I suspect (perhaps “fear”) that, outside of very specific goal-oriented fields like entrepreneurship, this is more likely a symptom self-deception about our goals.
You tell yourself that your ultimate goal is, for example, to make the world a happier place. And so it is for this ultimate reason, that you decide to be a video game programmer. What a coincidence that you’re a video game enthusiast that always dreamed of making the next Mario Bros. What a coincidence that it happens to pay extraordinarily well.
And if someone points out that you could probably increase world happiness more by, say, donating some of that money to charity, naturally you can come up with some convoluted explanation of why this is not (at least provably) so.
I think even more so though, it happens on a small scale. When I’m working, I take breaks to cruise the internet. Ostensibly, to recharge and give my brain a break. While this is indeed what I’m doing, this explanation has usually run dry within 10 minutes. After this point, my actual goal has become putting off work because something else seems more interesting, and I’d be lying to myself to claim otherwise.
In short, we sometimes fall short of our “goals” because they’re actually not our goals. Canonically, this.
And if someone points out that you could probably increase world happiness more by, say, donating some of that money to charity, naturally you can come up with some convoluted explanation of why this is not (at least provably) so.
Doesn’t that sound like status quo bias?
I frequently point out to fellow students at my school that given the existence of videorecording technology, seeing live lectures is the equivalent of having scribes copy books by hand after the invention of the printing press. No one says “yeah, you’re probably right”—at least not without fairly substantial discussion. I’m pretty sure everyone’s first instinct is to figure out why I’m wrong.
I’m not sure, given the ability for feedback between instructors and students. This only works well for extremely small class sizes. For those 300 student monstrosities, yeah, videotape is better.
Or medium-sized classes where the teacher asks a lot of questions, for the students who do most of the answering. It’s not an absolute rule. The point is that if a student asks/answers 0.5 questions per class (a very high average), there’s no way the benefit of that outweighs not having to pay the teacher and being able to speed up consumption of information by 1.4
I’m on Ubuntu using VLC and if I recall correctly, it’s pretty friggin’ hard to make anything out once you get to 2x speed. I don’t think that’s the barrier for me, anyway.
VLC’s algorithms are not very good, and out of the box it only moves in x0.5 increments (there’s a setting to change that, but it’s hard to find).
Quicktime 7 is awesome at it (look for the A/V Controls), but Quicktime 8 can’t do it at all.
(A small note (probably for others, rather than JM-IV): it takes time for your brain to get used to very high speed audio—if you can’t follow at first, give yourself a few minutes to adapt)
Hm. I might try to get Quicktime working on Linux if you think sped-up lectures are more effective means of learning stuff than reading pdfs and so on.
The particular part about you quoted, regarding whether to donate, does actually sound like status quo bias. I’m not sure if it hits the nail on the head in this example, you would need to know his mind to say so.
I was trying to imply that he was in video games for selfish reasons: because it would be a fun job for him and the pay is good. So I expect that he’s keeping the money because simply because he really likes money. If the situation were reversed, and he was already donating a chunk to charity (for some reason), I would expect him to gradually stop doing this. However, If you believe him when he says his goal is to save the world, and not think as I do that his motivations are mostly selfish, then status quo bias could definitely be a suspect here. In real world cases it’s certainly a worthy consideration.
I doubt that simply donating money to charity is an efficient way to make the world a better place. There are studies that question, for instance, how much good all the money has done that we’ve given to developing nations.
It’s definitely possible, I think, that creating a great video game might bring more happiness to the world than simply writing a check for a charity.
I am not saying, by the way, that being charitable is a bad idea. However, I do think you need to be strategic for it to be effective. For instance, it might be better to help a struggling neighbor or cousin by getting actively involved in their problems and helping them in a more involved manner. Or, if you have specific skill that can be helpful for a charity organization, that may be a better investment than just giving them money.
My point is, there is no simple, clear path to making the world a better place. We all have to actively think about how to make it happen. And it may happen in unexpected ways.
Or, if you have specific skill that can be helpful for a charity organization, that may be a better investment than just giving them money.
How does this make sense? By donating your labor you’re effectively giving the charity money, since now they don’t have to pay someone to do said labor. Since it’s rare that your skills and an organization’s needs are going to line up, it’s almost always going to be more efficient to just make a donation.
If you think the organization is going to waste your donation, you shouldn’t offer them labor instead—you should find a better organization.
Most charities suck. A few don’t. Finding the ones that suck least and then pumping money into them is actually a pretty efficient way to make the world a better place.
I suspect (perhaps “fear”) that, outside of very specific goal-oriented fields like entrepreneurship, this is more likely a symptom self-deception about our goals. … In short, we sometimes fall short of our “goals” because they’re actually not our goals.
This is a good point, yes. A lot of times the finish line is not well-defined, and you have to choose. Or people self deceive for self esteem reasons or for signalling reasons. Yes, this could be a major reason it happens. Good point. There’s still an open question of why people do it when they do have very clear purpose that they honestly want… for instance, the would-be comedian who really really does want to do comedy and is taking lower gains… that said, I think you just uncovered a big reason it happens—self-deception about goals, indeed.
For clear cut examples, the question certainly remains. Your example of the comedian is what got me thinking about this though, because if I heard of a person doing what he’s doing, the “fake justifications” explanation would seem like the vastly more likely one to me.
There’s no way he actually thinks Garfield is the best way to comedy superstardom, or even a reasonable use of his time at all. In your example, we can look into his mind and see that he’s doing comedian training. If I met this guy in reality though, my explanation of his behavior would be “He’s lazy and just wants to watch tv all day. He tells himself it’s training because he doesn’t want to admit this”.
If he just wanted to watch TV all day, I’m sure he could find something more entertaining. After a while, the jokes about mailing Nermal to Abu Dhabi get really old. This sounds like a case where he somehow convinced himself that watching Garfield and Friends was a good way to become a better comedian.
So did I, but while I’m sure a comedian-in-training could learn something from it, it’s far from optimal.
Actually, most possible things people do are obviously far from optimal. Just look at how much time students spend zoning out in class, “learning”. It’s trivial to come up with a better way to use that time. Thinking about this scares me, because I could probably be doing something better most of the time, if I had a better idea of how to win at life.
Just look at how much time students spend zoning out in class, “learning”. It’s trivial to come up with a better way to use that time.
School isn’t about learning. Zoning out in class can be a rational choice on the part of a student. If your goal is to acquire the credentials school provides and a required component of that is a certain attendance level but you get little of value from the class then zoning out can be a rational response. This describes much of my school career.
When I was in those situations, I would usually read a book, or ponder something, and periodically check to see if the teacher was saying anything important. It was like an enforced study time. That’s more rational than sitting there vegetating. (The downside is that some of the most boring teachers would get ticked off. Still worth it, though.)
I would usually pay attention to the actual lesson unless it was review over what we’d already been assigned to read or otherwise not new information. At that point, and otherwise when question and answer or assignment writing was going on and I was finished the assignment, I would mostly tune out the teacher and spend my time drawing on the backs and margins of my worksheets. I never in any other period of my life did as much artwork as I did while bored or distracted in high school, and I think it’s because for many reasons I don’t bother with well enough to control I am usually tired, and prefer to piss away my time with small “entertainments” like YouTube videos which are almost always available than invest my time in things which require more of an energy commitment despite also being more rewarding.
Or I would nap on my desk. Got in trouble for it surprisingly rarely.
Maybe we should put the X-is-not-about-X stuff on the wiki so we can accumulate datapoints. I mean, for schooling I have 2 (lack of use of the proven superior spaced presentation/spaced repetition over the prevalent massed presentation; lack of sensible school hours for high schools), but most people interested in the topic will never come across these.
So did I, but while I’m sure a comedian-in-training could learn something from it, it’s far from optimal.
Definitely. And I’m sure that you’d learn a lot more about television than about how to do stand-up comedy by studying a television series that isn’t itself about stand-up.
I suspect (perhaps “fear”) that, outside of very specific goal-oriented fields like entrepreneurship, this is more likely a symptom self-deception about our goals.
You tell yourself that your ultimate goal is, for example, to make the world a happier place. And so it is for this ultimate reason, that you decide to be a video game programmer. What a coincidence that you’re a video game enthusiast that always dreamed of making the next Mario Bros. What a coincidence that it happens to pay extraordinarily well.
And if someone points out that you could probably increase world happiness more by, say, donating some of that money to charity, naturally you can come up with some convoluted explanation of why this is not (at least provably) so.
I think even more so though, it happens on a small scale. When I’m working, I take breaks to cruise the internet. Ostensibly, to recharge and give my brain a break. While this is indeed what I’m doing, this explanation has usually run dry within 10 minutes. After this point, my actual goal has become putting off work because something else seems more interesting, and I’d be lying to myself to claim otherwise.
In short, we sometimes fall short of our “goals” because they’re actually not our goals. Canonically, this.
Doesn’t that sound like status quo bias?
I frequently point out to fellow students at my school that given the existence of videorecording technology, seeing live lectures is the equivalent of having scribes copy books by hand after the invention of the printing press. No one says “yeah, you’re probably right”—at least not without fairly substantial discussion. I’m pretty sure everyone’s first instinct is to figure out why I’m wrong.
I’m not sure, given the ability for feedback between instructors and students. This only works well for extremely small class sizes. For those 300 student monstrosities, yeah, videotape is better.
Or medium-sized classes where the teacher asks a lot of questions, for the students who do most of the answering. It’s not an absolute rule. The point is that if a student asks/answers 0.5 questions per class (a very high average), there’s no way the benefit of that outweighs not having to pay the teacher and being able to speed up consumption of information by 1.4
Crank that slider a bit further—QuickTime 7 on OS X does it really well, and I do most of my video watching at 2.5x.
I’m on Ubuntu using VLC and if I recall correctly, it’s pretty friggin’ hard to make anything out once you get to 2x speed. I don’t think that’s the barrier for me, anyway.
VLC’s algorithms are not very good, and out of the box it only moves in x0.5 increments (there’s a setting to change that, but it’s hard to find). Quicktime 7 is awesome at it (look for the A/V Controls), but Quicktime 8 can’t do it at all.
(A small note (probably for others, rather than JM-IV): it takes time for your brain to get used to very high speed audio—if you can’t follow at first, give yourself a few minutes to adapt)
Hm. I might try to get Quicktime working on Linux if you think sped-up lectures are more effective means of learning stuff than reading pdfs and so on.
I think that different modes of presentation of the same content is a great learning hack, and verbal presentation without a speedup takes too long.
Generally though, given a transcript, I’d prefer to read.
The particular part about you quoted, regarding whether to donate, does actually sound like status quo bias. I’m not sure if it hits the nail on the head in this example, you would need to know his mind to say so.
I was trying to imply that he was in video games for selfish reasons: because it would be a fun job for him and the pay is good. So I expect that he’s keeping the money because simply because he really likes money. If the situation were reversed, and he was already donating a chunk to charity (for some reason), I would expect him to gradually stop doing this. However, If you believe him when he says his goal is to save the world, and not think as I do that his motivations are mostly selfish, then status quo bias could definitely be a suspect here. In real world cases it’s certainly a worthy consideration.
I doubt that simply donating money to charity is an efficient way to make the world a better place. There are studies that question, for instance, how much good all the money has done that we’ve given to developing nations.
It’s definitely possible, I think, that creating a great video game might bring more happiness to the world than simply writing a check for a charity.
I am not saying, by the way, that being charitable is a bad idea. However, I do think you need to be strategic for it to be effective. For instance, it might be better to help a struggling neighbor or cousin by getting actively involved in their problems and helping them in a more involved manner. Or, if you have specific skill that can be helpful for a charity organization, that may be a better investment than just giving them money.
My point is, there is no simple, clear path to making the world a better place. We all have to actively think about how to make it happen. And it may happen in unexpected ways.
How does this make sense? By donating your labor you’re effectively giving the charity money, since now they don’t have to pay someone to do said labor. Since it’s rare that your skills and an organization’s needs are going to line up, it’s almost always going to be more efficient to just make a donation.
If you think the organization is going to waste your donation, you shouldn’t offer them labor instead—you should find a better organization.
Most charities suck. A few don’t. Finding the ones that suck least and then pumping money into them is actually a pretty efficient way to make the world a better place.
This is a good point, yes. A lot of times the finish line is not well-defined, and you have to choose. Or people self deceive for self esteem reasons or for signalling reasons. Yes, this could be a major reason it happens. Good point. There’s still an open question of why people do it when they do have very clear purpose that they honestly want… for instance, the would-be comedian who really really does want to do comedy and is taking lower gains… that said, I think you just uncovered a big reason it happens—self-deception about goals, indeed.
For clear cut examples, the question certainly remains. Your example of the comedian is what got me thinking about this though, because if I heard of a person doing what he’s doing, the “fake justifications” explanation would seem like the vastly more likely one to me.
There’s no way he actually thinks Garfield is the best way to comedy superstardom, or even a reasonable use of his time at all. In your example, we can look into his mind and see that he’s doing comedian training. If I met this guy in reality though, my explanation of his behavior would be “He’s lazy and just wants to watch tv all day. He tells himself it’s training because he doesn’t want to admit this”.
If he just wanted to watch TV all day, I’m sure he could find something more entertaining. After a while, the jokes about mailing Nermal to Abu Dhabi get really old. This sounds like a case where he somehow convinced himself that watching Garfield and Friends was a good way to become a better comedian.
I liked Garfield and Friends...
So did I, but while I’m sure a comedian-in-training could learn something from it, it’s far from optimal.
Actually, most possible things people do are obviously far from optimal. Just look at how much time students spend zoning out in class, “learning”. It’s trivial to come up with a better way to use that time. Thinking about this scares me, because I could probably be doing something better most of the time, if I had a better idea of how to win at life.
School isn’t about learning. Zoning out in class can be a rational choice on the part of a student. If your goal is to acquire the credentials school provides and a required component of that is a certain attendance level but you get little of value from the class then zoning out can be a rational response. This describes much of my school career.
When I was in those situations, I would usually read a book, or ponder something, and periodically check to see if the teacher was saying anything important. It was like an enforced study time. That’s more rational than sitting there vegetating. (The downside is that some of the most boring teachers would get ticked off. Still worth it, though.)
I would usually pay attention to the actual lesson unless it was review over what we’d already been assigned to read or otherwise not new information. At that point, and otherwise when question and answer or assignment writing was going on and I was finished the assignment, I would mostly tune out the teacher and spend my time drawing on the backs and margins of my worksheets. I never in any other period of my life did as much artwork as I did while bored or distracted in high school, and I think it’s because for many reasons I don’t bother with well enough to control I am usually tired, and prefer to piss away my time with small “entertainments” like YouTube videos which are almost always available than invest my time in things which require more of an energy commitment despite also being more rewarding.
Or I would nap on my desk. Got in trouble for it surprisingly rarely.
Maybe we should put the X-is-not-about-X stuff on the wiki so we can accumulate datapoints. I mean, for schooling I have 2 (lack of use of the proven superior spaced presentation/spaced repetition over the prevalent massed presentation; lack of sensible school hours for high schools), but most people interested in the topic will never come across these.
Definitely. And I’m sure that you’d learn a lot more about television than about how to do stand-up comedy by studying a television series that isn’t itself about stand-up.