The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me.
The English idioms of “paying attention” and “giving attention” are misleading. One is not paying or giving these as things to the other person, as a consideration for which they will pay or give some quantity of theirs to you. Instead, both are jointly using their time and attention to create something to their common benefit.
I can imagine people treating their paying of attention in that transactional way, an hour for an hour, a pat on the back for a pat on the back, but it strikes me as dysfunctional.
Yet when you’ve spent an hour with someone and they’ve spent an hour with you, that hour is gone and you no longer have it contra your comment above. I would call that “having spent it”.
You would be in the same situation if you’d done something else during that hour. You’re only “paying”, in the sense of giving up something valuable to you, in so far as you would have preferred to do something else.
That’s sometimes true of time spent with friends—maybe your friend is moving house and you help them unload a lot of boxes or something—but by and large we human beings tend to enjoy spending time with our friends. (Even when unloading boxes, actually.)
You’re only “paying”, in the sense of giving up something valuable to you, in so far as you would have preferred to do something else.
I don’t think that makes sense. When I spend dollars from my bank balance on the things I most prefer to spend them on, I haven’t not spent them just because that’s the thing I most wanted to buy. I don’t think it’s any different with time. The spending is in that’s in gone and I no longer have it, no matter how pleased or displeased I am with how the resource was consumed.
I am not convinced by the analogy. If you have $30 in your bank account you spend it on a book, you are $30 poorer; you had the option of just not doing that, in which case you would still have the $30. If you have 60 minutes ahead of you in the day and you spend it with a friend, then indeed you’re 60 minutes older = poorer at the end of that time; but you didn’t have the option of not spending those 60 minutes; they were going to pass by one way or another whatever you did.
You might still have given up something valuable! If you’d have preferred to devote those 60 minutes to earning money, or sleeping, or discovering timeless mathematical truths, then talking to your friend instead has had an opportunity cost. But the valuable thing you’ve foregone is that other thing you’d prefer to have done, not the time itself. That was always going to pass you by; it always does.
There aren’t exactly definite right and wrong answers here; everyone agrees that “spending” time is not exactly the same thing as spending money, ditto for “giving” time, and the question is merely whether it’s similar enough that the choice of language isn’t misleading us. And it seems to me that, because the time is going to go anyway, the least-misleading way to think of it is that the default, no-action, case to compare with—analogous to simply not spending money and having it sit in the bank—is whatever you’d have been doing with your time otherwise. If you help a friend out by doing some tedious task that makes their life better, then you are “giving” or “spending” time. If you sit and chat with a friend because you both enjoy talking with one another, then you’re not “giving” or “spending” in a sense that much resembles “giving” or “spending” money: you aren’t worse off afterwards than if you hadn’t done that; if you hadn’t, then you’d likely have occupied the same time doing something no better.
I’m in two minds as to whether I believe what I just wrote. The counter-argument goes like this: comparing the situation after spending an hour with your friend with the situation after spending an hour doing something else begs the question; it’s like comparing the situation after spending the $30 on a book with that after spending the $30 on something else. But I don’t think the counter-argument really works, precisely because you have the option of just leaving the $30 in the bank and never spending it on something else, and there is no corresponding option for money.
In the world where people had exactly $30 to spend every hour and they’d either spend it or it disappeared, would you object to calling that spending money? I feel like many of my spending intuitions would still basically transfer to that world.
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation :-). But yes, I would feel fine using the term “spending” (but then I also feel fine talking about “spending time”) but wouldn’t want to assume that all my intuitions from the present world still apply.
(E.g., in the actual world, for anyone who is neither very rich or very poor spending always has saving as an alternative[1], and how much you save can have a big impact on your future well-being. In the hypothetical spend-it-or-lose-it world, that isn’t the case, and that feels like a pretty important difference.)
[1] For the very poor, much of their spending is basically compulsory and saving instead isn’t an option. For the very rich, the choice is still there but for normal-size purchases matters less because they’re going to have ample resources whether they spend or save.
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation
Opportunity cost? Spending the money on something prevents you from being able to spend it on anything else, and this fact remains true regardless for whether it “spoils” after an hour or not.
This entire dialogue reads like you and Raemon aren’t disagreeing much on what you expect the world to be like (on the object-level) but you instead have a definitional dispute about whether you are “paying” or “spending” something when you have to deal with a substantial opportunity cost, with Raemon taking the “yes” stance (which agrees with standard economic thinking that thinks of economic profit as accounting profit minus opportunity cost) and you taking the “no” position (which seems more in line with regular, non-economic-jargon language).
This is perhaps due to the fact that the two of you have cached thoughts associated with the label of “spending” more so than with the substance of it.
Right: as I said upthread, the discussion is largely about whether terms like “spending” are misleading or helpful when we’re talking about time rather than money. And, as you point out (or at least it seems clearly implied by what you say), whether a given term is helpful to a given person will depend on what other things are associated with that term in that person’s mind, so it’s not like there’s even a definite answer to “is it helpful or misleading?”.
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
Oh yeah, oops. I saw Raemon made the (at-the-time) most recent comment and that someone whose name also started with R was commenting upthread, so I pattern-matched incorrectly.
In addition to what you have said here, you cannot save up your time. It’s questionable if you can save up your pats on the back (which you might just as well give away very liberally, and your reward could be as simple as the meaning or help it created for someone else). Perhaps you can save your attention, but usually that is going to be between you and your work and internet/media habits more than human interaction habits.
There could be some extreme cases where someone is hogging an undue level of time and attention (and at that point, you need to set boundaries as the issue likely lies within you as much as your friend). Which segues into, I think the whole point OP is missing, “It takes two to tango.” There’s something complex in the interaction between two people. If it was “worthwhile” or “you got something out of it” it is often due to the influence of your own actions, words, reality field as much as anything they willfully “did” or “did not do.” And if it seemed like a waste of time, well, at least 50% of that interaction was you!
Your statement “The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me.” is correct. To reach a little further into it, likely looking at things transactionally will skew human interactions in a specific direction, self-selecting for other people and interactions of a certain type. Strangely, for the person who believes in transactional human interactions, I suspect due to that skewing, looking back it will appear that their perspective was “correct.” Transactionalism being a kind of self-reinforcing or even self-feeding pattern.
I think this might be akin to the conversational results that would be achieved in social interactions between a habit of steelmanning vs strawmanning. In steelmanning, you would understand things better, but also in my experience you can draw out the best of the other person’s thinking, intentions, etc. The entire interaction typically changes. Especially if you are talking to someone from an otherwise embattled group. Often they drop the whole thing after awhile and you’re talking to another human with about the same needs, wants, and motives as any other decent person, and there’s something to connect to.
As you said, paying of attention and pats on the back in a transactional way seems dysfunctional. But it’s also selective for partners who themselves are either very transactive or very giving. It’s likely someone could leave ten years of doing it that way thinking they were “right.” And if all you care about is one level of tangible results, it might be “an effective strategy.” It’s only a partial analogy, but just like the ideologue who goes around looking for every hole and inconsistency in dissenting views (the highbrow version of strawmanning) will have been “right” about all those idiots out there.
One is not paying or giving these as things to the other person, as a consideration for which they will pay or give some quantity of theirs to you.
This fails to take into account the straightforward concept of opportunity cost, which sits at the core of basic economic thinking about these matters.
Yes, you are not literally paying in money or blood to spend time with someone else (at least not in most cases), but doing the latter does impose an opportunity cost because it prevents you from doing other things during that timeframe, things that could have been productive or given you some other benefit. It does not matter if this engagement is transactional or mutualistic or heartfelt, the opportunity cost exists nonetheless.
Spending time with friends has an opportunity cost, regardless of whether the activity you engage in is pleasurable or hurtful or whether it generates consideration or not.
I entirely agree, and it also seems false due to Dunbar’s number-related considerations. While it’s not an actual, physical hard cap on the number of friends you have, simply making a new non-surface-level friendship probably makes it more difficult and cognitively demanding (on the margin) to maintain stable relationships with your other friends (past a certain point, at least).
Right, but that seems to imply you had to give up spending the time and attention elsewhere. There are definitely times where spending time with a certain person is pretty close to a terminal goal. And in that case “spending” seems to be a bit of a misleading word.
Right, but that seems to imply you had to give up spending the time and attention elsewhere.
But you did? That’s how spending your time works.
I think using up a resource such that it can’t be used elsewhere (most usually $$ or time) counts as spending that resource regardless of whether you’re using it up for something instrumental or terminal. I’m also happy with consuming, though “spending” is more usually the English word for consuming a consumable resource for some purpose.
The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me.
This seems quite false, at least with the currencies of time and attention. When given or spent on another, you no longer have them.
The English idioms of “paying attention” and “giving attention” are misleading. One is not paying or giving these as things to the other person, as a consideration for which they will pay or give some quantity of theirs to you. Instead, both are jointly using their time and attention to create something to their common benefit.
I can imagine people treating their paying of attention in that transactional way, an hour for an hour, a pat on the back for a pat on the back, but it strikes me as dysfunctional.
Yet when you’ve spent an hour with someone and they’ve spent an hour with you, that hour is gone and you no longer have it contra your comment above. I would call that “having spent it”.
You would be in the same situation if you’d done something else during that hour. You’re only “paying”, in the sense of giving up something valuable to you, in so far as you would have preferred to do something else.
That’s sometimes true of time spent with friends—maybe your friend is moving house and you help them unload a lot of boxes or something—but by and large we human beings tend to enjoy spending time with our friends. (Even when unloading boxes, actually.)
I don’t think that makes sense. When I spend dollars from my bank balance on the things I most prefer to spend them on, I haven’t not spent them just because that’s the thing I most wanted to buy. I don’t think it’s any different with time. The spending is in that’s in gone and I no longer have it, no matter how pleased or displeased I am with how the resource was consumed.
I am not convinced by the analogy. If you have $30 in your bank account you spend it on a book, you are $30 poorer; you had the option of just not doing that, in which case you would still have the $30. If you have 60 minutes ahead of you in the day and you spend it with a friend, then indeed you’re 60 minutes older = poorer at the end of that time; but you didn’t have the option of not spending those 60 minutes; they were going to pass by one way or another whatever you did.
You might still have given up something valuable! If you’d have preferred to devote those 60 minutes to earning money, or sleeping, or discovering timeless mathematical truths, then talking to your friend instead has had an opportunity cost. But the valuable thing you’ve foregone is that other thing you’d prefer to have done, not the time itself. That was always going to pass you by; it always does.
There aren’t exactly definite right and wrong answers here; everyone agrees that “spending” time is not exactly the same thing as spending money, ditto for “giving” time, and the question is merely whether it’s similar enough that the choice of language isn’t misleading us. And it seems to me that, because the time is going to go anyway, the least-misleading way to think of it is that the default, no-action, case to compare with—analogous to simply not spending money and having it sit in the bank—is whatever you’d have been doing with your time otherwise. If you help a friend out by doing some tedious task that makes their life better, then you are “giving” or “spending” time. If you sit and chat with a friend because you both enjoy talking with one another, then you’re not “giving” or “spending” in a sense that much resembles “giving” or “spending” money: you aren’t worse off afterwards than if you hadn’t done that; if you hadn’t, then you’d likely have occupied the same time doing something no better.
I’m in two minds as to whether I believe what I just wrote. The counter-argument goes like this: comparing the situation after spending an hour with your friend with the situation after spending an hour doing something else begs the question; it’s like comparing the situation after spending the $30 on a book with that after spending the $30 on something else. But I don’t think the counter-argument really works, precisely because you have the option of just leaving the $30 in the bank and never spending it on something else, and there is no corresponding option for money.
In the world where people had exactly $30 to spend every hour and they’d either spend it or it disappeared, would you object to calling that spending money? I feel like many of my spending intuitions would still basically transfer to that world.
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation :-). But yes, I would feel fine using the term “spending” (but then I also feel fine talking about “spending time”) but wouldn’t want to assume that all my intuitions from the present world still apply.
(E.g., in the actual world, for anyone who is neither very rich or very poor spending always has saving as an alternative[1], and how much you save can have a big impact on your future well-being. In the hypothetical spend-it-or-lose-it world, that isn’t the case, and that feels like a pretty important difference.)
[1] For the very poor, much of their spending is basically compulsory and saving instead isn’t an option. For the very rich, the choice is still there but for normal-size purchases matters less because they’re going to have ample resources whether they spend or save.
Opportunity cost? Spending the money on something prevents you from being able to spend it on anything else, and this fact remains true regardless for whether it “spoils” after an hour or not.
This entire dialogue reads like you and Raemon aren’t disagreeing much on what you expect the world to be like (on the object-level) but you instead have a definitional dispute about whether you are “paying” or “spending” something when you have to deal with a substantial opportunity cost, with Raemon taking the “yes” stance (which agrees with standard economic thinking that thinks of economic profit as accounting profit minus opportunity cost) and you taking the “no” position (which seems more in line with regular, non-economic-jargon language).
This is perhaps due to the fact that the two of you have cached thoughts associated with the label of “spending” more so than with the substance of it.
Right: as I said upthread, the discussion is largely about whether terms like “spending” are misleading or helpful when we’re talking about time rather than money. And, as you point out (or at least it seems clearly implied by what you say), whether a given term is helpful to a given person will depend on what other things are associated with that term in that person’s mind, so it’s not like there’s even a definite answer to “is it helpful or misleading?”.
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)
Oh yeah, oops. I saw Raemon made the (at-the-time) most recent comment and that someone whose name also started with R was commenting upthread, so I pattern-matched incorrectly.
In addition to what you have said here, you cannot save up your time. It’s questionable if you can save up your pats on the back (which you might just as well give away very liberally, and your reward could be as simple as the meaning or help it created for someone else). Perhaps you can save your attention, but usually that is going to be between you and your work and internet/media habits more than human interaction habits.
There could be some extreme cases where someone is hogging an undue level of time and attention (and at that point, you need to set boundaries as the issue likely lies within you as much as your friend). Which segues into, I think the whole point OP is missing, “It takes two to tango.” There’s something complex in the interaction between two people. If it was “worthwhile” or “you got something out of it” it is often due to the influence of your own actions, words, reality field as much as anything they willfully “did” or “did not do.” And if it seemed like a waste of time, well, at least 50% of that interaction was you!
Your statement “The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me.” is correct. To reach a little further into it, likely looking at things transactionally will skew human interactions in a specific direction, self-selecting for other people and interactions of a certain type. Strangely, for the person who believes in transactional human interactions, I suspect due to that skewing, looking back it will appear that their perspective was “correct.” Transactionalism being a kind of self-reinforcing or even self-feeding pattern.
I think this might be akin to the conversational results that would be achieved in social interactions between a habit of steelmanning vs strawmanning. In steelmanning, you would understand things better, but also in my experience you can draw out the best of the other person’s thinking, intentions, etc. The entire interaction typically changes. Especially if you are talking to someone from an otherwise embattled group. Often they drop the whole thing after awhile and you’re talking to another human with about the same needs, wants, and motives as any other decent person, and there’s something to connect to.
As you said, paying of attention and pats on the back in a transactional way seems dysfunctional. But it’s also selective for partners who themselves are either very transactive or very giving. It’s likely someone could leave ten years of doing it that way thinking they were “right.” And if all you care about is one level of tangible results, it might be “an effective strategy.” It’s only a partial analogy, but just like the ideologue who goes around looking for every hole and inconsistency in dissenting views (the highbrow version of strawmanning) will have been “right” about all those idiots out there.
This fails to take into account the straightforward concept of opportunity cost, which sits at the core of basic economic thinking about these matters.
Yes, you are not literally paying in money or blood to spend time with someone else (at least not in most cases), but doing the latter does impose an opportunity cost because it prevents you from doing other things during that timeframe, things that could have been productive or given you some other benefit. It does not matter if this engagement is transactional or mutualistic or heartfelt, the opportunity cost exists nonetheless.
Spending time with friends has an opportunity cost, regardless of whether the activity you engage in is pleasurable or hurtful or whether it generates consideration or not.
I entirely agree, and it also seems false due to Dunbar’s number-related considerations. While it’s not an actual, physical hard cap on the number of friends you have, simply making a new non-surface-level friendship probably makes it more difficult and cognitively demanding (on the margin) to maintain stable relationships with your other friends (past a certain point, at least).
Right, but that seems to imply you had to give up spending the time and attention elsewhere. There are definitely times where spending time with a certain person is pretty close to a terminal goal. And in that case “spending” seems to be a bit of a misleading word.
But you did? That’s how spending your time works.
I think using up a resource such that it can’t be used elsewhere (most usually $$ or time) counts as spending that resource regardless of whether you’re using it up for something instrumental or terminal. I’m also happy with consuming, though “spending” is more usually the English word for consuming a consumable resource for some purpose.