> people lose on average 16 socks per year. implying an annual loss of ~8 pairs of socks.
How? I have a sock drawer and never seem to lose socks. And not like im super organized (or organized at all).
Also, that doesn't imply an annual lost of 8 pairs of socks. that implies a loss of 16 pairs of socks, unless you keep each orphaned sock and still wear it till it also disappears.
And lol, in all this waffle about socks he never asks the important questions like 'how likely am I to grab to matching socks in a pile of N unordered socks' (important question to ask after washing, or you could do what one of my math teachers did, and simply don't organize your socks, put them in a pile and grab and just wear 2). What is the optimal amount of pairs of sock to own before ordering socks into pairs becomes a huge time investment (assuming you don't just buy the same pair of sock forever). But no it is about demographics, surveys and xmass gifts, life hacks, system 2 vs system 1 thinking, this isn't a waste of time honest, etc.
“average person loses 16 socks a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person loses 0 socks per year. Socks Losing Georg, who lives in cave & loses over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
> Also, that doesn't imply an annual lost of 8 pairs of socks. that implies a loss of 16 pairs of socks, unless you keep each orphaned sock and still wear it till it also disappears.
Unless you're the kind of person who only owns one kind of socks, and assumes everyone else does too, and then writes blog posts based on this assumption which claim that failing to buy socks is due to a lack of "bourgeois virtues"
I also do that unless I have something important to do(*) then I get my fancy socks out. Who I do have matched, and never seem to lose a sock.
*: not always btw, I don't really pay that much attention. I think this is the most conscious attention I have spend on the concept of socks management in years.
After running out of socks one day, I immediately launched a multi-decade longitudinal peer reviewed study to investigate possible causes and solutions to this age-old problem
right like if you really cared about sock efficiency you'd have the courage in your convictions to start wearing mismatching socks. instead gwern writes a whole essay and that's how i know the rationalist community is cowardly and dishonest
With socks, my new heuristic is expand my annual photographic
inventory of my personal possessions (making a record of everything I
own in case of disaster) to include clothes too; in considering my
clothes, I expect that I will notice when I get low on socks—or any
other kind of clothing—and can take action before too many years pass
and my sockpile becomes inadequate. I will surely discover other
inadequacies in the future, but, if I am mindful of my limits, fewer and
fewer, and they will get less in the way of important things.
So like a dedicated sock drawer? Or would that be too simple a
solution?
Each sock is kept in its own special plastic vacuum sealed container with a QR code which you can scan for the extended purchase/wear/washing history, complete with hourly log while wearing them. All on the blockchain of course. I wrote a few blog posts about it, this is clearly the most efficient way.
[Epistemic status: socks, topics: statistics, R, survey, Bayes, psychology, skull sizes, technology, decision theory, socks, blockchain, logs, laundry robots, vacuum sealed,
created: 22 Nov 2017; modified: 12 June 2019; status: finished; confidence: possible; importance: 69]
I don’t know if it’s a function of often living in hostels and
ferrying back and forth across the UK quite often for the last five
years but I always have plenty of socks.
One could make some predictions based on stereotypes: women will have
more socks than men, older people will be more likely to have enough
socks than younger people, and there will probably be cross-country
differences. Checking, older people are indeed more likely,
cross-country differences are not so large as to be inferable, and there
appears to be inconsistency in gender effects: men have more problems
with socks in the US than internationally?
Aha turns out the quest to build an AI dictator is just a desire to have a mom look after your stuff again.
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So like a dedicated sock drawer? Or would that be too simple a solution?
I don’t know if it’s a function of often living in hostels and ferrying back and forth across the UK quite often for the last five years but I always have plenty of socks.
Of course there’s a Harry Potter epigraph
i too have depression. (what is it with these people and their goddamn twitter surveys??)
Last year I donated all of my socks and bought 4 mega packs of extra thicc Costco socks and my sock problems are gone now.
What