Commuting

 August 29th, 2011
commuting
People who spend a lot of their day commuting, especially by car in traffic, are less happy. By itself, this is not surprising: everyone knows commuting sucks. What is surprising is that people don't treat it as a big enough downside when considering potential houses or jobs. This is known as the "Commuter's Paradox", and I just read a (kind of technical) economics paper on it (via lesswrong).

If I'm looking at a decision where I'm weighing more or less commuting against something else, how can I do better at predicting which will make me happier? I can remind myself that "enjoyment of a large house fades but the pain of a bad commute wears you down every day," but I'm not sure that's enough. Thoughts? How can we spend less of our time on the least pleasant daily activity?

Referenced in: Internal Statistics

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

I have a baby

I am pleased to announce the existence of the newest and smallest effective altruist, Seretse Benjamin Brennan.

via Thing of Things November 2, 2026

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via Posts on October 24, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

more     (via openring)