I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet, then I continued weeping because his foot problem did not actually solve my shoe problem.
-- Noah Brand
I’d prefer if this quote ended with ” … and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget,” but oh wells.
Shoes aren’t just about positional social status, are they? (I mean, the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and a $300 pair of shoes mostly is, but the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and no shoes at all isn’t, is it?)
This. If only people realized that unpleasant facts do not cancel each other out, and pointing out one unpleasant fact in addition to another should never ever make us feel better, because it only leaves us in a worse world than we started out in. Compute the actual utilities. It’s such a common and avoidable error.
I think people just accidentally conflate keeping problems in perspective with the idea that the existence of bigger problems makes the small problems negligible and therefore equivalent to non-problems.
I’ve seen this happen with positive things too; sometimes you won’t mind repeatedly doing small favors for someone and they start acting like you not minding means the favor is equivalent to doing nothing from your perspective, which is frustrating when your small but non-zero effort goes unacknowledged.
It’s sort of like approximating sinθ as 0 for small angles. ^_^
Yep. Most people seem to behave as though the choice between spending $5 and spending $10 is a much bigger deal than the choice between spending $120 and spending $125, but if anything it’s the other way round, because in the latter case you’ll be left with less money. (That heuristic does have a point for acausal reasons analogous to these insofar as you’ll have to make the first kind of choice much more often than the second, but people will still behave the same way in one-off situations.)
Another possible motivation for that heuristic: something that’s a good buy for $5 might well be a bad buy for $10, but something that’s a good buy for $120 is probably still a good buy for $125. If I find that a cheap item’s twice the cost I thought it was, that’s more likely to force me to re-do a utilitarian calculation than if I find an expensive item is 4% pricier than I thought it was.
Yes, but OTOH if I’m about to buy something for $125 it isn’t that unlikely that if I looked more carefully I could found someone else selling the same thing for $120, whereas if I’m about to buy something for $10 it’s somewhat unlikely that anyone else would sell the same thing for $5 (so looking around would most likely be a waste of time), and I’d guess these two effects would more-or-less cancel out.
I can often get a $10 good/service for $5 or less if I’m willing to delay consumption or find another seller (e.g. buying used books, not seeing films as soon as they come out, getting food at a canteen or fast food place instead of a pub or restaurant, using buses instead of trains). I might be atypical.
My guess: The purpose of crying is to make people around you more likely to help you.
So if you don’t have shoes, there is a chance that crying in public will make someone give you money to buy the shoes. But if there is a person without feet nearby, your chances become smaller, because people will redirect their limited altruist budgets to that other person. Your crying becomes less profitable.
… Alright, but… that’s a separate point to make altogether. It’s not a quote about making yourself as likely as possible to get others to help you, and, I would say, it doesn’t have to be; it’s a quote about how other people’s negative experiences influence the way you feel about yours.
But if you look at it other way, then pointing out unpleasant facts about other people’s condition (that don’t apply to us) is equivalent to pointing out good facts about our condition, which should make us feel better, as it leaves us in a better world than we started out in.
That’s exactly the kind of thinking the world needs less of, and the kind that I was trying to warn readers against in the parent comment. Why? Just why would a worse world for someone else make for a better world for you, if that someone is not your mortal enemy? It just makes for a worse world, period.
The point isn’t that you’re taking pleasure in their misfortune, it’s that you’re taking pleasure in your own fortune. “I’m so lucky for having X.” If you don’t do that, then any improvements in your standard of living or situation in general will end up having no impact on your happiness, since you just get used to them and take them for granted and don’t even realize that you would have a million reasons to be happy. And then (in the most extreme case) you’ll end up feeling miserable because of something completely trivial, because you’re ignoring everything that could make you happy and the only things that can have any impact on your state of mind are negative ones.
And then (in the most extreme case) you’ll end up feeling miserable because of something completely trivial, because you’re ignoring everything that could make you happy and the only things that can have any impact on your state of mind are negative ones.
Someone commented above about the instrumental value of crying and feeling bad, and you’re actually pointing out the case where crying and feeling bad fail at being instrumental. Basically, I’m for whatever attitude that gets you to stop crying and start fixing some problem, and if resetting your baseline helps, it’s fair game! It definitely works for me in some cases.
I think this quote is trying to argue against the attitude that problems that are minor compared to other problems don’t deserve any attention at all. That everyone without shoes should just wrench themselves into happiness and go around being grateful, rather than acknowledging that they keep stepping on snails and pointy things, which sucks, and making productive steps toward acquiring shoes.
I remember reading something about plastic surgeons getting kind of looked down upon because they’re not proper heroic doctors that handle real medical problems.
… I think I see where you’re coming from—by realizing we’re not at the far end of the unhappiness scale (since we have a counterexample to that), we should calibrate our feelings about our situation accordingly, yes?
It’s still not the way I view things; I’d like to say I prefer judging these things according to an absolute standard, but it’s likely that that would be less true for me than I want it to be. To the extent that it doesn’t hold true for me, I think it’s better to take into consideration better states as well as worse ones. Saying, “at least I don’t have it as bad as X” just doesn’t feel enough; everybody who doesn’t have it as bad as X could say it, and people in this category can vary widely in their levels of satisfaction, the more so the worse X has it. It’s more complete to say “Yes, but I don’t have it as good as Y either” or, better yet, “I have it better/worse than my need requires”.
by realizing we’re not at the far end of the unhappiness scale (since we have a counterexample to that), we should calibrate our feelings about our situation accordingly, yes?
Yes, yes, but now you are going into far more depth than the original quote. The idea behind the quote seems to have been (at least as I read it): “Be happy that you have feet, having feet is not something you should take for granted.” The quote says nothing more than that. (Well, not quite. The point it makes is not only meant to be reserved for feet specifically, but rather seems to be meant as a comment on anything people take for granted.)
In the example above: the fact that you have no shoes equates to negative utility for you. If you’re a normal human being who is generally well-intended and wants people to have both feet and shoes for those feet, you would feel upset if you saw someone without feet, hence more negative utility. Your negative utility from you having no shoes + negative utility from seeing someone have no feet can only amount to a more negative total score than just the one obtained by considering your own lack of shoes. Even in the case where you’re a complete egoist for whom others’ misfortunes have absolutely no impact on your own personal happiness, if you sum them up again you still end up with the same negative utility from having no shoes. Only if you’re the kind of monster that rejoices in other people’s suffering is it possible for your utility score to raise after seeing someone with no feet. Yet it seems that even people who aren’t complete monsters seem to take comfort in the fact that someone else has it worse than them, and this seems intuitive for most people, and counter-intuitive for others, i.e. me, and the person who made the quote.
(Disclaimer: I haven’t studied utilitarianism formally; probably I’m using more of an everyday definition of the word “utility”, akin to “feel-good-ness” in a broad sense. The way I’ve thought about this problem stems purely from my intuitions.)
Generally speaking, bigger problems tend to be cheaper to solve (i.e. solving them will yield more utilons per dollar); so if there is a painting in a museum that risks being sold, and there are people that risk dying from malaria, the existence of latter is a good indication that worrying about the former isn’t the most effective use of a given amount of resources. (“Concentrate on the high-order bits”—Umesh Vazirani.) But in this particular case, that heuristic doesn’t seem to work (unless I’m overestimating the cost of prosthetics).
I’d prefer if this quote ended with ” … and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget,”
That’s really the entire point of the original quote that this quote is making fun of. The difference between the original and this one is that the author of the second has not updated his baseline expectation that he should have shoes, and that something is wrong if he doesn’t.
Our baseline expectations determine what we consider a “loss”, in the prospect theory sense, so if seeing someone else’s problem helps you reset your baseline, it actually is a way to help you stop weeping and start working on the budget, as it were. What we call “getting perspective” on a situation is basically a name for updating your baseline expectation for how reality “ought to be” at the present moment.
(That isn’t a perfect phrasing, because English doesn’t really have distinct-enough words for different sorts of “oughts” or “shoulds”. The kind I mean is the kind where reality feels awful or crushingly disappointing if it’s not the way it “ought” to be, not the kind where you say that ideally, in a perfect world, things ought to be in thus and such a way, but you don’t experience a bad feeling about it right now. It’s a “near” sort of ought, not a “far” one. Believing the future should be a certain way doesn’t cause this sort of problem, until the future actually arrives.)
What we call “getting perspective” on a situation is basically a name for updating your baseline expectation for how reality “ought to be” at the present moment.
I agree that resetting your baseline is often important if you think that your lack of shoes is a soul-crushing awfulness. This quote is mainly arguing against the attitude that says “you have feet therefore your shoe problem is a non-problem, don’t even bother feeling bad or working on it”. It’s comparatively very minor, but it should be fixed just like any other problem. This quote is arguing against resetting your baseline to the point where minor problems get no attention at all.
This quote is mainly arguing against the attitude that says “you have feet therefore your shoe problem is a non-problem, don’t even bother feeling bad or working on it”.
That may be, but the actual context of the quote it’s arguing with is quite different, on a couple of fronts.
Harold Abbott, the author of the original 1934 couplet (“I had the blues because I had no shoes / Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet”), wrote it to memorialize an encounter with a happy legless man, at a time when Abbott was dead broke and depressed. (Abbott was not actually lacking in shoes, nor the man only lacking in feet, but apparently in those days people took their couplet-writing seriously. ;-) )
Thing is, at the time he encountered the legless man (who smiled and said good morning), Abbott was actually walking to the bank in order to borrow money to go to Kansas City to look for a job. And not only did he not stop walking to the bank after the encounter, he decided to ask for twice as much money as he had originally intended to borrow. He had in fact raised his sights, rather than lowering them.
That is, the full story is not anything like, “other people have worse problems so STFU”, but rather that your attitude is a choice, and there are probably people who have much worse circumstances than you, who nonetheless have a better attitude. Abbott wrote the couplet to put on his bathroom mirror, as an ongoing reminder to have a positive outlook and persist in the face of adversity.
Which is quite a different message than what Noah Brand’s snarky quip would imply.
the full story is not anything like, “other people have worse problems so STFU”
I think the problem that people are having with the quote is that it doesn’t actually contain the full story, and when it is repeated outside that context, the meaning they get from parsing the words is “other people have worse problems so STFU”, and it’s not a good idea to go around repeating it if people are going to predictably lack the context and misinterpret it.
I guess I didn’t quote the original article, and he was saying “I am pointing out this problem that is probably not as big or painful as this other problem, but can we please acknowledge its existence also?” And, as often happens with social issues, he was trying to preempt the inevitable “why would we care? we have it worse!” response.
I definitely agree that attitude is a choice! I wasn’t quite aware of the original quote, but I would put it down as an instrumental rationality quote as well. 8) But it sounds like his shoelessness was a symptom of bigger/different problems?
I consider Noah Brand’s quote a rationality quote because it’s a reminder that problems require real solutions. Changing your attitude to be positive is useful, but changing your attitude to accept that something that sucks will continue to suck indefinitely is not the answer.
it sounds like his shoelessness was a symptom of bigger/different problems?
Yes, his business (a grocery store) had just failed, taking his entire life savings with it. (And the story doesn’t actually say he was shoeless, anyway, just that the rhyme was something he posted on his mirror as a reminder of the encounter.)
Nope, the thing I’m talking about is closer to what the Buddhists would call an “attachment”, and some Buddhist-influenced writers call an “addiction”. (Others would call it a “desire”, but IMO this is inaccurate: one can desire something without being attached to actually getting it.)
-- Noah Brand
I’d prefer if this quote ended with ” … and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget,” but oh wells.
″...And then I remembered status is positional, felt superior to the footless man, and stopped weeping.”
Shoes aren’t just about positional social status, are they? (I mean, the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and a $300 pair of shoes mostly is, but the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and no shoes at all isn’t, is it?)
This. If only people realized that unpleasant facts do not cancel each other out, and pointing out one unpleasant fact in addition to another should never ever make us feel better, because it only leaves us in a worse world than we started out in. Compute the actual utilities. It’s such a common and avoidable error.
I think people just accidentally conflate keeping problems in perspective with the idea that the existence of bigger problems makes the small problems negligible and therefore equivalent to non-problems.
I’ve seen this happen with positive things too; sometimes you won’t mind repeatedly doing small favors for someone and they start acting like you not minding means the favor is equivalent to doing nothing from your perspective, which is frustrating when your small but non-zero effort goes unacknowledged.
It’s sort of like approximating sinθ as 0 for small angles. ^_^
Yep. Most people seem to behave as though the choice between spending $5 and spending $10 is a much bigger deal than the choice between spending $120 and spending $125, but if anything it’s the other way round, because in the latter case you’ll be left with less money. (That heuristic does have a point for acausal reasons analogous to these insofar as you’ll have to make the first kind of choice much more often than the second, but people will still behave the same way in one-off situations.)
Another possible motivation for that heuristic: something that’s a good buy for $5 might well be a bad buy for $10, but something that’s a good buy for $120 is probably still a good buy for $125. If I find that a cheap item’s twice the cost I thought it was, that’s more likely to force me to re-do a utilitarian calculation than if I find an expensive item is 4% pricier than I thought it was.
Yes, but OTOH if I’m about to buy something for $125 it isn’t that unlikely that if I looked more carefully I could found someone else selling the same thing for $120, whereas if I’m about to buy something for $10 it’s somewhat unlikely that anyone else would sell the same thing for $5 (so looking around would most likely be a waste of time), and I’d guess these two effects would more-or-less cancel out.
I can often get a $10 good/service for $5 or less if I’m willing to delay consumption or find another seller (e.g. buying used books, not seeing films as soon as they come out, getting food at a canteen or fast food place instead of a pub or restaurant, using buses instead of trains). I might be atypical.
I think both your comment and the quote are forgetting the instrumental purpose of crying and/or feeling bad.
I can’t say I see your point. Mind explaining?
My guess: The purpose of crying is to make people around you more likely to help you.
So if you don’t have shoes, there is a chance that crying in public will make someone give you money to buy the shoes. But if there is a person without feet nearby, your chances become smaller, because people will redirect their limited altruist budgets to that other person. Your crying becomes less profitable.
… Alright, but… that’s a separate point to make altogether. It’s not a quote about making yourself as likely as possible to get others to help you, and, I would say, it doesn’t have to be; it’s a quote about how other people’s negative experiences influence the way you feel about yours.
Unfortunately, I’ve met a lot of people who forget the instrumental purposes of crying and/or feeling bad. =[
But if you look at it other way, then pointing out unpleasant facts about other people’s condition (that don’t apply to us) is equivalent to pointing out good facts about our condition, which should make us feel better, as it leaves us in a better world than we started out in.
That’s exactly the kind of thinking the world needs less of, and the kind that I was trying to warn readers against in the parent comment. Why? Just why would a worse world for someone else make for a better world for you, if that someone is not your mortal enemy? It just makes for a worse world, period.
The point isn’t that you’re taking pleasure in their misfortune, it’s that you’re taking pleasure in your own fortune. “I’m so lucky for having X.” If you don’t do that, then any improvements in your standard of living or situation in general will end up having no impact on your happiness, since you just get used to them and take them for granted and don’t even realize that you would have a million reasons to be happy. And then (in the most extreme case) you’ll end up feeling miserable because of something completely trivial, because you’re ignoring everything that could make you happy and the only things that can have any impact on your state of mind are negative ones.
Someone commented above about the instrumental value of crying and feeling bad, and you’re actually pointing out the case where crying and feeling bad fail at being instrumental. Basically, I’m for whatever attitude that gets you to stop crying and start fixing some problem, and if resetting your baseline helps, it’s fair game! It definitely works for me in some cases.
I think this quote is trying to argue against the attitude that problems that are minor compared to other problems don’t deserve any attention at all. That everyone without shoes should just wrench themselves into happiness and go around being grateful, rather than acknowledging that they keep stepping on snails and pointy things, which sucks, and making productive steps toward acquiring shoes.
I remember reading something about plastic surgeons getting kind of looked down upon because they’re not proper heroic doctors that handle real medical problems.
… I think I see where you’re coming from—by realizing we’re not at the far end of the unhappiness scale (since we have a counterexample to that), we should calibrate our feelings about our situation accordingly, yes?
It’s still not the way I view things; I’d like to say I prefer judging these things according to an absolute standard, but it’s likely that that would be less true for me than I want it to be. To the extent that it doesn’t hold true for me, I think it’s better to take into consideration better states as well as worse ones. Saying, “at least I don’t have it as bad as X” just doesn’t feel enough; everybody who doesn’t have it as bad as X could say it, and people in this category can vary widely in their levels of satisfaction, the more so the worse X has it. It’s more complete to say “Yes, but I don’t have it as good as Y either” or, better yet, “I have it better/worse than my need requires”.
Yes, pretty much.
Yes, yes, but now you are going into far more depth than the original quote. The idea behind the quote seems to have been (at least as I read it): “Be happy that you have feet, having feet is not something you should take for granted.” The quote says nothing more than that. (Well, not quite. The point it makes is not only meant to be reserved for feet specifically, but rather seems to be meant as a comment on anything people take for granted.)
What’s an actual utility?
In the example above: the fact that you have no shoes equates to negative utility for you. If you’re a normal human being who is generally well-intended and wants people to have both feet and shoes for those feet, you would feel upset if you saw someone without feet, hence more negative utility. Your negative utility from you having no shoes + negative utility from seeing someone have no feet can only amount to a more negative total score than just the one obtained by considering your own lack of shoes. Even in the case where you’re a complete egoist for whom others’ misfortunes have absolutely no impact on your own personal happiness, if you sum them up again you still end up with the same negative utility from having no shoes. Only if you’re the kind of monster that rejoices in other people’s suffering is it possible for your utility score to raise after seeing someone with no feet. Yet it seems that even people who aren’t complete monsters seem to take comfort in the fact that someone else has it worse than them, and this seems intuitive for most people, and counter-intuitive for others, i.e. me, and the person who made the quote.
(Disclaimer: I haven’t studied utilitarianism formally; probably I’m using more of an everyday definition of the word “utility”, akin to “feel-good-ness” in a broad sense. The way I’ve thought about this problem stems purely from my intuitions.)
Generally speaking, bigger problems tend to be cheaper to solve (i.e. solving them will yield more utilons per dollar); so if there is a painting in a museum that risks being sold, and there are people that risk dying from malaria, the existence of latter is a good indication that worrying about the former isn’t the most effective use of a given amount of resources. (“Concentrate on the high-order bits”—Umesh Vazirani.) But in this particular case, that heuristic doesn’t seem to work (unless I’m overestimating the cost of prosthetics).
That’s really the entire point of the original quote that this quote is making fun of. The difference between the original and this one is that the author of the second has not updated his baseline expectation that he should have shoes, and that something is wrong if he doesn’t.
Our baseline expectations determine what we consider a “loss”, in the prospect theory sense, so if seeing someone else’s problem helps you reset your baseline, it actually is a way to help you stop weeping and start working on the budget, as it were. What we call “getting perspective” on a situation is basically a name for updating your baseline expectation for how reality “ought to be” at the present moment.
(That isn’t a perfect phrasing, because English doesn’t really have distinct-enough words for different sorts of “oughts” or “shoulds”. The kind I mean is the kind where reality feels awful or crushingly disappointing if it’s not the way it “ought” to be, not the kind where you say that ideally, in a perfect world, things ought to be in thus and such a way, but you don’t experience a bad feeling about it right now. It’s a “near” sort of ought, not a “far” one. Believing the future should be a certain way doesn’t cause this sort of problem, until the future actually arrives.)
I agree that resetting your baseline is often important if you think that your lack of shoes is a soul-crushing awfulness. This quote is mainly arguing against the attitude that says “you have feet therefore your shoe problem is a non-problem, don’t even bother feeling bad or working on it”. It’s comparatively very minor, but it should be fixed just like any other problem. This quote is arguing against resetting your baseline to the point where minor problems get no attention at all.
That may be, but the actual context of the quote it’s arguing with is quite different, on a couple of fronts.
Harold Abbott, the author of the original 1934 couplet (“I had the blues because I had no shoes / Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet”), wrote it to memorialize an encounter with a happy legless man, at a time when Abbott was dead broke and depressed. (Abbott was not actually lacking in shoes, nor the man only lacking in feet, but apparently in those days people took their couplet-writing seriously. ;-) )
Thing is, at the time he encountered the legless man (who smiled and said good morning), Abbott was actually walking to the bank in order to borrow money to go to Kansas City to look for a job. And not only did he not stop walking to the bank after the encounter, he decided to ask for twice as much money as he had originally intended to borrow. He had in fact raised his sights, rather than lowering them.
That is, the full story is not anything like, “other people have worse problems so STFU”, but rather that your attitude is a choice, and there are probably people who have much worse circumstances than you, who nonetheless have a better attitude. Abbott wrote the couplet to put on his bathroom mirror, as an ongoing reminder to have a positive outlook and persist in the face of adversity.
Which is quite a different message than what Noah Brand’s snarky quip would imply.
I think the problem that people are having with the quote is that it doesn’t actually contain the full story, and when it is repeated outside that context, the meaning they get from parsing the words is “other people have worse problems so STFU”, and it’s not a good idea to go around repeating it if people are going to predictably lack the context and misinterpret it.
I guess I didn’t quote the original article, and he was saying “I am pointing out this problem that is probably not as big or painful as this other problem, but can we please acknowledge its existence also?” And, as often happens with social issues, he was trying to preempt the inevitable “why would we care? we have it worse!” response.
I definitely agree that attitude is a choice! I wasn’t quite aware of the original quote, but I would put it down as an instrumental rationality quote as well. 8) But it sounds like his shoelessness was a symptom of bigger/different problems?
I consider Noah Brand’s quote a rationality quote because it’s a reminder that problems require real solutions. Changing your attitude to be positive is useful, but changing your attitude to accept that something that sucks will continue to suck indefinitely is not the answer.
Yes, his business (a grocery store) had just failed, taking his entire life savings with it. (And the story doesn’t actually say he was shoeless, anyway, just that the rhyme was something he posted on his mirror as a reminder of the encounter.)
“need”
Nope, the thing I’m talking about is closer to what the Buddhists would call an “attachment”, and some Buddhist-influenced writers call an “addiction”. (Others would call it a “desire”, but IMO this is inaccurate: one can desire something without being attached to actually getting it.)