It’s noticing that your movement is not made up of value-maximizing automatons.
Looks like straw. Anyone is NOT noticing that?
Emotional labor is helping people be people; mapping their emotional/mental landscape, clearing out baggage, deciding what it is they want
Um. You can try to map my emotional/mental landscape, to the best of your ability—I do not promise to cooperate and may, in fact, do some database poisoning in the process. But if you want to decide what it is that I want, you will be told to fuck off in no uncertain terms.
I see your point, but I still think of this as basic awareness of what’s happening around you. Sure, you want to help your friends who hit a rough patch. If you happen to be a manager, sure, you have to deal with the various emotional states of your minions. But that’s no more “emotional labour” than doing, say, mechanical engineering is gravitational labour because gravity is there and you can’t just ignore it.
Maybe I just have too many economic associations with the word “labour”—I think of it as something you sell for money (or barter). If you are just aware and compassionate and helpful, I wouldn’t call that “labour”.
emotional labor traditionally falls more on women
Women are just better at it. Sometimes much better.
Maybe I just have too many economic associations with the word “labour”—I think of it as something you sell for money (or barter).
If you spend all day chopping wood, and selling it, vs spend all day chopping wood, and then people take it because it’s just sort of assumed that the wood is there for the taking without expecting anything in return, either way you spend the whole day chopping wood.
If the term ‘labor’ is distracting we can taboo it, but we need a word for “the effortful thing that you sometimes get paid for and sometimes don’t.”
Um. You can try to map my emotional/mental landscape, to the best of your ability—I do not promise to cooperate and may, in fact, do some database poisoning in the process.
I’m confused about this. Why does it help you to make other people harder to figure out what you want? (Bear in mind this includes lots of things you DON’T want and avoiding those things too).
This is not about FORCING you to do the thing-I-think-you-want. The mark of someone who is good at emotional skills is noticing when they were wrong and adjusting on the fly.
But if you start applying the ” labour” term to everything, it would get quite silly. You spent some time talking to your friends? That was “talking labour”. You went for a walk? That was “walking labour”. You played a game? That was “gaming labour”.
A living creature constantly expends energy. Most everything you do in life takes some effort. It seems simpler to me to just accept this as a baseline fact.
the effortful thing
The word “effort” doesn’t look too bad. Sometimes you can cruise through social situations on autopilot expending little effort, sometimes you need to pay attention and spend more effort/energy to interact.
Why does it help you to make other people harder to figure out what you want?
It depends on whether I trust those people to act in my best interests. For example, I block most of the tracking in my browsers—I don’t want those people to figure out what I want.
This is not about FORCING you
Usually not. But power games and manipulation are, let’s say, common in social situations.
ETA: Oh, I see. I read “deciding” in “deciding what it is they want” as making a decision. But there is another reading which is treating “deciding” as figuring out. Is that what you had in mind?
You spent some time talking to your friends? That was “talking labour”. You went for a walk? That was “walking labour”. You played a game? That was “gaming labour”.
I can imagine situations where this actually makes sense. Such as:
You want to organize a LW meetup, but all places in your town are insanely expensive. Exploring more and more crazy options, you find out there is this one cheap place you could reserve… for playing World of Warcraft.
Such are the rules of the place: the owner is a huge fan of World of Warcraft, and is willing to rent the place cheaply for people who will play the game there. Desperately you say: “Yeah, yeah, we are all fans of World of Warcraft, that’s what we are going to do; just give me the keys.” But the owner says: “Ok, but because some people already tried to abuse my trust, and then use the room for other purposes, here are my conditions—you only get the discount for the rent, if you afterwards show me at least 5 characters that gained at least 3 levels each during that afternoon.” You agree, thinking that this shouldn’t be a problem for a group of rationalists.
But when the day comes, everyone is just talking about cool topics, and no one wants to help you. So you spend the whole afternoon running between 5 computers, levelling up those 5 characters. You leave completely exhausted, without having heard any of the lectures or debates, and decide that you are never going to do this again.
This would literally be the “gaming labor”, in Raemon’s sense.
Yeah (or rather, since someone else wrote that, I’m fairly confident that’s what you meant)
But if you start applying the ” labour” term to everything,
The part where this starts to matter is when particular types of labor are undersupplied, or people start getting frustrated that their relatively rare skills are undervalued (i.e. they are getting neither money nor respect nor other things they may want).
As far as I understand many women would like that their husbands is more open about what’s emotionally happening with him and share it with the woman.
The husband might get a benefit from getting listened to his emotional issues but looking at the interaction in terms of supply and demand ignores the real dynamics of the interaction.
when particular types of labor are undersupplied, or people start getting frustrated that their relatively rare skills are undervalued
Are we talking economics now?
There is supply and demand. If your type of labour is “undersupplied”, this implies there is high demand which means you should get more (money, status, sex, etc.) for your labour. If there is some mechanism that prevents you from getting more, well, the labour will continue to be undersupplied for obvious reasons. The other side of this coin is that if you offer more, the labour should stop being undersupplied.
When people think their skills are “undervalued” this means that the demand for them is lower than they expect (or think it should be). This might well frustrate them, but I don’t see anything wrong here. Unless you want to start manufacturing demand, I’m not sure what do you want to do other than adjust expectations.
Basically, if you want more of a particular kind of behaviour (say, “emotional labour”), reward it more. And if people think their behaviour is insufficiently rewarded, well, maybe no one values it enough to reward it “sufficiently”. It’s all Incentives 101 -- why do you think this is complicated?
Basically, if you want more of a particular kind of behaviour (say, “emotional labour”), reward it more
This is, in fact, one of the things Project Hufflepuff is aiming to do. The point is that right now we do not have enough emotional labor (this is making people lonely and burnt out), and one of the reasons there is not a greater supply of emotional labor is that people who are good at emotional labor do not feel valued and therefore are not attracted to the community.
Another reason is that people don’t understand why it is important, and so don’t cultivate the skills themselves.
Hey, everyone! We have a visitor here from Econ-101-Land!
Here in what we like to think of as the real world, people don’t appear to be perfect utility-maximizing machines, and as a consequence it is possible for situations to arise where the rewards available for different kinds of work, or work performed by different groups of people, don’t exactly match up with the value received by the people doing the rewarding.
These discrepancies may get ironed out over time—after all, there is benefit to be had from doing so—and one mechanism by which that happens is by the less-rewarded people (or others who take an interest for whatever reason) complaining about it and encouraging others to think about whether they’re handing out rewards in a way that matches the value received. Which is what’s happening here: it’s not a failure to understand Incentives 101, it’s how the Incentives 101 thing happens.
Another thing about the real world: sometimes people here think things are suboptimal even though they are outcomes the market produces. (I know, it’s weird.) So it may happen that (1) a certain amount of some kind of labour is supplied and (2) it receives a certain level of payment, and (3) the amount of labour and the amount of payment are what the operation of the relevant (actual or metaphorical) market products, and yet (4) someone considers that it would be better for the amounts to be different—perhaps (strange though it sounds) even for the amounts to be ones that the market would not be produced. Some people (I have to confess that I am among them) think it may be reasonable to air such concerns, and to consider whether there might be ways to change things so that the market produces a “better” outcome, or even to let the allocation be done by (whisper it not in Gath) a non-market mechanism.
/me looks around. /me is confused. Where are all the spherical cows that should be floating in vacuum?
discrepancies
The point isn’t to talk about fairness (or lack of it). The point is what do you need to do to get the results you want. And the notion that if you reward something you get more of it applies to real-life humans perfectly well.
The issue isn’t whether you achieve a perfect balance—it’s all about where do you need to push to get movement in the desired direction.
and yet (4) someone considers that it would be better for the amounts to be different
Sure, but I don’t see how it’s different from that someone considering that it would be better if he had a pony.
Again, I make no claims about the fairness of outcomes, all I’m pointing out is that the easiest way to get more of something is to pay (not necessarily in money) more for it.
Note that “market” is a synonym for “voluntary exchange of value”. For example, if you want to you can always pay more than the minimum price the seller will accept—no market nanny will come to scold and punish you. In a similar way, “non-market mechanisms” generally imply that the “voluntary” characteristic gets dropped and we get some coercion involved.
the notion that if you reward something you get more of it applies to real-life humans perfectly well
Oh yes, indeed it does. But the notion that that’s all that determines what people do doesn’t apply so well. Your comment three upthread from this one seems to take it for granted that what “emotional labour” gets done, and how it’s rewarded, are completely determined by market mechanisms: people will do more if it’s rewarded more, and reward it more if it’s scarcer, and that’s all there is to be said about it. I suggest that that assumption is not obviously correct.
I don’t see how it’s different from that someone considering that it would be better if he had a pony.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with considering that it would be better if one had a pony, or with saying so. Of course it’s then reasonable to ask how they propose to get one.
“non-market mechanisms” generally imply that the “voluntary” characteristic gets dropped and we get some coercion involved.
Coercion is one kind of non-market mechanism. (And sometimes a very reasonable one. We use it to restrict the supply of murder, for instance; and to collect taxes, which for all the bad press they get in certain quarters I consider an important and valuable mechanism.) There are others. For instance, giving things away. (In some cases the things were first obtained by coercion, but by no means always.) For another instance, appeals to ethics. (Of course appealing to ethics is no guarantee that what you’re trying to make people do is actually a good idea.) For another instance, attempting to modify people’s preferences (which in some cases—“try it, you’ll like it”—may be done for their sake and with effects that benefit them; sometimes, not so much.)
Coercion is one kind of non-market mechanism … There are others
Yes. A lot of communities, from small (e.g. families) to large (e.g. feudal empires) use non-market mechanisms. However here we are talking about a voluntary association of quite diverse people where no one has much in the way of coercive powers.
Wouldn’t it make things easier if rationalists liked virtue ethics more than consequentialism? :-)
An interesting rhetorical tactic. I suggest you’re being simplistic, and you respond not by showing that you weren’t being, nor by admitting that you were being, but by … well, I’m not sure, actually. I suppose you’re making fun of the idea that anyone might think your earlier comments were simplistic. That’s certainly easier than showing that they weren’t or that they were right to be, and easier on the ego than admitting they were.
Are you familiar with Popehat?
Yup. And with the pony trope more generally, which I think Ken got from someone at Crooked Timber, who of course got it from Calvin and Hobbes. But laughing at something is not actually the same thing as demonstrating that it deserves only laughing at.
where no one has much in the way of coercive powers
Gosh, if only there were non-market mechanisms other than coercion. … I’m getting a funny sense of deja vu here; how about you?
I may be misremembering. I thought that was where I first saw the C&H pony cartoon being used in the way we’re talking about, but I could very well be wrong—or of course I could be right about that but wrong to think that was its first influential emergence. Here is a 2004 example, not from CT itself, but from one of its leading contributors.
Looks like straw. Anyone is NOT noticing that?
Um. You can try to map my emotional/mental landscape, to the best of your ability—I do not promise to cooperate and may, in fact, do some database poisoning in the process. But if you want to decide what it is that I want, you will be told to fuck off in no uncertain terms.
I see your point, but I still think of this as basic awareness of what’s happening around you. Sure, you want to help your friends who hit a rough patch. If you happen to be a manager, sure, you have to deal with the various emotional states of your minions. But that’s no more “emotional labour” than doing, say, mechanical engineering is gravitational labour because gravity is there and you can’t just ignore it.
Maybe I just have too many economic associations with the word “labour”—I think of it as something you sell for money (or barter). If you are just aware and compassionate and helpful, I wouldn’t call that “labour”.
Women are just better at it. Sometimes much better.
If you spend all day chopping wood, and selling it, vs spend all day chopping wood, and then people take it because it’s just sort of assumed that the wood is there for the taking without expecting anything in return, either way you spend the whole day chopping wood.
If the term ‘labor’ is distracting we can taboo it, but we need a word for “the effortful thing that you sometimes get paid for and sometimes don’t.”
I’m confused about this. Why does it help you to make other people harder to figure out what you want? (Bear in mind this includes lots of things you DON’T want and avoiding those things too).
This is not about FORCING you to do the thing-I-think-you-want. The mark of someone who is good at emotional skills is noticing when they were wrong and adjusting on the fly.
But if you start applying the ” labour” term to everything, it would get quite silly. You spent some time talking to your friends? That was “talking labour”. You went for a walk? That was “walking labour”. You played a game? That was “gaming labour”.
A living creature constantly expends energy. Most everything you do in life takes some effort. It seems simpler to me to just accept this as a baseline fact.
The word “effort” doesn’t look too bad. Sometimes you can cruise through social situations on autopilot expending little effort, sometimes you need to pay attention and spend more effort/energy to interact.
It depends on whether I trust those people to act in my best interests. For example, I block most of the tracking in my browsers—I don’t want those people to figure out what I want.
Usually not. But power games and manipulation are, let’s say, common in social situations.
ETA: Oh, I see. I read “deciding” in “deciding what it is they want” as making a decision. But there is another reading which is treating “deciding” as figuring out. Is that what you had in mind?
I can imagine situations where this actually makes sense. Such as:
You want to organize a LW meetup, but all places in your town are insanely expensive. Exploring more and more crazy options, you find out there is this one cheap place you could reserve… for playing World of Warcraft.
Such are the rules of the place: the owner is a huge fan of World of Warcraft, and is willing to rent the place cheaply for people who will play the game there. Desperately you say: “Yeah, yeah, we are all fans of World of Warcraft, that’s what we are going to do; just give me the keys.” But the owner says: “Ok, but because some people already tried to abuse my trust, and then use the room for other purposes, here are my conditions—you only get the discount for the rent, if you afterwards show me at least 5 characters that gained at least 3 levels each during that afternoon.” You agree, thinking that this shouldn’t be a problem for a group of rationalists.
But when the day comes, everyone is just talking about cool topics, and no one wants to help you. So you spend the whole afternoon running between 5 computers, levelling up those 5 characters. You leave completely exhausted, without having heard any of the lectures or debates, and decide that you are never going to do this again.
This would literally be the “gaming labor”, in Raemon’s sense.
Oh, I can imagine a great deal, but it doesn’t illuminate much except for my own imagination.
By the way, if you want a simple example of gaming labour, it’s called a Chinese gold farmer.
Yeah (or rather, since someone else wrote that, I’m fairly confident that’s what you meant)
The part where this starts to matter is when particular types of labor are undersupplied, or people start getting frustrated that their relatively rare skills are undervalued (i.e. they are getting neither money nor respect nor other things they may want).
As far as I understand many women would like that their husbands is more open about what’s emotionally happening with him and share it with the woman.
The husband might get a benefit from getting listened to his emotional issues but looking at the interaction in terms of supply and demand ignores the real dynamics of the interaction.
Are we talking economics now?
There is supply and demand. If your type of labour is “undersupplied”, this implies there is high demand which means you should get more (money, status, sex, etc.) for your labour. If there is some mechanism that prevents you from getting more, well, the labour will continue to be undersupplied for obvious reasons. The other side of this coin is that if you offer more, the labour should stop being undersupplied.
When people think their skills are “undervalued” this means that the demand for them is lower than they expect (or think it should be). This might well frustrate them, but I don’t see anything wrong here. Unless you want to start manufacturing demand, I’m not sure what do you want to do other than adjust expectations.
Basically, if you want more of a particular kind of behaviour (say, “emotional labour”), reward it more. And if people think their behaviour is insufficiently rewarded, well, maybe no one values it enough to reward it “sufficiently”. It’s all Incentives 101 -- why do you think this is complicated?
This is, in fact, one of the things Project Hufflepuff is aiming to do. The point is that right now we do not have enough emotional labor (this is making people lonely and burnt out), and one of the reasons there is not a greater supply of emotional labor is that people who are good at emotional labor do not feel valued and therefore are not attracted to the community.
Another reason is that people don’t understand why it is important, and so don’t cultivate the skills themselves.
Hey, everyone! We have a visitor here from Econ-101-Land!
Here in what we like to think of as the real world, people don’t appear to be perfect utility-maximizing machines, and as a consequence it is possible for situations to arise where the rewards available for different kinds of work, or work performed by different groups of people, don’t exactly match up with the value received by the people doing the rewarding.
These discrepancies may get ironed out over time—after all, there is benefit to be had from doing so—and one mechanism by which that happens is by the less-rewarded people (or others who take an interest for whatever reason) complaining about it and encouraging others to think about whether they’re handing out rewards in a way that matches the value received. Which is what’s happening here: it’s not a failure to understand Incentives 101, it’s how the Incentives 101 thing happens.
Another thing about the real world: sometimes people here think things are suboptimal even though they are outcomes the market produces. (I know, it’s weird.) So it may happen that (1) a certain amount of some kind of labour is supplied and (2) it receives a certain level of payment, and (3) the amount of labour and the amount of payment are what the operation of the relevant (actual or metaphorical) market products, and yet (4) someone considers that it would be better for the amounts to be different—perhaps (strange though it sounds) even for the amounts to be ones that the market would not be produced. Some people (I have to confess that I am among them) think it may be reasonable to air such concerns, and to consider whether there might be ways to change things so that the market produces a “better” outcome, or even to let the allocation be done by (whisper it not in Gath) a non-market mechanism.
/me looks around. /me is confused. Where are all the spherical cows that should be floating in vacuum?
The point isn’t to talk about fairness (or lack of it). The point is what do you need to do to get the results you want. And the notion that if you reward something you get more of it applies to real-life humans perfectly well.
The issue isn’t whether you achieve a perfect balance—it’s all about where do you need to push to get movement in the desired direction.
Sure, but I don’t see how it’s different from that someone considering that it would be better if he had a pony.
Again, I make no claims about the fairness of outcomes, all I’m pointing out is that the easiest way to get more of something is to pay (not necessarily in money) more for it.
Note that “market” is a synonym for “voluntary exchange of value”. For example, if you want to you can always pay more than the minimum price the seller will accept—no market nanny will come to scold and punish you. In a similar way, “non-market mechanisms” generally imply that the “voluntary” characteristic gets dropped and we get some coercion involved.
Oh yes, indeed it does. But the notion that that’s all that determines what people do doesn’t apply so well. Your comment three upthread from this one seems to take it for granted that what “emotional labour” gets done, and how it’s rewarded, are completely determined by market mechanisms: people will do more if it’s rewarded more, and reward it more if it’s scarcer, and that’s all there is to be said about it. I suggest that that assumption is not obviously correct.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with considering that it would be better if one had a pony, or with saying so. Of course it’s then reasonable to ask how they propose to get one.
Coercion is one kind of non-market mechanism. (And sometimes a very reasonable one. We use it to restrict the supply of murder, for instance; and to collect taxes, which for all the bad press they get in certain quarters I consider an important and valuable mechanism.) There are others. For instance, giving things away. (In some cases the things were first obtained by coercion, but by no means always.) For another instance, appeals to ethics. (Of course appealing to ethics is no guarantee that what you’re trying to make people do is actually a good idea.) For another instance, attempting to modify people’s preferences (which in some cases—“try it, you’ll like it”—may be done for their sake and with effects that benefit them; sometimes, not so much.)
A funny notion. Did you bring it up to compensate for the lack of spherical cows?
Oh, yes, in vacuum. These cows should definitely be in vacuum.
Are you familiar with Popehat? :-D
Yes. A lot of communities, from small (e.g. families) to large (e.g. feudal empires) use non-market mechanisms. However here we are talking about a voluntary association of quite diverse people where no one has much in the way of coercive powers.
Wouldn’t it make things easier if rationalists liked virtue ethics more than consequentialism? :-)
An interesting rhetorical tactic. I suggest you’re being simplistic, and you respond not by showing that you weren’t being, nor by admitting that you were being, but by … well, I’m not sure, actually. I suppose you’re making fun of the idea that anyone might think your earlier comments were simplistic. That’s certainly easier than showing that they weren’t or that they were right to be, and easier on the ego than admitting they were.
Yup. And with the pony trope more generally, which I think Ken got from someone at Crooked Timber, who of course got it from Calvin and Hobbes. But laughing at something is not actually the same thing as demonstrating that it deserves only laughing at.
Gosh, if only there were non-market mechanisms other than coercion. … I’m getting a funny sense of deja vu here; how about you?
Mea culpa, I do that :-)
You do realize this is casual discussion on the ’net, not an academic text intended to be used as a reference with all the Is dotted and Ts crossed?
Did he? I don’t read Crooked Timber regularly, but I don’t remember them being excited about ponies.
Oh, I just see a mulberry bush :-P
I may be misremembering. I thought that was where I first saw the C&H pony cartoon being used in the way we’re talking about, but I could very well be wrong—or of course I could be right about that but wrong to think that was its first influential emergence. Here is a 2004 example, not from CT itself, but from one of its leading contributors.