Von Neumann was actually a fairly reflective fellow who knew about, and indeed helped generalize, utility functions. The great achievements of von Neumann were not achieved by some very specialized hypernerd who spent all his fluid intelligence on crystallizing math and science and engineering alone, and so never developed any opinions about politics or started thinking about whether or not he had a utility function.
Uh. I don’t know about that.
Von Neuman seemed to me to be very much not making rational tradeoffs of the sort that one would if they were conceptualizing themselves as an an agent with a utility function.
From a short post I wrote, a few years ago, after reading a bit about the man:
For one thing, at the end of his life, he was terrified of dying. But throughout the course of his life he made many reckless choices with his health.
He ate gluttonously and became fatter and fatter over the course of his life. (One friend remarked that he “could count anything but calories.”)
Furthermore, he seemed to regularly risk his life when driving.
Von Neuman was an aggressive and apparently reckless driver. He supposedly totaled his car every year or so. An intersection in Princeton was nicknamed “Von Neumann corner” for all the auto accidents he had there. records of accidents and speeding arrests are preserved in his papers. [The book goes on to list a number of such accidents.] (pg. 25)
(Amusingly, Von Neumann’s reckless driving seems due, not to drinking and driving, but to singing and driving. “He would sway back and forth, turning the steering wheel in time with the music.”)
Some of your examples don’t prove anything, e.g., eating gluttonously is a legitimate tradeoff if you have a certain metabolism and care more about advancing science as a life goal in years where your brain still works well. About the driving, I guess it depends on how reckless it was. It’s probably rare for people to die in inner-city driving accidents, especially if you make sure to not mess around at intersections. Judging by the part about singing, it seems possible he was just having fun and could afford to buy new cars?
But are you suggesting that the reckless driving was well-considered expected utility maximizing?
I guess I can see that if fatal accidents are rare, I guess, but I don’t think that was the case?
“Activities that have a small, but non-negligible chance of death or permanent injury are not worth the immediate short-term thrill”, seems like a textbook case of a conclusion one would draw from considering expected utility theory in practice, in one’s life.
At minimum, it seems like there ought to be pareto-improvements that are just as or close to as fun, but which entail a lot less risk?
I guess I can see that if fatal accidents are rare, I guess, but I don’t think that was the case?
I agree that if driving incurs non-trivial risks of lasting damage, that’s indicative that the person isn’t trying very seriously to optimize some ambitious long-term goal.
At minimum, it seems like there ought to be pareto-improvements that are just as or close to as fun, but which entail a lot less risk?
This reasoning makes me think your model lacks gears about what it’s like to live with certain types of psychologies. Making pareto improvements for your habits is itself a task to be prioritized. Depending on what else you have going on in life and how difficult it is to you to replace one habit with a different one, it’s totally possible that for some period, it’s not rational for you to focus on the habit change.
Basically, because often the best way to optimize your utility comes from applying your strengths to solve a certain bottleneck under time pressure, the observation “this person engages in suboptimal-seeming behavior some of the time” provides very little predictive evidence.
In fact, if you showed me someone who never engaged in such suboptimal behavior, I’d be tempted to wonder if they’re maybe not optimizing hard enough in that one area that matters more than everything else they could do.
That said, it is a bit hard to empathize with “driving recklessly while singing” as a hard-to-change behavior. It doesn’t sound like something particularly compulsive, except maybe if the impulse to sing came from exuberant happiness due to amphetamine use. But who knows. Von Neumann for sure had an unusual brain and maybe he often had random overwhelming feelings of euphoria.
I think a mistake of trying to hyperoptimize a healthy lifestyle or micromanage productivity hacks to the point of spending a lot of their attention on new productivity hacks, is probably the bigger mistake than getting overweight as long as the overweight person puts as much of their brainpower as possible into actually irreplaceable cognitive achievements. And long-term health is only important if you care a lot about living for very long.
Uh. I don’t know about that.
Von Neuman seemed to me to be very much not making rational tradeoffs of the sort that one would if they were conceptualizing themselves as an an agent with a utility function.
From a short post I wrote, a few years ago, after reading a bit about the man:
Some of your examples don’t prove anything, e.g., eating gluttonously is a legitimate tradeoff if you have a certain metabolism and care more about advancing science as a life goal in years where your brain still works well. About the driving, I guess it depends on how reckless it was. It’s probably rare for people to die in inner-city driving accidents, especially if you make sure to not mess around at intersections. Judging by the part about singing, it seems possible he was just having fun and could afford to buy new cars?
I agree that they aren’t conclusive.
But are you suggesting that the reckless driving was well-considered expected utility maximizing?
I guess I can see that if fatal accidents are rare, I guess, but I don’t think that was the case?
“Activities that have a small, but non-negligible chance of death or permanent injury are not worth the immediate short-term thrill”, seems like a textbook case of a conclusion one would draw from considering expected utility theory in practice, in one’s life.
At minimum, it seems like there ought to be pareto-improvements that are just as or close to as fun, but which entail a lot less risk?
I agree that if driving incurs non-trivial risks of lasting damage, that’s indicative that the person isn’t trying very seriously to optimize some ambitious long-term goal.
This reasoning makes me think your model lacks gears about what it’s like to live with certain types of psychologies. Making pareto improvements for your habits is itself a task to be prioritized. Depending on what else you have going on in life and how difficult it is to you to replace one habit with a different one, it’s totally possible that for some period, it’s not rational for you to focus on the habit change.
Basically, because often the best way to optimize your utility comes from applying your strengths to solve a certain bottleneck under time pressure, the observation “this person engages in suboptimal-seeming behavior some of the time” provides very little predictive evidence.
In fact, if you showed me someone who never engaged in such suboptimal behavior, I’d be tempted to wonder if they’re maybe not optimizing hard enough in that one area that matters more than everything else they could do.
That said, it is a bit hard to empathize with “driving recklessly while singing” as a hard-to-change behavior. It doesn’t sound like something particularly compulsive, except maybe if the impulse to sing came from exuberant happiness due to amphetamine use. But who knows. Von Neumann for sure had an unusual brain and maybe he often had random overwhelming feelings of euphoria.
I think a mistake of trying to hyperoptimize a healthy lifestyle or micromanage productivity hacks to the point of spending a lot of their attention on new productivity hacks, is probably the bigger mistake than getting overweight as long as the overweight person puts as much of their brainpower as possible into actually irreplaceable cognitive achievements. And long-term health is only important if you care a lot about living for very long.