I read the whole article and didn’t really get a click, but this version of it somehow clicked for me:
I am not saying that effort should never painful. I am also not saying that many useful interventions are painful. I am specifically saying that when you measure effort in units of pain this systematically leads to really bad places (and also that a lot of people are doing this).
The specific thing I realized was that this might be almost THE SAME as the reasoning error where people think that “objects which cost large amounts” probably have “high quality and usability”.
There are various ways to make it so that all the really extra specially good objects in a class of objects tend to have the highest prices, and equivalently for the low end of the product range, leading to a pretty clean correlation between the price (which is a cost, which is bad) and the value (which is the usability, which is good).
This sort of correlation can arise in a reasonably efficient market with heterogeneously capitalized people so that rich ones have money to waste on durability or style or whatever. Or it could just be that there are people with variance in their instrumental utility for the objects (perhaps based on aiming at different goals of greater or less import)? I think the correlation always requires the pre-existence of agents engaged in means/ends reasoning who accept the cost because the value is worth it, and so each purchase is something such agents are reasonably sure will create consumer surplus for them.
There’s a related joke about economists knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
The click I had was that maybe in the same way that some people conflate “price” and “value” into something like “worth”, there might also be people who conflate “painful effort” and “creative success” into something like “trying”, and such people might get more “agentic surplus” by making very goddamn sure that they never optimize for pain directly, due to a motivational/conceptual conflation of “pain” with “trying that leads to success”.
I read the whole article and didn’t really get a click, but this version of it somehow clicked for me:
The specific thing I realized was that this might be almost THE SAME as the reasoning error where people think that “objects which cost large amounts” probably have “high quality and usability”.
There are various ways to make it so that all the really extra specially good objects in a class of objects tend to have the highest prices, and equivalently for the low end of the product range, leading to a pretty clean correlation between the price (which is a cost, which is bad) and the value (which is the usability, which is good).
This sort of correlation can arise in a reasonably efficient market with heterogeneously capitalized people so that rich ones have money to waste on durability or style or whatever. Or it could just be that there are people with variance in their instrumental utility for the objects (perhaps based on aiming at different goals of greater or less import)? I think the correlation always requires the pre-existence of agents engaged in means/ends reasoning who accept the cost because the value is worth it, and so each purchase is something such agents are reasonably sure will create consumer surplus for them.
There’s a related joke about economists knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
The click I had was that maybe in the same way that some people conflate “price” and “value” into something like “worth”, there might also be people who conflate “painful effort” and “creative success” into something like “trying”, and such people might get more “agentic surplus” by making very goddamn sure that they never optimize for pain directly, due to a motivational/conceptual conflation of “pain” with “trying that leads to success”.