Comment by everydaypanos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by everydaypanos | Hacker News Reader

I had a girlfriend who when faced with the choice of Chain-Coffee v Small-Shop-Coffee she’d at first choose the Chain-Coffee but as days passed she’d choose the SmallShop-Coffee more and more.

When I asked her why she chose the one with clearly no particular expertise in coffee making(they were also right next to one another) she’d tell me that she wanted to support the independent small player and not the big corporate chain.

I always wondered how efficient those theories, like the learning theory are, with complex intelligent beings like us. Sometimes we can even ignore all conventional models and just do smt because of philosophical belief. Which in turn developed by other unknown factors..

(When she was alone at University or Downtown she’d mostly hang out to the local big Chain-Coffee, but when faced with an easy choice of two different types of coffee shop one right next to each other she’d after some time make mostly the “philosophical” choice)

When someone changes a decision like that after multiple experiences with the outcome, they are overriding a natural human bias for consistency. That likely indicates a strong reason. Maybe the coffee or atmosphere was actually consistently better?

The article example is pretty dumb honestly. Chains are a mental shortcut for making decisions, but truthfully, there is much more variation between two Starbucks than they would like to admit.

chains are predictable. less risky: your expectations are stable and accurate.

And if those expectations are predictably and accurately poor?

it's just math. you have your typical concave risk averse utility function, and you measure the difference in expected utilities between a low variance option and a high variance option, feed into softmax hoila

Expectations are more stable, but that doesn't mean the underlying product is at all stable and consistent.

I've a friend, a high end foodie. he proposes to use the big Mac as the international standard/reference point for burger quality. that would t be possible unless the big Mac basically tasted the same at pretty much every mc Ds

This is a very strange point of reference for a foodie, as McDonald's burgers are not even remotely close to anything tasty.

My experience with coffee chains is the chains are predictably mediocre or bad, and the small shops are less predictable but on average generally much better than the chains (with the occasional place that's a lot worse than the chains, but this is rare from my experience).

could be, but for risk averse people (most people) the variance matters.

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