Good post on the whole, but I downvoted for the “affiliate link” rickroll. I was genuinely curious, and if it was a real product that seemed good enough to buy I figured I’d make sure they’d tracked my click to get you a payout as a favor to show appreciation for the recommendation. Is that really the kind of behavior you’d like to punish for a laugh?
Or, more to the point, what if they don’t compensate at all and just have the money to afford it? Who cares!
We as social animals care if someone else is getting more, because we’re wired to want to do what they’re doing. In a flock of chickens, when one of them finds something delicious, all the others immediately want some too. Imagine how this impacts the group’s survival in the wild, vs if each individual ignored the others’ discoveries.
Money decouples earning behavior from spending behavior in a way that those ancient survival-relevant artifacts of behavior habits don’t follow well, of course. Just saying it makes sense to me that we have a “that member of my group has what I want so I am going to try to do what they do” reaction wired in at a pretty fundamental level.
With the mattress topper you’d describe buying, I’d say congratulations—amortize the amount you’d spend to climate control your whole room to the target temperatures over the expected life of the item, and it’s probably a pretty efficient way to address the consideration at hand.
With the services, I think it’s also worth considering framing them as education—buying the opportunity to watch experts do a thing, so you can learn to do the thing better yourself. Ultimately I think the role of many experts—therapists, sports trainers, home organizers, whatever—has a large element of education/tutoring/training: offering you the opportunity to inherit the relevant portions of their skillset in a more efficient manner than going out and studying the whole skillset from scratch.
but I downvoted for the “affiliate link” rickroll. I was genuinely curious, and if it was a real product that seemed good enough to buy I figured I’d make sure they’d tracked my click to get you a payout as a favor to show appreciation for the recommendation. Is that really the kind of behavior you’d like to punish for a laugh?
I appreciate you being upfront about this. Maybe you missed it, but I included an actual link earlier on at “A nearly $3,000 mattress cover (cools/heats bed)”.
I don’t have an issue with affiliate links in general for the reasons you began to describe. In practice though I think they’re usually kinda sketchy. An example of this is when someone writes a blog post or creates a video where it seems like they’re intrinsically motivated to talk about the topic, and then midway through it you realize that they have something to sell you. I was kinda making fun of that here with the rickroll.
Not that I think it’s a great joke or anything. I think it’s pretty marginal. But I personally enjoy that sort of joking around, don’t see a downside in general (perhaps there is one here with the possibility of the reader having missed the first link to the actual product), and am ok with whatever the consequences of the jokes are.
We as social animals care if someone else is getting more, because we’re wired to want to do what they’re doing. In a flock of chickens, when one of them finds something delicious, all the others immediately want some too. Imagine how this impacts the group’s survival in the wild, vs if each individual ignored the others’ discoveries.
I agree that in the ancestral environment there was probably a good reason for this. But in our modern environment, I’m not really seeing it. Maybe in some uncommon situations it’s justified, but not frequently.
With the services, I think it’s also worth considering framing them as education—buying the opportunity to watch experts do a thing, so you can learn to do the thing better yourself. Ultimately I think the role of many experts—therapists, sports trainers, home organizers, whatever—has a large element of education/tutoring/training: offering you the opportunity to inherit the relevant portions of their skillset in a more efficient manner than going out and studying the whole skillset from scratch.
That’s an interesting point. It sounds plausible in general and something worth keeping in mind. But for the examples I discussed:
Even if I got to be as fast and skilled as the house cleaner, I think it’d still be worth paying the house cleaner as a way of trading my money for time.
Massage therapy seems a little awkward to perform on oneself, even if you had the skills. I also think I remember hearing that like tickling, it doesn’t have the same effect when you do it to yourself.
I’ve read a lot about psychotherapy including various “be your own therapist” sort of books and I feel pretty confident that it unlikely to work for me.
I think it is definitely worth doing with the professional organizer. But at the same time, I don’t think I should hesitate to re-hire them if I’m feeling even a little bit stuck since the amount of value I get from reduced clutter is very large compared to the cost.
Good post on the whole, but I downvoted for the “affiliate link” rickroll. I was genuinely curious, and if it was a real product that seemed good enough to buy I figured I’d make sure they’d tracked my click to get you a payout as a favor to show appreciation for the recommendation. Is that really the kind of behavior you’d like to punish for a laugh?
We as social animals care if someone else is getting more, because we’re wired to want to do what they’re doing. In a flock of chickens, when one of them finds something delicious, all the others immediately want some too. Imagine how this impacts the group’s survival in the wild, vs if each individual ignored the others’ discoveries.
Money decouples earning behavior from spending behavior in a way that those ancient survival-relevant artifacts of behavior habits don’t follow well, of course. Just saying it makes sense to me that we have a “that member of my group has what I want so I am going to try to do what they do” reaction wired in at a pretty fundamental level.
With the mattress topper you’d describe buying, I’d say congratulations—amortize the amount you’d spend to climate control your whole room to the target temperatures over the expected life of the item, and it’s probably a pretty efficient way to address the consideration at hand.
With the services, I think it’s also worth considering framing them as education—buying the opportunity to watch experts do a thing, so you can learn to do the thing better yourself. Ultimately I think the role of many experts—therapists, sports trainers, home organizers, whatever—has a large element of education/tutoring/training: offering you the opportunity to inherit the relevant portions of their skillset in a more efficient manner than going out and studying the whole skillset from scratch.
I appreciate you being upfront about this. Maybe you missed it, but I included an actual link earlier on at “A nearly $3,000 mattress cover (cools/heats bed)”.
I don’t have an issue with affiliate links in general for the reasons you began to describe. In practice though I think they’re usually kinda sketchy. An example of this is when someone writes a blog post or creates a video where it seems like they’re intrinsically motivated to talk about the topic, and then midway through it you realize that they have something to sell you. I was kinda making fun of that here with the rickroll.
Not that I think it’s a great joke or anything. I think it’s pretty marginal. But I personally enjoy that sort of joking around, don’t see a downside in general (perhaps there is one here with the possibility of the reader having missed the first link to the actual product), and am ok with whatever the consequences of the jokes are.
I agree that in the ancestral environment there was probably a good reason for this. But in our modern environment, I’m not really seeing it. Maybe in some uncommon situations it’s justified, but not frequently.
That’s an interesting point. It sounds plausible in general and something worth keeping in mind. But for the examples I discussed:
Even if I got to be as fast and skilled as the house cleaner, I think it’d still be worth paying the house cleaner as a way of trading my money for time.
Massage therapy seems a little awkward to perform on oneself, even if you had the skills. I also think I remember hearing that like tickling, it doesn’t have the same effect when you do it to yourself.
I’ve read a lot about psychotherapy including various “be your own therapist” sort of books and I feel pretty confident that it unlikely to work for me.
I think it is definitely worth doing with the professional organizer. But at the same time, I don’t think I should hesitate to re-hire them if I’m feeling even a little bit stuck since the amount of value I get from reduced clutter is very large compared to the cost.
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You know the rules, and so do I