I am happy to say more after having had time to reflect.
I do like the idea of spare resources quite a bit, but it doesn’t encompass properly the class of things you can bounded on. I also think that defining via the negative is actually important here. A person who must wear a suit and tie, or the color blue, lacks Slack in this way, and one who is not so forced has it, but it is odd to think of this as spare resources. In many cases the way you retain Slack is to avoid incentive structures that impose constraints rather than having resources. Perhaps this is simply a case of not knowing what you’ve got till its gone, but I think that getting there would prove confusing.
Another intuition that points against spare resources is that you can substitute the ability to acquire resources for resources. Slack can often come simply from the ability to trade, including trade among things not literally traded (e.g. trading time for money for emotional stability etc etc) or the ability to produce. Again, you can call all such things “resources” or even “spare resources” but that would imply a pretty non-useful and non-intuitive definition of spare and resources, that wouldn’t help explain the concept very well.
That all does suggest freedom might be a good word but I think it’s not right. Certainly Slack implies freedom and freedom requires Slack, but freedom is a very overloaded (and loaded) word that has a lot of meanings that would be misleading. My model of how people think about concepts says that if we use the word freedom in this way, people will pattern match heavily on their current affectations and models of freedom, and won’t grok the concept we’re pointing towards with Slack as easily. I also think there’d be an instinct to think things of the class “oh,that’s just...” and that’s a curiosity stopper.
I don’t understand how your definition is different from freedom.
I’m using resource in a very broad sense in that there is something that can be modelled as roughly on a linear scale and that there is some level beneath where bad things happen (often this is 0, but not always). So emotional stability can be thrown into a linear scale in very high level models.
I am happy to say more after having had time to reflect.
I do like the idea of spare resources quite a bit, but it doesn’t encompass properly the class of things you can bounded on. I also think that defining via the negative is actually important here. A person who must wear a suit and tie, or the color blue, lacks Slack in this way, and one who is not so forced has it, but it is odd to think of this as spare resources. In many cases the way you retain Slack is to avoid incentive structures that impose constraints rather than having resources. Perhaps this is simply a case of not knowing what you’ve got till its gone, but I think that getting there would prove confusing.
Another intuition that points against spare resources is that you can substitute the ability to acquire resources for resources. Slack can often come simply from the ability to trade, including trade among things not literally traded (e.g. trading time for money for emotional stability etc etc) or the ability to produce. Again, you can call all such things “resources” or even “spare resources” but that would imply a pretty non-useful and non-intuitive definition of spare and resources, that wouldn’t help explain the concept very well.
That all does suggest freedom might be a good word but I think it’s not right. Certainly Slack implies freedom and freedom requires Slack, but freedom is a very overloaded (and loaded) word that has a lot of meanings that would be misleading. My model of how people think about concepts says that if we use the word freedom in this way, people will pattern match heavily on their current affectations and models of freedom, and won’t grok the concept we’re pointing towards with Slack as easily. I also think there’d be an instinct to think things of the class “oh, that’s just...” and that’s a curiosity stopper.
“I also think there’d be an instinct to think things of the class “oh, that’s just...” and that’s a curiosity stopper.”
This is an important idea (and an important argument in favor of jargon proliferation) that I don’t recall having seen presented before explicitly.
I don’t understand how your definition is different from freedom.
I’m using resource in a very broad sense in that there is something that can be modelled as roughly on a linear scale and that there is some level beneath where bad things happen (often this is 0, but not always). So emotional stability can be thrown into a linear scale in very high level models.