There’s an important piece missing from the articles analysis.
As humans we are inherently social in nature.
We delegate a lot of our reasoning to the wider social group around us. This is more energy efficient.
The article asks ‘why do many people go through long training programs “to make money” without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time’.
We do long training programs (eg, college degrees) mostly because they are socially esteemed. This social esteem serves as a proxy to their worth, and its typically information that has a lower personal cost to obtain, than going and looking at salary surveys.
The reason we do so little systematic testing for ourselves is that we have trusted our wider social grouping to do it for us. I don’t find a rational argument about the bungie jump mechanism nearly as compelling evidence of safety, as I do my talking with enthusiastic friend who has done it 20 times.
If I was to learn about my cars braking mechanism in sufficient detail to convince myself of why it worked, I would never go anywhere. Instead, I see others who I trust driving the car, and ‘delegate’ to them.
This is simply a heuristic. It doesn’t always work. Just because all my friends smoke doesn’t mean smoking isn’t dangerous (the social influence here is well documented).
But the vast majority of the time its a much more cost/information efficient way of doing things.
Any analysis of our behaviour in such circumstances must factor in our social aspects, and the fact we don’t act as individuals or reach decisions in a vacuum.
We delegate a lot of our reasoning to the wider social group around us.… the vast majority of the time its a much more cost/information efficient way of doing things.
This strikes me as half right. Specifically: Yes, we often use social indicators to take the place of personal reasoning. And, yes, these indicators are better than nothing. But given the rapid (relative to the EEA) of change in e.g. what jobs pay well, what we know about how to avoid accidents, what skills can boost your productivity (e.g., typing on computers is now important, and, thus, it’s important to learn more than two-fingered typing), etc., and the fact that social recommendations update fairly slowly, it seems that most on this site can do far better by adding some internet research and conscious thought to standard socially recommended productivity heuristics.
There’s an important piece missing from the articles analysis.
As humans we are inherently social in nature.
We delegate a lot of our reasoning to the wider social group around us. This is more energy efficient.
The article asks ‘why do many people go through long training programs “to make money” without spending a few hours doing salary comparisons ahead of time’. We do long training programs (eg, college degrees) mostly because they are socially esteemed. This social esteem serves as a proxy to their worth, and its typically information that has a lower personal cost to obtain, than going and looking at salary surveys.
The reason we do so little systematic testing for ourselves is that we have trusted our wider social grouping to do it for us. I don’t find a rational argument about the bungie jump mechanism nearly as compelling evidence of safety, as I do my talking with enthusiastic friend who has done it 20 times. If I was to learn about my cars braking mechanism in sufficient detail to convince myself of why it worked, I would never go anywhere. Instead, I see others who I trust driving the car, and ‘delegate’ to them.
This is simply a heuristic. It doesn’t always work. Just because all my friends smoke doesn’t mean smoking isn’t dangerous (the social influence here is well documented). But the vast majority of the time its a much more cost/information efficient way of doing things.
Any analysis of our behaviour in such circumstances must factor in our social aspects, and the fact we don’t act as individuals or reach decisions in a vacuum.
This strikes me as half right. Specifically: Yes, we often use social indicators to take the place of personal reasoning. And, yes, these indicators are better than nothing. But given the rapid (relative to the EEA) of change in e.g. what jobs pay well, what we know about how to avoid accidents, what skills can boost your productivity (e.g., typing on computers is now important, and, thus, it’s important to learn more than two-fingered typing), etc., and the fact that social recommendations update fairly slowly, it seems that most on this site can do far better by adding some internet research and conscious thought to standard socially recommended productivity heuristics.