I think I mostly agree with you, but I think some skills (or the process of learning them) predictably influence one’s values and behaviour in undesirable ways. In case of social grace this influence can be “I have the feeling of small changes in my social capital depending on what I say → I have frequent reinforcement based on my social capital → I value my social capital more → I’m more reluctant to spend my social capital on saying honest things”.
And yes, avoiding this influence is just another skill one can learn, and perfect rationalist definitely would have it, but learning it isn’t free.
I’d think it would be fair if someone bundled “learning to phrase things in a socially graceful way” with “learning to spend the social capital when it’s correct to do so” together when accounting for the cost of learning. But I think this actually points at a stronger case for my argument, which is that the exchange rates can get really, really lopsided. If you don’t know how much you’re spending, your budget can get pretty bad and you make poor choices.
If I imagine an architect who has no idea what steel or drywall costs, I expect them to make unsustainably and needlessly expensive buildings. They might buy one material for a thousand dollars a square foot when another that costs ten dollars per square foot would do almost as well. And that’s in the case where they’re actually at the pareto frontier, which I’m not convinced most people are. Often it seems to me like there’s free grace for the same amount of honesty.
Often it seems to me like there’s free grace for the same amount of honesty.
It’s not free.
One has to think, often in advance of the dinner party or whatever, how to phrase something differently to get more grace for the same amount of honesty.
This analogy will only work if you’re at least somewhat a programmer. I’m going to go with the odds around here and try it anyway, let me know if it misses and I should try something else.
If you see someone about to check in code that’s doing a bubble sort. One has to think how to implement something differently, such as block sort, to get the same amount of sorting in less time.
Except, if you wind up sorting a lot of things, you could practice implementing blocksort. Once you have that up-front practice, thinking through how to properly implement bubble sort isn’t meaningfully easier than properly implementing block sort.
There are cases in programming where there really is a tradeoff! There’s a real reason to do merge sort instead of heap sort sometimes, usually because stability is important. The sentence you quote isn’t “Every time it seems to me like there’s grace grace for the same amount of honesty.” I am very confident I’ve seen people do the social equivalent of bogo sort. Heck, I’ve done it myself. And then I got better at the skill.
Pausing and thinking “should I just implement bubble sort, or should I go look up something that’s better for my use case and implement that instead” is work, and it’s not free.
Now, it might not be extra work the fourth time around (when you can knowingly choose and bang out block sort in your sleep just as easily as you can bubble sort…or say the thing in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers at the dinner party), but it’s work initially, and isn’t free.
I’m not saying the process of becoming skilled is free, and if I’ve accidentally communicated that it’s a mistake I’d like to fix. It would take me a lot of time and effort to learn to speak Chinese fluently.
I am trying to say that once I’ve paid the cost of becoming skilled at social grace, using this particular skill costs much less than people seem to think. If I was already fluent in Chinese (not just barely fluent, but really good at it and comfortable) then saying a sentence in Chinese is free—or rather, it doesn’t cost any meaningful more brain power or breath than saying that sentence in English.
Yeah, but I feel like Screwtape was acknowledging this two comments ago and I’m not sure why you think there’s still more updating to be done here.
(I think his two-comments-ago-comment was saying “learning to implementing bubble sort, and then implementing bubble sort, might cost time, but not implementing bubble sort might mean your servers are taking way longer to answer queries and costing more compute and costing you more money than your hourly rate for the time it took to learn and implement bubble sort)
I think I mostly agree with you, but I think some skills (or the process of learning them) predictably influence one’s values and behaviour in undesirable ways. In case of social grace this influence can be “I have the feeling of small changes in my social capital depending on what I say → I have frequent reinforcement based on my social capital → I value my social capital more → I’m more reluctant to spend my social capital on saying honest things”.
And yes, avoiding this influence is just another skill one can learn, and perfect rationalist definitely would have it, but learning it isn’t free.
I’d think it would be fair if someone bundled “learning to phrase things in a socially graceful way” with “learning to spend the social capital when it’s correct to do so” together when accounting for the cost of learning. But I think this actually points at a stronger case for my argument, which is that the exchange rates can get really, really lopsided. If you don’t know how much you’re spending, your budget can get pretty bad and you make poor choices.
If I imagine an architect who has no idea what steel or drywall costs, I expect them to make unsustainably and needlessly expensive buildings. They might buy one material for a thousand dollars a square foot when another that costs ten dollars per square foot would do almost as well. And that’s in the case where they’re actually at the pareto frontier, which I’m not convinced most people are. Often it seems to me like there’s free grace for the same amount of honesty.
It’s not free.
One has to think, often in advance of the dinner party or whatever, how to phrase something differently to get more grace for the same amount of honesty.
This analogy will only work if you’re at least somewhat a programmer. I’m going to go with the odds around here and try it anyway, let me know if it misses and I should try something else.
If you see someone about to check in code that’s doing a bubble sort. One has to think how to implement something differently, such as block sort, to get the same amount of sorting in less time.
Except, if you wind up sorting a lot of things, you could practice implementing blocksort. Once you have that up-front practice, thinking through how to properly implement bubble sort isn’t meaningfully easier than properly implementing block sort.
There are cases in programming where there really is a tradeoff! There’s a real reason to do merge sort instead of heap sort sometimes, usually because stability is important. The sentence you quote isn’t “Every time it seems to me like there’s grace grace for the same amount of honesty.” I am very confident I’ve seen people do the social equivalent of bogo sort. Heck, I’ve done it myself. And then I got better at the skill.
You’re not contradicting my point.
Pausing and thinking “should I just implement bubble sort, or should I go look up something that’s better for my use case and implement that instead” is work, and it’s not free.
Now, it might not be extra work the fourth time around (when you can knowingly choose and bang out block sort in your sleep just as easily as you can bubble sort…or say the thing in a way that doesn’t ruffle feathers at the dinner party), but it’s work initially, and isn’t free.
I’m not saying the process of becoming skilled is free, and if I’ve accidentally communicated that it’s a mistake I’d like to fix. It would take me a lot of time and effort to learn to speak Chinese fluently.
I am trying to say that once I’ve paid the cost of becoming skilled at social grace, using this particular skill costs much less than people seem to think. If I was already fluent in Chinese (not just barely fluent, but really good at it and comfortable) then saying a sentence in Chinese is free—or rather, it doesn’t cost any meaningful more brain power or breath than saying that sentence in English.
Yeah, but I feel like Screwtape was acknowledging this two comments ago and I’m not sure why you think there’s still more updating to be done here.
(I think his two-comments-ago-comment was saying “learning to implementing bubble sort, and then implementing bubble sort, might cost time, but not implementing bubble sort might mean your servers are taking way longer to answer queries and costing more compute and costing you more money than your hourly rate for the time it took to learn and implement bubble sort)