pull down to refresh
30 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Mar \ parent \ on: The data to help you become a better Stacker ⚡ meta
How could we disambiguate between our hypotheses? It strikes me that yours has not accorded well w/ reality, as demonstrated by your repeated reminders that people's normal zapping tendencies are un-economic.
They're getting less uneconomic as the stakes increase though. We refer to that as "saliency" in experimental economics. Oftentimes experiments fail to find results because the design didn't create a big enough payoff spread between the different actions.
If I could earn another kilosat by zapping better, I'm more inclined to make the effort to do so when that kilosat is worth more.
reply
Ah -- that seems plausible. I might incorporate that into something like:
- the psych factors of all the exuberant feels lead to people zapping more
- this gives them the chance to observe economic payoff matrices
- increased value makes those payoffs salient enough to care about
If that's the generative model, it's not obvious how to realistically pry apart #1 from #2 and #3. You could run an experiment but it would be unnatural-seeming.
reply
Numbers 2 and 3 lead researchers to identify this problem. A bunch of experiments were putting people in unusual situation that nonetheless had very distinct theoretical predictions. However, due to funding constraints, the payoff differences were only like a nickel.
The participants quite rationally didn't find it worth their time to think through what was going on nor did they notice a material difference in the payouts they were getting so they couldn't learn anything anyway.
reply