Hrm, I hadn’t realised how muddled my discussion post sounded until you brought these angles up. I think when I wrote, “the ‘nothing’ option is never available” I was trying to express a semantic stop sign as you’ve mentioned—I should have said something like, in considering my options in day to day life, it seems like I often assume that I know what the costs/rewards of the nothing option are without getting specific about them or thinking about the possibility in as much detail as I might think about other options because I seem to have a cached thought about it for most situations. And its often something I’ve tried before, like “not taking out a mortgage”, but it might be something I haven’t tried before, or shouldn’t try, like, “freezing in a crosswalk” when a vehicle does something unexpected. Not that traffic is a good place for sitting there drawing up a spreadsheet with all your decisions and figuring out the right one, of course, but ‘freezing in place’ seems like a “do nothing” response to me too, I guess. Hrm, yes. When I first moved to Portland, OR from Vancouver, WA, I remember losing a lot of money to homeless people in a very short period of time without really thinking about it until I looked at my bank statement and thought about where I’d been spending it. It was really surprising, because handing out a dollar or two, or helping someone who claimed to be in need, seemed like pretty standard behavior as a child. My dad still makes a point of handing out money to homeless people when he sees them begging at intersections. I’ve cut back to buying street roots (the homeless’s local newspaper) when I see vendors if I haven’t bought the latest issue, which seems to keep me from blowing everything, or as you’ve pointed out, interacting with a potentially dangerously confused person.
I guess “nothing” to me seems like its a bit subtle in that information from instinct (the play dead routine) and experience get muddled together kind of seamlessly. And it is often reliable enough that I don’t get eaten by tigers, or assaulted by homeless people anyways, on a regular basis.
I’ll have to think more about all this. Thank you.
Thanks for the thanks! Sometimes I feel bad when a comment I think is particularly helpful sits at zero and comments I think were cheap applause buttons are voted up. Most people like sugar and few people like broccoli, and this felt like a broccoli comment that maybe(?) I shouldn’t have bothered with… until you responded :-)
The “freezing in place in traffic” as a “do nothing” response was interesting. I would not have lumped that with “not taking out a mortgage”, but I can see how some people do. I think there might be something important there in terms of agency and cooperation/competition dynamics. It jogged a memory...
When I was growing up we had rabbits that ran free in the front yard, and they would sometimes sit at the bottom of our narrow driveway and freak out when you came home, running away from the car (up the driveway) as though it was a predator. It was particularly tricky because they seemed to have this instinct for running “away” along one vector (which was the same one the car took because it was trapped going up the driveway, so it reproduced “being chased” conditions to a first approximation) and then at the last second they’d swerve to “dodge the snapping teeth” of the car/predator. But if the you tried to dodge a rabbit at the last second based on the rabbit’s initial trajectory, you and they would swerve in the same direction. If the rabbits had run away totally naively it would have served them better, because car drivers are not actually predators. Which meant that the right thing for a driver to do was to sort of half-heartedly follow through “as though to hit the rabbit” so they could dodge a simple form of the thing their instincts expected to happen.
Hrm, I hadn’t realised how muddled my discussion post sounded until you brought these angles up. I think when I wrote, “the ‘nothing’ option is never available” I was trying to express a semantic stop sign as you’ve mentioned—I should have said something like, in considering my options in day to day life, it seems like I often assume that I know what the costs/rewards of the nothing option are without getting specific about them or thinking about the possibility in as much detail as I might think about other options because I seem to have a cached thought about it for most situations. And its often something I’ve tried before, like “not taking out a mortgage”, but it might be something I haven’t tried before, or shouldn’t try, like, “freezing in a crosswalk” when a vehicle does something unexpected. Not that traffic is a good place for sitting there drawing up a spreadsheet with all your decisions and figuring out the right one, of course, but ‘freezing in place’ seems like a “do nothing” response to me too, I guess.
Hrm, yes. When I first moved to Portland, OR from Vancouver, WA, I remember losing a lot of money to homeless people in a very short period of time without really thinking about it until I looked at my bank statement and thought about where I’d been spending it. It was really surprising, because handing out a dollar or two, or helping someone who claimed to be in need, seemed like pretty standard behavior as a child. My dad still makes a point of handing out money to homeless people when he sees them begging at intersections. I’ve cut back to buying street roots (the homeless’s local newspaper) when I see vendors if I haven’t bought the latest issue, which seems to keep me from blowing everything, or as you’ve pointed out, interacting with a potentially dangerously confused person. I guess “nothing” to me seems like its a bit subtle in that information from instinct (the play dead routine) and experience get muddled together kind of seamlessly. And it is often reliable enough that I don’t get eaten by tigers, or assaulted by homeless people anyways, on a regular basis. I’ll have to think more about all this. Thank you.
Thanks for the thanks! Sometimes I feel bad when a comment I think is particularly helpful sits at zero and comments I think were cheap applause buttons are voted up. Most people like sugar and few people like broccoli, and this felt like a broccoli comment that maybe(?) I shouldn’t have bothered with… until you responded :-)
The “freezing in place in traffic” as a “do nothing” response was interesting. I would not have lumped that with “not taking out a mortgage”, but I can see how some people do. I think there might be something important there in terms of agency and cooperation/competition dynamics. It jogged a memory...
When I was growing up we had rabbits that ran free in the front yard, and they would sometimes sit at the bottom of our narrow driveway and freak out when you came home, running away from the car (up the driveway) as though it was a predator. It was particularly tricky because they seemed to have this instinct for running “away” along one vector (which was the same one the car took because it was trapped going up the driveway, so it reproduced “being chased” conditions to a first approximation) and then at the last second they’d swerve to “dodge the snapping teeth” of the car/predator. But if the you tried to dodge a rabbit at the last second based on the rabbit’s initial trajectory, you and they would swerve in the same direction. If the rabbits had run away totally naively it would have served them better, because car drivers are not actually predators. Which meant that the right thing for a driver to do was to sort of half-heartedly follow through “as though to hit the rabbit” so they could dodge a simple form of the thing their instincts expected to happen.