragon — surprisingly I hung out with ACM dudes a lot too. Talked about classes and whatnot.
Late night with Brian Johnson. I love this guy. I came away really encouraged — of all the people I’ve talked to about the stuff that’s been bothering me, I feel like he’s the only one who really understood me.
Posting tweet...
