I tried looking for situations that have many of the same formal features, but that I am glad exist (whereas I intuitively dislike the examples in the OP and wish they happened less). I got:
Some kids set out to spend the night outdoors somewhere. They consider spending it in a known part of the woods, or in an extra scary/risky-seeming part of the woods. They choose the latter because it is risky. (And because they care more about demonstrating to themselves and each other that they can tolerate risk, then about safety.)
A boy wants to show a girl that he cares about her, as he asks her on a first date. He has no idea which flowers she does/doesn’t like. He considers getting her some common (easy to gather) flowers, or seeking out and giving her some rare flowers. (Everybody in town knows which flowers and common and which are rare.) He decides on the rare flowers, specifically because it’ll cause her to know that he spent more time gathering them, which will send a louder “hey I’m interested in you” signal. (This is maybe the same as your gift-giving example, which I feel differently good/bad about depending on its context.)
Critch used to recommend (probably still does) that if a person has e.g. just found out they’re allergic to chocolate, and is planning to try to give up chocolate but expecting to find this tricky, that they go buy unusually fancy/expensive/delicious chocolate packages, open them up, smell them, and then visibly throw them away without taking a bite. (Thus creating more ability to throw out similar things later, if they are e.g. given fancy chocolates as a gift.) For this exercise, the more expensive/fancy/good the chocolates are (and thus, the larger the waste in buying them to throw away), the better.
Some jugglers get interested in a new, slippery kind of ball that is particularly difficult to juggle. It is not any more visually beautiful to watch a person juggle (at least, if you’re an untrained novice who doesn’t know how the slippery balls work) — it is just harder. Many of the jugglers, when faced with the choice between training on an easier kind of ball or training on the difficult slippery ones, choose to train on the difficult slippery ones, specifically because it is harder (i.e., specifically because it’ll take more time/effort/attention to learn to successfully juggle them).
My anonymous friend Alex was bullied a lot in school. Then, at age 18, Alex was in a large group house with me and… made cookies… all through the afternoon. A huge batch of cookies. Twelve hungry people, including me, sat around smelling the cookies, expecting the cookies. (Food-sharing was ubiquitous in this group house.) Then, when the cookies were made and we showed up in the kitchen to ask for them, Alex… said they were the boss of the cookies (having made them) and that no one could have any! (Or at least, not for several hours.) A riot practically broke out. I was pretty upset! Partly in myself, and partly because lots of other people were pretty upset! But later Alex said they were still glad they did this, basically to show themselves that they didn’t always have to lose conflicts with other people, or have to be powerless in social contexts. And I still know Alex, and haven’t known them to do anything similar again. So I think I in fact feel positively about this all things considered. And the costs/value-destruction was pretty intrinsic to how Alex’s self-demonstration worked — Alex had no other reason to prefer “making everybody wait hours without cookies” to “letting people eat the cookies”, besides that people strongly dis-prefered waiting. (This is a true story.)
(I don’t have a specific thesis in sharing these. It’s just a step for me in trying to puzzle out what the dynamics in the OP’s examples actually are, and I want to share my scratch work. More scratch work coming probably.)
two themes i see in your examples that i don’t think was prevalent in the OP is challenge and effort, especially in 1, 2 and 3. but 3 and 5 are also about overcoming a challenge, in one it’s the challenge of giving up chocolate, and in the other it’s standing up to people.
in almost none of these does “the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse”. sleeping in a more risky part of the forest isn’t strictly worse, there are benefits to it. spending time finding a rare flower isn’t worse than using a common flower since a rare flower is likely to have more value.
The example that seems closest is the 5th, though as i understand it he tries prove something more to himself than to anybody else.
Yoav, I think there might be a difference like the one you’re gesturing at, but if so, I don’t think Zvi’s formalism quite captures it. If someone can find a formalism that does capture it, I’m interested. (Making that need for a fuller formalism explicit, is sort of what I’m hoping for with the examples.)
For example, I disagree, if I reason formally/rigidly, with “in almost none of these does “the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse”. sleeping in a more risky part of the forest isn’t strictly worse, there are benefits to it. spending time finding a rare flower isn’t worse than using a common flower since a rare flower is likely to have more value.”
Re: the flowers, I can well imagine a situation where the boy chooses the [takes more work and has more opportunity cost to gather (“rarer”)] flower because it [visibly takes more cost to gather it], and “because it has more costs” is IMO pretty clearly an example of “because it is worse” in the sense in the OP (similar to: “because it costs more rubles to buy this scarf-that-is-not-better”). To make a pure example: It’s true the flower’s that rarity itself makes it more valuable to look at (since folks have seen it less) — but we can imagine a case where it is slightly uglier and slightly less pretty-smelling, to at least mostly offset this, so that a naive observer from a different region who did not know what was rare/common would generally prefer the other. Anyhow, in that scenario it still seems pretty plausible that the boy’s romantic gesture would work better with the rarer flower, as the girl says to her gossipy girlfriends “He somehow brought me 50 [rareflowers]!” And they’re like “What? Where did he possibly get those from?” And she’s like “Yeah. I don’t even like [rareflowertype] all that much, but still, gathering those! I guess he must really like me!” (I.e., in this scenario, the boy having spent hours of his time roving around seeking flowers, which seems naively/formally like a cost, is itself a thing that the girl is appreciating.)
Similarly, “riskier part of the forest” means “part of the forest with less safety” — and while, yes, the forest-part surely has other positive features, I can well imagine a context where the “has less safety” is itself the main attraction to the kids (so they can demonstrate their daring). (And “has less safety / has greater risk of injury” seems formally like an example of “worse”. If it isn’t, I need better models of what “worse” means here.)
If these are actually disanalogous, maybe you could spell out the disanalogy more? I realize I didn’t engage here with your point about “challenge” and “effort” (which seem like costs on some reckoning, but costs that we sometimes give a positive-affect term to, and for reason)
You could apply some positive spin to Zvi’s examples, too. For example, how difficult it is to establish trust and cooperation between people, and how necessary it is for a survival of civilization, and therefore a manager who sacrifices something valuable in order to signal loyalty is actually the good guy.
They aren’t that different from the examples Zvi has mentioned. They all burn value to achieve an outcome that would be achievable via honesty and/or self-control (i.e., they burn value to coordinate externally or internally), which has always felt very bad to me (even if it is the best available option, I feel strong disgust towards it). What is more annoying is when the people involved do not seem to appreciate the burned value as a bad thing and instead “romanticize” it. The examples that feel the worst are the ones where they can actually focus the cost of the signal on something (more) useful. For example, the jugglers could juggle more balls or exotically-shaped balls, instead of wasting their energy on just increasing the difficulty.
What is more annoying is when the people involved do not seem to appreciate the burned value as a bad thing and instead “romanticize” it
Nailed it.
I think people on this forum all share some variation of the same experience, where they observe that everyone around them is used to do something inefficient, get told by their peers “no, don’t do the efficient thing, people will think less of you”, they do the efficient thing, and their life gets straightforwardly easier and nobody notices or care.
This is especially the case for social norms, when you can get your social circle to buy in. Eg people have really silly ideas about romance and gender roles and patriarchal ideals (eg the girl has to shave and put on makeup, the guy has to pay everything, everyone must be coy and never communicate), but if you and the person you date agree to communicate openly and respect each other and don’t do that crap… well, in my limited experience, it’s just easier and more fun?
My point is, it’s amazing how much value you can not-burn when your stop romanticizing burning value.
I tried looking for situations that have many of the same formal features, but that I am glad exist (whereas I intuitively dislike the examples in the OP and wish they happened less). I got:
Some kids set out to spend the night outdoors somewhere. They consider spending it in a known part of the woods, or in an extra scary/risky-seeming part of the woods. They choose the latter because it is risky. (And because they care more about demonstrating to themselves and each other that they can tolerate risk, then about safety.)
A boy wants to show a girl that he cares about her, as he asks her on a first date. He has no idea which flowers she does/doesn’t like. He considers getting her some common (easy to gather) flowers, or seeking out and giving her some rare flowers. (Everybody in town knows which flowers and common and which are rare.) He decides on the rare flowers, specifically because it’ll cause her to know that he spent more time gathering them, which will send a louder “hey I’m interested in you” signal. (This is maybe the same as your gift-giving example, which I feel differently good/bad about depending on its context.)
Critch used to recommend (probably still does) that if a person has e.g. just found out they’re allergic to chocolate, and is planning to try to give up chocolate but expecting to find this tricky, that they go buy unusually fancy/expensive/delicious chocolate packages, open them up, smell them, and then visibly throw them away without taking a bite. (Thus creating more ability to throw out similar things later, if they are e.g. given fancy chocolates as a gift.) For this exercise, the more expensive/fancy/good the chocolates are (and thus, the larger the waste in buying them to throw away), the better.
Some jugglers get interested in a new, slippery kind of ball that is particularly difficult to juggle. It is not any more visually beautiful to watch a person juggle (at least, if you’re an untrained novice who doesn’t know how the slippery balls work) — it is just harder. Many of the jugglers, when faced with the choice between training on an easier kind of ball or training on the difficult slippery ones, choose to train on the difficult slippery ones, specifically because it is harder (i.e., specifically because it’ll take more time/effort/attention to learn to successfully juggle them).
My anonymous friend Alex was bullied a lot in school. Then, at age 18, Alex was in a large group house with me and… made cookies… all through the afternoon. A huge batch of cookies. Twelve hungry people, including me, sat around smelling the cookies, expecting the cookies. (Food-sharing was ubiquitous in this group house.) Then, when the cookies were made and we showed up in the kitchen to ask for them, Alex… said they were the boss of the cookies (having made them) and that no one could have any! (Or at least, not for several hours.) A riot practically broke out. I was pretty upset! Partly in myself, and partly because lots of other people were pretty upset! But later Alex said they were still glad they did this, basically to show themselves that they didn’t always have to lose conflicts with other people, or have to be powerless in social contexts. And I still know Alex, and haven’t known them to do anything similar again. So I think I in fact feel positively about this all things considered. And the costs/value-destruction was pretty intrinsic to how Alex’s self-demonstration worked — Alex had no other reason to prefer “making everybody wait hours without cookies” to “letting people eat the cookies”, besides that people strongly dis-prefered waiting. (This is a true story.)
(I don’t have a specific thesis in sharing these. It’s just a step for me in trying to puzzle out what the dynamics in the OP’s examples actually are, and I want to share my scratch work. More scratch work coming probably.)
two themes i see in your examples that i don’t think was prevalent in the OP is challenge and effort, especially in 1, 2 and 3. but 3 and 5 are also about overcoming a challenge, in one it’s the challenge of giving up chocolate, and in the other it’s standing up to people.
in almost none of these does “the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse”. sleeping in a more risky part of the forest isn’t strictly worse, there are benefits to it. spending time finding a rare flower isn’t worse than using a common flower since a rare flower is likely to have more value.
The example that seems closest is the 5th, though as i understand it he tries prove something more to himself than to anybody else.
Yoav, I think there might be a difference like the one you’re gesturing at, but if so, I don’t think Zvi’s formalism quite captures it. If someone can find a formalism that does capture it, I’m interested. (Making that need for a fuller formalism explicit, is sort of what I’m hoping for with the examples.)
For example, I disagree, if I reason formally/rigidly, with “in almost none of these does “the protagonist chooses the worse action because it is worse”. sleeping in a more risky part of the forest isn’t strictly worse, there are benefits to it. spending time finding a rare flower isn’t worse than using a common flower since a rare flower is likely to have more value.”
Re: the flowers, I can well imagine a situation where the boy chooses the [takes more work and has more opportunity cost to gather (“rarer”)] flower because it [visibly takes more cost to gather it], and “because it has more costs” is IMO pretty clearly an example of “because it is worse” in the sense in the OP (similar to: “because it costs more rubles to buy this scarf-that-is-not-better”). To make a pure example: It’s true the flower’s that rarity itself makes it more valuable to look at (since folks have seen it less) — but we can imagine a case where it is slightly uglier and slightly less pretty-smelling, to at least mostly offset this, so that a naive observer from a different region who did not know what was rare/common would generally prefer the other. Anyhow, in that scenario it still seems pretty plausible that the boy’s romantic gesture would work better with the rarer flower, as the girl says to her gossipy girlfriends “He somehow brought me 50 [rareflowers]!” And they’re like “What? Where did he possibly get those from?” And she’s like “Yeah. I don’t even like [rareflowertype] all that much, but still, gathering those! I guess he must really like me!” (I.e., in this scenario, the boy having spent hours of his time roving around seeking flowers, which seems naively/formally like a cost, is itself a thing that the girl is appreciating.)
Similarly, “riskier part of the forest” means “part of the forest with less safety” — and while, yes, the forest-part surely has other positive features, I can well imagine a context where the “has less safety” is itself the main attraction to the kids (so they can demonstrate their daring). (And “has less safety / has greater risk of injury” seems formally like an example of “worse”. If it isn’t, I need better models of what “worse” means here.)
If these are actually disanalogous, maybe you could spell out the disanalogy more? I realize I didn’t engage here with your point about “challenge” and “effort” (which seem like costs on some reckoning, but costs that we sometimes give a positive-affect term to, and for reason)
You could apply some positive spin to Zvi’s examples, too. For example, how difficult it is to establish trust and cooperation between people, and how necessary it is for a survival of civilization, and therefore a manager who sacrifices something valuable in order to signal loyalty is actually the good guy.
I dislike all of your examples, too.
What do you dislike about them?
They aren’t that different from the examples Zvi has mentioned. They all burn value to achieve an outcome that would be achievable via honesty and/or self-control (i.e., they burn value to coordinate externally or internally), which has always felt very bad to me (even if it is the best available option, I feel strong disgust towards it). What is more annoying is when the people involved do not seem to appreciate the burned value as a bad thing and instead “romanticize” it. The examples that feel the worst are the ones where they can actually focus the cost of the signal on something (more) useful. For example, the jugglers could juggle more balls or exotically-shaped balls, instead of wasting their energy on just increasing the difficulty.
FYI I found this comment much more helpful than the previous one, which felt sort off putting while not giving me much to engage with.
Nailed it.
I think people on this forum all share some variation of the same experience, where they observe that everyone around them is used to do something inefficient, get told by their peers “no, don’t do the efficient thing, people will think less of you”, they do the efficient thing, and their life gets straightforwardly easier and nobody notices or care.
This is especially the case for social norms, when you can get your social circle to buy in. Eg people have really silly ideas about romance and gender roles and patriarchal ideals (eg the girl has to shave and put on makeup, the guy has to pay everything, everyone must be coy and never communicate), but if you and the person you date agree to communicate openly and respect each other and don’t do that crap… well, in my limited experience, it’s just easier and more fun?
My point is, it’s amazing how much value you can not-burn when your stop romanticizing burning value.