Meteuphoric

Time has a monetary value to you. That is, money and time can be traded for one another in lots of circumstances, and there are prices that you are willing to take and prices you are not. Hopefully, other things equal, the prices you are willing to take are higher than the ones you aren’t.

Sometimes people object to the claim that time has a value in terms of money, but I think this tends to be a misunderstanding, or a statement about the sacredness of time and mundanity of money. I also suspect that the feeling that time is sacred and money is in some sense not prompts people who believe that money and time can be compared in value in principle to object to actually doing it much. There are further reasons you might object to this too. For instance, perhaps having an explicit value on your time makes you feel stressed, or cold calculations make you feel impersonal, or accurate appraisals of your worth per hour make you feel arrogant or worthless.

Still I think it is good to try to be aware of the value of your time. If you have an item, and you trade it all day long, and you don’t put a consistent value on it, you will be making bad trades all over the place. Imagine if you accepted wages on a day to day basis while refusing to pay any attention to what they were. Firstly, you could do a lot better by paying attention and accepting only the higher ones. But secondly, you would quickly be a target for exploitation, and only be offered the lowest wages.

I don’t think people usually do this badly in their everyday trading off of time and money, because they do have some idea of the trades they are making, just not a clear one. But many other things go into the sense of how much you should pay to buy time in different circumstances, so I think the prices people take vary a lot when they should not. For instance, a person who would not accept a wage below $30/h will waste an hour in an airport because they don’t have internet, instead of buying wifi for $5, because they feel this is overpriced. Or they will search for ten minutes to find a place that sells drinks for $3 instead of $4, because $4 is a lot for a drink. Or they will stand in line for twenty minutes to get the surprisingly cheap and delicious lunch, and won’t think of it as being an expensive lunch now.

I agree that time is very valuable. I just disagree that you should avoid putting values on valuable things. What you don’t explicitly value, you squander.

It can be hard to think of ways that you are trading off money and time in practice. In response to a request for these, below is a list. They are intended to indicate trade-offs which might be helpful if you want to spend more money at the expense of time or vice versa in a given circumstance. Some are  written as if to suggest that you should move in one direction or the other especially – remember that you can generally move in the opposite direction also.

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I like Scott’s post on what LessWrong has learned in its lifetime. In general I approve of looking back at your past misunderstandings and errors, and trying to figure out what you did wrong. This is often very hard, because it’s hard to remember or imagine what absurd thoughts (or absences of thought) could have produced your past misunderstandings. I think this is especially because nonsensical confusions and oversights tend to be less well-formed, and thus less organizable or memorable than e.g. coherent statements are.

In the spirit of understanding past errors, here is a list of errors which I think spring from a common meta-error. Some are mentioned in Scott’s post, some were mine, some are others’ (especially those who are a combination of smart and naive I think), a few are hypothetical:

• Because I believe agent-like behavior is obviously better than randomish reactions, I assume I am an agent (debunked!).
• Because I think it is good to be sad about the third world, and not good to be sad about not having enough vitamin B, I assume the former is why I am sad.
• Because I explicitly feel that racism is bad, I am presumably not racist.
• Because my mind contains a line of reasoning that suggests I should not update much against my own capabilities because I am female, presumably I do no such thing.
• Because I have formulated this argument that it is optimal for me to think about X-risks, I assume I am motivated to (also debunked on LW).
• Because I follow and endorse arguments against moral realism, and infer that on reflection I prefer to be a consequentialist, I assume I don’t have any strong moral feelings about incest.
• Because I have received sufficient evidence that I should believe Y, I presumably believe Y now.
• I don’t believe Y, and the only reason I endorse to not believe things is that you haven’t got enough evidence for them, therefore I must not have enough evidence to believe Y.
• Because I don’t understand the social role of Christmas, I presume I don’t enjoy it (note that this is a terrible failing of the outside view: none of those people merrily opening their presents understands the social role either).
• Because I don’t endorse the social role of drinking, I assume I don’t enjoy it.
• Because signaling sounds bad to me, I assume I don’t do it, or at least not as much as others.
• Because I know the cost of standing up is small (it must be, it’s so brief and painless!), this cannot be a substantial obstacle to going for a run (debunked!).
• I know good motives are better than bad motives, so presumably I’m motivated by good motives (unlike the bad people, who are presumably confused over whether good things are the things you should choose)
• I have determined that polyamory is a good idea and babies are a bad idea, therefore I don’t expect to feel jealousy or any inclination to procreate, in my relationships.

In general, I think the meta problem is failing to distinguish between endorsing a mental characteristic and having that characteristic. Not erroneously believing that the two are closely related, but actually just failing to notice there are two things that might not be the same.

It seems harder to make the same kind of errors with non-mental characteristics. Somehow it’s more obvious to people that saying you shouldn’t smoke is not the same as not smoking.

With mental characteristics however, you don’t know how your brain works much at all, and it’s not obvious what your beliefs and feelings are exactly. And your brain does produce explicit endorsements, so perhaps it is easy to identify those with the mental characteristics that the endorsements are closely related to. Note that explicitly recognizing this meta-error is different from it being integrated into your understanding.

An interview with the people of Cool Earth, a charity I investigated and ultimately recommended as a relatively good one while visiting GWWC last summer.

Rob and Federico of GWWC have made a nice summary of metacharities, which might be useful to those of you interested in cause prioritization as a cause. For future reference, I’ve put in my online collection of useful things (just for useful things which need help with their web presence).

I’ve also put up a few ‘structured cases’ for various claims there. These are intended to be well organized collections of arguments and considerations regarding a particular question, such as ‘should I invest in opening US borders?’. The claims of interest are mostly about how resources can be used to make the world better. The arguments are in progress, and probably not in particularly good formats, nor complete. However I talk to people about these often, so it is good to have them online to point to.

I’ve also put up some puzzles and other things.

Information and ideas percolate through society in many forms: via research papers, media publications, schools, advocacy campaigns, and perhaps most ubiquitously, private conversations.

Private conversations fulfill purposes other than information processing and transfer, so they cannot be expected to perfectly fulfill such roles, or even to fulfil them particularly well. They convey implicit information about the speakers and their qualities, they manifest social maneuvering, they embody humor and other good feelings, and they make a good circumstance for enjoying company more generally.

The information related roles that conversation can play most obviously include straightforwardly communicating information, and – in a more argumentative fashion – collaboratively figuring out what is true. Even if conversations are usually for other things as well, given that they are a major part of the social information  and dispersal system, one might wonder if they could do these jobs better when those roles are important. For instance, if you partake in ‘work’ conversations with the intention of productively progressing toward specific goals, should you be doing anything other than following your natural conversation instincts?

If you wanted to fulfill these information roles with conversations, here are some ways they seem to fall short in general:

1. They are rarely recorded or shared usefully. Which is bad because it means they must be repeated anew by many different groups of people, not to mention exactly the same people.
2. Relatedly, conversations seem to hardly build on one another over time. If I think of a good counterargument to your point, this won’t be available to any of the gazillion others having the same argument in the near future, because neither of us will do anything that makes it so, and both of us will probably forget all but the gist of the discussion by tomorrow. I posit that it is very hard to have a counterargument to a counterargument to a counterargument to an argument widely known, even when the argument and the counterargument are often repeated. Except when participants have a history or perhaps a shared subculture, each discussion basically starts the topic anew. A given discussion rarely gets through many considerations, and doesn’t leave the considerations it gets through in a state to be built upon by other conversations.
3. Discussions are often structured poorly for analysis, though perhaps ok for information transfer. It is natural for a discussion to take a fairly linear form, because only one sentence can be said at a time. But topics being discussed often don’t fit well in this form. A given statement has many potential counterarguments, and lots of possible pieces of supporting evidence, or vantage points from which to analyze it. The same is true of each of those arguments or supports. So a person may make a statement, then another person may offer a  criticism, and so on for a few levels, at which point one of the people will ‘lose the argument’ because he has no retort. But that corner of the tree was not necessarily critically important to the truth of the initial claim. If at the first level a different argument had been pursued, or different evidence had been offered, a largely unrelated path would have been taken, and someone else may have had the final say. If the parties do not remember the rest of the structure of their discussion, it is hard to go back to to a sensible juncture and hash out a different supporting claim. Usually they will just move on to something else that the last bit reminded them of, and in the future vaguely remember who won the argument, without further value being created. 
4. Relatedly, it is often unclear to the participants in a discussion what the overall structure of a discussion is, or how the parts relate to one another on even a small scale. For instance, which parts are important to carrying the point, and which parts are watertight. I find that when I write out an argument at length, in a structured way, I notice gaps that weren’t salient informally. And structured arguments look as if they help students reason more clearly.
5. Disagreement interacts badly with the social signaling purposes of conversation, as it tends to be taken as an aggressive move except when done skillfully. It’s not clear to me whether this is a fundamental problem with collaboratively critiquing ideas or a accident of the social norms we have, both for critique and for attacking people.
6. Similarly, allocating time in conversations tends to interact badly with social signaling. The person with the best point to listen to next is unlikely to always be the one who should talk next according to fairness, kindness, status, or volume. There have been some attempts to improve this.

This is not near exhaustive. Feel free to suggest more.

I am told that people have often tried to improve conversational norms, but I only know of a few such efforts. These are innovations such as randomized alarms while talking, hand gestures during seminars, argument mapping, and anonymous text conversation while everyone is in the room. I’d like to see a better survey of such attempts, but so far have not. Hopefully I just haven’t guessed the right keywords. Pointers would be appreciated.

For figuring out what is true, it seems many of these problems are resolved by writing a more permanent, public, well structured, outline of a topic of debate, then adding to it as you find new arguments. I think various people are in favor of such a thing, but I haven’t seen it done much (again, pointers appreciated). I have tried this a bit, with Paul Christiano, with the hope that it will either help somewhat, or allow us to figure out the problems with it.

Here are a few examples in progress:

1. The case for Cool Earth (linked before from my climate research)
2. US open borders advocacy
3. Animal activism

So far we don’t seem to have found any irrecoverable problems. However I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the merits of such interventions. Especially if you think this sort of thing is a terrible aid to discussion for the purpose of figuring things out.