Strongly seconded. Keeping my phone out of reach, out of sight, and on silent is both trivially easy and amazingly effective at reducing distraction. I think that all of those three things (sight, sound, reach) are necessary for me, and I suspect others as well.
Aaron Bergman
I’m frequently surprised that my parents will spend effort on something or ask another person for help without Googling; both are well-educated and comfortable using the internet, but it just isn’t their first instinct like it is with me. Perhaps there’s a correlation with age, where older people weren’t trained to use Google as a first-line troubleshooting device.
Good points. I certainly don’t know how any individual conservative would justify any of their positions. The Fijian example is admittedly a little silly to work with, but based on my experience of contemporary American politics I would bet that the strong majority of Fijian conservatives would not cite Chesterton’s Fence-esque reasons for their position. True, the “thoughtful” or intellectual elite conservatives might, but these individuals are often deemed “thoughtful” and survive in academia or other elite liberal institutions because their style of thinking is at least a little more appealing to their more numerous liberal colleagues.
All very valid points. To be sure, my model is only valid when there is good reason to expect competence and motivation to correlate and when firing is relatively difficult. My only (possible?) disagreement is that I think “lawyers with no serious option at better than $61K/yr” wouldn’t generally become public defenders unless they also happen to be very motivated by the position itself, because other law positions paying $61k have a lower workload, stress, etc.
It’s true that government jobs tend to be more secure, but I don’t think this fully explains the low salaries of public defenders (though this is just an intuition).
Hmm, I don’t entirely see it that way. I think in the vast majority of cases, the talent-attracting effect of more money overpowers the benefits offered by competence signalling. That’s why I think public defenders should be paid more both as a matter of justice and because it would increase average performance on net
Ordered for my family as a direct results of reading this post—thank you!
I don’t think rule utilitarianism, as generally understood, is the same as expected consequences. Perhaps in practice, their guidance generally coincides, but the former is fundamentally about social coordination to produce the best consequences and the latter is not. Hypothetically, you can imagine a situation in which someone is nearly certain that breaking one of these rules, just this once, would improve the world. Rule consequentialism says they should not break the rule, and expected consequences says they should.
Thanks for your insight. Yes, the “we simplify this for undergrads” thing seems most plausible to me. I guess my concern is that in this particular case, the simplification from “expected consequences matter” to “consequences matter” might be doing more harm than good.
I was thinking the third bullet, though the question of perverse incentives needs fleshing out, which I briefly alluded to at the end of the post:
“Expected consequences”, for example, leaves under-theorized when you should seek out new, relevant information to improve your forecast about some action’s consequences.
My best guess is that this isn’t actually an issue, because you have a moral duty to seek out that information, as you know a priori that seeking out such info is net-positive in itself.
Thank you! Should have known someone would have beat me to it.
Basically agree with this suggestion: broader metrics are more likely to be unbiased over time. Even the electric grid example, though, isn’t ideal because we can imagine a future point where going from $0.0001 to $0.000000001 per kilowatt-hour, for example, just isn’t relevant.
Total factor productivity and GDP per capita are even better, agreed.
While a cop-out, my best guess is that a mixture of qualitative historical assessments (for example, asking historians, entrepreneurs, and scientists to rank decades by degree of progress) and using a variety of direct and indirect objective metrics (ex. patent rates, total factor productivity, cost of energy, life expectancy) is the best option. Any single or small group of metrics seems bound to be biased in one way or another. Unfortunately, it’s hard to figure out how to weight and compare all of these things.
I meant objective in the sense that the metric itself is objective, not that it is necessarily a good indicator of innovation. Yes, you’re right. I do like Cowen and Southewood’s method of only looking at patents registered all of the U.S., Japan, and E.U.
Fair point, but you’d have to think that the tendencies of the patent officers changed over time in order to foreclose that as a good metric.
This is a good point. Could also be that discussing only points that might impact oneself seems more credible and less dependent on empathy, even if one really does care about others directly.
Thanks very much. Just fixed that.
Yes, you’re correct. As others have correctly noted, there is no unambiguous way of determining which effects are “direct” and which are not. However, suppose decriminalization does decrease drug use. My argument emphasizes that we would need to consider the reduction in time spent enjoying drugs as a downside to decriminalization (though I doubt this would outweigh the benefits associated with lower incarceration rates). It seems to me that this point would frequently be neglected.
Great post! Is ego depletion just another way of conceptualizing rising marginal cost of effort? Like, maybe it is a fact of human psychology that the second hour of work is more difficult and unpleasant than the first.
It’s not that individual journalists don’t trust Wikipedia, but that they know they can’t publish an article in which a key fact comes directly from Wikipedia without any sort of corroboration. I assume, anyway. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Yes this is an excellent point; books increase the fidelity of idea transmission because they place something like a bound on how much an idea can be misinterpreted, since one can always appeal to the author’s own words (much more than a blog post or Tweet).
Regarding “Magic Pills,” I would note that Wellbutrin is know as the first-line antidepressant that tends to aid in focus, energy, and productivity. SSRIs (which wellbutrin is not) have a reputation for sedation and sometimes an emotional numbing effect, though this very well may be what one needs or desires to deal with depression or anxiety. Additionally, Wellbutrin is “lower risk” than SSRIs in the sense that uncomfortable withdrawal effects are quite rare. The source for this is research for a personal decision regarding whether to try antidepressnts in the past. All this said, there seems to be very large variation in personal satisfaction with different antidepressants, and there are surely some people who would indeed benefit from SSRIs, not only in terms of depression itself but also productivity as a secondary effect.