Just for clarity, I think “one should consider trade (of anything) among one’s choices”, which is different than “one should trade anything...”
A game you play does have a cost in time. It costs one hour per hour (plus setup and coordination costs, plus usually-trivial monetary costs). It also has a value to you in happiness and perhaps social cohesion. I highly recommend that trade, and make it myself often.
Time is an excellent resource to focus on for this discussion, as you’re going to lose it no matter what—it proceeds regardless of your choices and you can only choose how to spend it, not whether. Which gets to the next step—“value” isn’t a property of the thing, it’s a property of a relationship between an agent and the thing. If some specific hour of my time is more valuable to me spent gaming than, say, responding to comments on a philosophy post, I should do that. If that marginal hour is more valuable to me than the money offered by a potential employer, I should do that. If those other things are more valuable, I’m better off doing those instead and maximizing my value for this resource. I’m losing the resource regardless—the hour will pass and no longer be mine. It’s just a matter of how I trade that for some future value (money, social connections, enjoyable memories, skills usable in future activities, etc.).
Calling some of my activities “sacred” is a fine negotiation mechanism between myself and others who’d like to influence my choices (many will accept “this is pre-committed” more readily than “this is important/valuable to me”). And even between my current self (who declares what’s “sacred”) and my future self (who actually makes the resource-use decision). But at root, it’s “just” a decision of how to spend the resource.
This is a hard comment to make well without coming across as status oriented (“Oh really? That sounds like such a Kegan Level 4 thing to say*”), but I think is important, and even if I screw it up I think it’s important that there’s a thing here I might not have screwed up that I’d like to learn how to do correctly.
In this case, the default view is “trade is for marketplaces, it has no place in how to think about personal relationships and free time and stuff.”
And then the antithesis view is “actually trade is everywhere, often going on under the hood in ways you can’t see, and this is in fact good because it enables a lot of value that wouldn’t otherwise be there”.
And there’s a synthesis view of “actually trade is one frame among many, and it’s not always the best frame, and while yes there is a sense that trade is literally the best thing ever, thinking in those terms comes with side effects you wont always see, at least as implemented on human wetware.”
And if a default-view person tries to skip to the synthesis view without grokking the antithesis view, they miss something important. You need to actually grok trade before you can say “well actually trade is good but has it’s place” – otherwise you’re still in the default view, just… more smug about it or something.
But you’re arguing with Zvi as if he’s in the default view and needs to grok the antithesis view, and he’s actually very definitely in well past that point, and is trying to get you to see the synthesis view. I don’t know how long you’ve been following Zvi but holy hell does he definitely get the points you’re saying, and the problem is not that you need to explain your points better or something.
I won’t say “and therefore you should just listen to him because Authority”, because that’s also not the point. But, either you think Zvi has something worth learning here, or you don’t, and if you don’t, this particular conversation carried over several threads isn’t a good use of anyone’s time.
Hmm, what you outline here is not obvious to me. It seems fine to me, to see that someone proposes an antithesis and to then respond with “I do not see how this antithesis adds anything to my existing model or how it makes better predictions, and it seems internally inconsistent, so I don’t see any need for synthesis here”. I would even argue that this should happen with 95%+ of antitheses that are presented to you.
I also don’t think that it’s obvious that the right thing is to assume that Zvi already understands the thesis. If I am stuck trying to understand one of Zvi’s points, then it seems better to me to make a comment explaining my confusion/explaining the inconsistency I think I found in the argument, than to stay silent in my confusion. I benefited from reading the exchange between Dagon and Zvi, and would like to see more of it, since I don’t think I get the point Zvi is trying to make, and why it is in conflict with a classical Hansonian signaling-resources model.
There’s no conflict with Hansonian signaling other than emphasis; it’s a thing that happens, it’s important, I don’t think it’s as important as Hanson thinks.
One thought that occurs to me is that this framework is partly an attempt to defend against Hansonian signaling—to keep X being about Y. That often seems super important to me.
Good feedback though that you don’t see the contrast, thank you.
I think I don’t endorse my final paragraph as written – among other things it doesn’t mention value to third-parties reading along.
I also very much don’t think it should be obvious to Dagon that my claims here are true, if he started reading Zvi a few days ago – just that if you’ve been reading Zvi for years it’s clear that he gets the class of trade-based-thinking that Dagon is pointing to here. I may have picked a bad comment to make this sort of reply – as standalone comment Dagon’s most recent remarks seem pretty fine at trying to clarify his position and tease out what exactly Zvi is talking about, and I don’t think my reply is worded fairly.
(In my defense, I said I’d probably not do a good job) [Does that count as a defense? :P)
But here’s an attempt to reword my final paragraph:
It seems like the default course this conversation will take would be exploring all the different ways trade could resolve a given problem, but I’m pretty confident that the interesting disagreements here aren’t about trade, so much as about other factors outside of the trade lens (I think mostly relating to human psychology, although I’m not sure)
So while one could continue having the long, extensive conversation of doublechecking that Zvi does in fact understand all the reasons that trade is a good and versatile lens, my comment was geared towards skipping past all that to get to the substantial, interesting disagreement at the end.
I fear I’m doing this wrong—I have a pretty large lump of respect for Zvi, and I’m honestly confused at what seems to be something important that I just don’t get. I don’t know if I skipped the thesis, so I’m stuck on the antithesis, or if it’s the case that this model of conversation doesn’t apply to my understanding, but people keep saying things that just don’t fit my experienced nor my considered decision-making process.
Historically, one of the best ways for me to figure out where I’m wrong is to make specific-enough statements for people to correct and tell me why. That’s not working very well on this topic, and I apologize for the churn.
It’s clear that this model doesn’t resonate with you, at all, despite your putting a lot of effort into it. I can think of any number of reasons for that, including my not being as clear as I’d like. From some of your other comments, it sounds to me like you’ve found a way to frame these issues that works reasonably for you, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
I’m a bit worried about speaking too much on behalf of Zvi (also apologies if my OC came across overly harsh). A couple concepts that seem relevant to me:
legibility. I think this is less relevant to this conversation than I first thought (based on your other comment). i.e I think there’s a failure mode than comes from saying “Ah, I can make N dollars an hour. Is playing this game worth N dollars?” And somey people feel like they then have to justify the cost, and the N dollars is very concrete and easy to point to, but the other things aren’t, so the system ends up punishing illegible things. I think this may sometimes be relevant even if one has internalized that money isn’t the only universal metric.
Choices are bad – comparing things to other things that might have been is often unhelpful or at least costly.
Just for clarity, I think “one should consider trade (of anything) among one’s choices”, which is different than “one should trade anything...”
A game you play does have a cost in time. It costs one hour per hour (plus setup and coordination costs, plus usually-trivial monetary costs). It also has a value to you in happiness and perhaps social cohesion. I highly recommend that trade, and make it myself often.
Time is an excellent resource to focus on for this discussion, as you’re going to lose it no matter what—it proceeds regardless of your choices and you can only choose how to spend it, not whether. Which gets to the next step—“value” isn’t a property of the thing, it’s a property of a relationship between an agent and the thing. If some specific hour of my time is more valuable to me spent gaming than, say, responding to comments on a philosophy post, I should do that. If that marginal hour is more valuable to me than the money offered by a potential employer, I should do that. If those other things are more valuable, I’m better off doing those instead and maximizing my value for this resource. I’m losing the resource regardless—the hour will pass and no longer be mine. It’s just a matter of how I trade that for some future value (money, social connections, enjoyable memories, skills usable in future activities, etc.).
Calling some of my activities “sacred” is a fine negotiation mechanism between myself and others who’d like to influence my choices (many will accept “this is pre-committed” more readily than “this is important/valuable to me”). And even between my current self (who declares what’s “sacred”) and my future self (who actually makes the resource-use decision). But at root, it’s “just” a decision of how to spend the resource.
This is a hard comment to make well without coming across as status oriented (“Oh really? That sounds like such a Kegan Level 4 thing to say*”), but I think is important, and even if I screw it up I think it’s important that there’s a thing here I might not have screwed up that I’d like to learn how to do correctly.
There’s a common pattern of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Or, “naive/contrarian/metacontrarian.”
In this case, the default view is “trade is for marketplaces, it has no place in how to think about personal relationships and free time and stuff.”
And then the antithesis view is “actually trade is everywhere, often going on under the hood in ways you can’t see, and this is in fact good because it enables a lot of value that wouldn’t otherwise be there”.
And there’s a synthesis view of “actually trade is one frame among many, and it’s not always the best frame, and while yes there is a sense that trade is literally the best thing ever, thinking in those terms comes with side effects you wont always see, at least as implemented on human wetware.”
And if a default-view person tries to skip to the synthesis view without grokking the antithesis view, they miss something important. You need to actually grok trade before you can say “well actually trade is good but has it’s place” – otherwise you’re still in the default view, just… more smug about it or something.
But you’re arguing with Zvi as if he’s in the default view and needs to grok the antithesis view, and he’s actually very definitely in well past that point, and is trying to get you to see the synthesis view. I don’t know how long you’ve been following Zvi but holy hell does he definitely get the points you’re saying, and the problem is not that you need to explain your points better or something.
I won’t say “and therefore you should just listen to him because Authority”, because that’s also not the point. But, either you think Zvi has something worth learning here, or you don’t, and if you don’t, this particular conversation carried over several threads isn’t a good use of anyone’s time.
*apologies to Kegan
Hmm, what you outline here is not obvious to me. It seems fine to me, to see that someone proposes an antithesis and to then respond with “I do not see how this antithesis adds anything to my existing model or how it makes better predictions, and it seems internally inconsistent, so I don’t see any need for synthesis here”. I would even argue that this should happen with 95%+ of antitheses that are presented to you.
I also don’t think that it’s obvious that the right thing is to assume that Zvi already understands the thesis. If I am stuck trying to understand one of Zvi’s points, then it seems better to me to make a comment explaining my confusion/explaining the inconsistency I think I found in the argument, than to stay silent in my confusion. I benefited from reading the exchange between Dagon and Zvi, and would like to see more of it, since I don’t think I get the point Zvi is trying to make, and why it is in conflict with a classical Hansonian signaling-resources model.
There’s no conflict with Hansonian signaling other than emphasis; it’s a thing that happens, it’s important, I don’t think it’s as important as Hanson thinks.
One thought that occurs to me is that this framework is partly an attempt to defend against Hansonian signaling—to keep X being about Y. That often seems super important to me.
Good feedback though that you don’t see the contrast, thank you.
I think I don’t endorse my final paragraph as written – among other things it doesn’t mention value to third-parties reading along.
I also very much don’t think it should be obvious to Dagon that my claims here are true, if he started reading Zvi a few days ago – just that if you’ve been reading Zvi for years it’s clear that he gets the class of trade-based-thinking that Dagon is pointing to here. I may have picked a bad comment to make this sort of reply – as standalone comment Dagon’s most recent remarks seem pretty fine at trying to clarify his position and tease out what exactly Zvi is talking about, and I don’t think my reply is worded fairly.
(In my defense, I said I’d probably not do a good job) [Does that count as a defense? :P)
But here’s an attempt to reword my final paragraph:
It seems like the default course this conversation will take would be exploring all the different ways trade could resolve a given problem, but I’m pretty confident that the interesting disagreements here aren’t about trade, so much as about other factors outside of the trade lens (I think mostly relating to human psychology, although I’m not sure)
So while one could continue having the long, extensive conversation of doublechecking that Zvi does in fact understand all the reasons that trade is a good and versatile lens, my comment was geared towards skipping past all that to get to the substantial, interesting disagreement at the end.
Dagon and Zvi?
Lol, yes. That’s a weird typo.
I fear I’m doing this wrong—I have a pretty large lump of respect for Zvi, and I’m honestly confused at what seems to be something important that I just don’t get. I don’t know if I skipped the thesis, so I’m stuck on the antithesis, or if it’s the case that this model of conversation doesn’t apply to my understanding, but people keep saying things that just don’t fit my experienced nor my considered decision-making process.
Historically, one of the best ways for me to figure out where I’m wrong is to make specific-enough statements for people to correct and tell me why. That’s not working very well on this topic, and I apologize for the churn.
It’s clear that this model doesn’t resonate with you, at all, despite your putting a lot of effort into it. I can think of any number of reasons for that, including my not being as clear as I’d like. From some of your other comments, it sounds to me like you’ve found a way to frame these issues that works reasonably for you, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
I’m a bit worried about speaking too much on behalf of Zvi (also apologies if my OC came across overly harsh). A couple concepts that seem relevant to me:
legibility. I think this is less relevant to this conversation than I first thought (based on your other comment). i.e I think there’s a failure mode than comes from saying “Ah, I can make N dollars an hour. Is playing this game worth N dollars?” And somey people feel like they then have to justify the cost, and the N dollars is very concrete and easy to point to, but the other things aren’t, so the system ends up punishing illegible things. I think this may sometimes be relevant even if one has internalized that money isn’t the only universal metric.
Choices are bad – comparing things to other things that might have been is often unhelpful or at least costly.