The original question is based on the observation that a lot of people, including me, including rationalists, do things like spending an hour of time to save $5-10 when their time is presumably worth a lot more than that, and in contexts where burnout or dips in productivity wouldn’t explain it. So my question is whether or not this is something that makes sense.
I feel moderately strongly that it doesn’t actually make sense, and that what Eliezer eludes to in Money: The Unit of Caring is what explains the phenomena.
Many people, when they see something that they think is worth doing, would like to volunteer a few hours of spare time, or maybe mail in a five-year-old laptop and some canned goods, or walk in a march somewhere, but at any rate, not spend money.
Believe me, I understand the feeling. Every time I spend money I feel like I’m losing hit points. That’s the problem with having a unified quantity describing your net worth: Seeing that number go down is not a pleasant feeling, even though it has to fluctuate in the ordinary course of your existence. There ought to be a fun-theoretic principle against it.
Agreed if we assume this premise is true, but I don’t think it is often true.
The original question is based on the observation that a lot of people, including me, including rationalists, do things like spending an hour of time to save $5-10 when their time is presumably worth a lot more than that, and in contexts where burnout or dips in productivity wouldn’t explain it. So my question is whether or not this is something that makes sense.
I feel moderately strongly that it doesn’t actually make sense, and that what Eliezer eludes to in Money: The Unit of Caring is what explains the phenomena.