killing your darlings
Our second biggest cost is taxes, and our biggest cost is opportunity cost.
larry page and noam shazeer both obsess over opportunity cost. it's the cost that matters most when evaluating policies, personal or public ones.
here's the problem: opportunity cost is invisible. the counterfactual, by definition, doesn't exist, so you never see it. kahneman calls this "what you see is all there is"
a solution to this occular blind spot in your personal life is deciding against doing the thing you really want to do. you kill your darling. you will be super concious of what you left on the table, the counterfactual becomes clear, and you actually take all the other options more serious.
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