There’s a lot of attention paid these days to accommodating the personal needs of students. For example, a student with PTSD may need at least one light on in the classroom at all times. Schools are starting to create mechanisms by which a student with this need can have it met more easily.
Our ability to do this depends on a lot of prior work. The mental health community had to establish PTSD as a diagnosis; the school had to create a bureaucratic mechanism to normalize accommodations of this kind; and the student had to spend a significant amount of time figuring out what accommodations alleviated their PTSD symptoms and how to get them addressed through the school’s bureaucracy.
This points in a direction of something like “transitions research,” an attempt to identify and economically address the specific barriers that skew individuals toward immediate modest-productivity strategies and away from long-term high-productivity strategies.
Imagine if there was a well-known “diagnosis” of “status-loss anxiety,” in which a person who’s achieved some professional success notices themselves avoiding situations that would be likely to enhance their growth, yet come with a threat of loss of status. It’s like the depressed person who resists mental health unseling because it implies there’s something wrong with them. Being able to identify that precise reaction, label it, raise awareness of it, and find means and messages to address it would be helpful to overcome a barrier to mental health treatment.
In economics jargon, what’s going on here is not so much the sunk cost fallacy as a combination of aging, opportunity cost and diminishing returns. Learning takes time, aging us, and this means we have less time to profit off a new long-term investment in skill-building. Increased skill raises the opportunity cost of learning new skills. Diminishing returns means that, if we learn a skill that increases our profit from A + B to A + 2B, that this is less intrinsically valuable to us than when we increased our profit from A to A + B. All these forces together, along with status considerations, coordination issues, and misaligned incentives, conspire to work against learning and investment.
I don’t know if “loss of freedom” is quite the most apt frame, though it’s not inappropriate. I think the central point is that success and pressure go hand in hand. The more successful you are, the more others want to make use of your skillset, and the greater the stakes are for doing your job right. You become more aware of the problems you could solve, if you only had more time and energy, if you had fewer other obligations or one more skill. And you may become anxious about placing yourself in situations where you look incompetent, lest others make the assumption that your lack of skill in the new area somehow reflects a lack of competence in your previous area of expertise—a perversion of the idea of Gell-Mann amnesia.
As overwhelming as these problems can be, I like the idea that a simple personal practice of beginner’s mind can take us a long way towards overcoming these barriers. Just because the problem is big and complex doesn’t mean that the solution can’t be small and simple.
There’s a lot of attention paid these days to accommodating the personal needs of students. For example, a student with PTSD may need at least one light on in the classroom at all times. Schools are starting to create mechanisms by which a student with this need can have it met more easily.
Our ability to do this depends on a lot of prior work. The mental health community had to establish PTSD as a diagnosis; the school had to create a bureaucratic mechanism to normalize accommodations of this kind; and the student had to spend a significant amount of time figuring out what accommodations alleviated their PTSD symptoms and how to get them addressed through the school’s bureaucracy.
This points in a direction of something like “transitions research,” an attempt to identify and economically address the specific barriers that skew individuals toward immediate modest-productivity strategies and away from long-term high-productivity strategies.
Imagine if there was a well-known “diagnosis” of “status-loss anxiety,” in which a person who’s achieved some professional success notices themselves avoiding situations that would be likely to enhance their growth, yet come with a threat of loss of status. It’s like the depressed person who resists mental health unseling because it implies there’s something wrong with them. Being able to identify that precise reaction, label it, raise awareness of it, and find means and messages to address it would be helpful to overcome a barrier to mental health treatment.
In economics jargon, what’s going on here is not so much the sunk cost fallacy as a combination of aging, opportunity cost and diminishing returns. Learning takes time, aging us, and this means we have less time to profit off a new long-term investment in skill-building. Increased skill raises the opportunity cost of learning new skills. Diminishing returns means that, if we learn a skill that increases our profit from A + B to A + 2B, that this is less intrinsically valuable to us than when we increased our profit from A to A + B. All these forces together, along with status considerations, coordination issues, and misaligned incentives, conspire to work against learning and investment.
I don’t know if “loss of freedom” is quite the most apt frame, though it’s not inappropriate. I think the central point is that success and pressure go hand in hand. The more successful you are, the more others want to make use of your skillset, and the greater the stakes are for doing your job right. You become more aware of the problems you could solve, if you only had more time and energy, if you had fewer other obligations or one more skill. And you may become anxious about placing yourself in situations where you look incompetent, lest others make the assumption that your lack of skill in the new area somehow reflects a lack of competence in your previous area of expertise—a perversion of the idea of Gell-Mann amnesia.
As overwhelming as these problems can be, I like the idea that a simple personal practice of beginner’s mind can take us a long way towards overcoming these barriers. Just because the problem is big and complex doesn’t mean that the solution can’t be small and simple.