Although I’m unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I’ve often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.
This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health—extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]
Yvain’s claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that’s a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.
a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.
b) If all med students get more studying done, it’s far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students’ knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]
What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I’m almost certainly generalizing from the example of me.
If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.
In some professions saying that you “love you work” is a signal of a good employee. So I would expect some dishonesty in self-reporting.
How could we ask the question to reduce this signalling? I imagine only silly questions like this:
Imagine that for some external reasons your workplace must be closed for two weeks. During those two weeks you will receive your normal salary, and those two weeks will not be taken from your holidays. How does this message make you feel? a) awesome! b) mildly happy c) neutral d) mildly sad e) depressed
On the second thought, is this question really silly, or does it show our true preferences? And the silliness is merely a reflection of dissonance between our professed values and real values.
This doesn’t quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn’t that work is unpleasant; it’s that there’s a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is “imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as “you step into the office, then step out”.
It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.
You are right about the opportunity costs. The work is actually not bad—it’s the idea of all the things I could have done in the same time that’s driving me crazy.
Your question is better (although it does not contain learning during the job, which is important too).
I think it genuinely shows our preferences. Of course, I also would be fairly neutral about this (and would probably seek other work for those two weeks).
Although I’m unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I’ve often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.
This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health—extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]
Yvain’s claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that’s a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.
a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.
b) If all med students get more studying done, it’s far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students’ knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]
What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I’m almost certainly generalizing from the example of me. If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.
In some professions saying that you “love you work” is a signal of a good employee. So I would expect some dishonesty in self-reporting.
How could we ask the question to reduce this signalling? I imagine only silly questions like this:
Imagine that for some external reasons your workplace must be closed for two weeks. During those two weeks you will receive your normal salary, and those two weeks will not be taken from your holidays. How does this message make you feel?
a) awesome!
b) mildly happy
c) neutral
d) mildly sad
e) depressed
On the second thought, is this question really silly, or does it show our true preferences? And the silliness is merely a reflection of dissonance between our professed values and real values.
This doesn’t quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn’t that work is unpleasant; it’s that there’s a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is “imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as “you step into the office, then step out”.
It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.
You are right about the opportunity costs. The work is actually not bad—it’s the idea of all the things I could have done in the same time that’s driving me crazy.
Your question is better (although it does not contain learning during the job, which is important too).
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I think it genuinely shows our preferences. Of course, I also would be fairly neutral about this (and would probably seek other work for those two weeks).
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Doctors don’t take courses in modafinil, or anything, so I’m not sure what you expect them to base their advice on besides the FDA prescribing guides like http://www.erowid.org/smarts/modafinil/modafinil_provigil_prescribing_info1.pdf
A pharmacist might be a better bet.
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