= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on How To Have Things Correctly - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (218)
You can also avoid the permanency of owning things by renting/leasing/borrowing/returning for refund.
EDIT: I place zero value on the fact of ownership. That is, I derive no satisfaction from knowing that something (or someone) belongs to me. I am given to understand that this is rather unusual. Of course, I value having hassle-free access to things when I need them, and often the only way to ensure this is by owning them, but when there is a choice, I'd rather not, even if it costs a bit more. Unfortunately, the society around me is not set up for this, except for really expensive items, like a place to live or a means of transportation. I wonder if other places in the world are more access- rather than ownership-friendly.
I can't seem to find it in my quotes file, but I recall once reading an interesting few paragraphs by someone explaining that capitalism allows them to "own" nearly everything they want in the world. In some sense I am the owner of a 16 inch telescope, a jet ski, a table with a gourmet meal at the best restaurant in the city, etc., regardless of whether I've gone out and bought those things and had them assigned to be my property, because at any time I could go out and buy them if the whim struck hard enough. The world is full of warehouses and store shelves and other buildings whose sole purpose is to store stuff-that-I-can-have-whenever-I-want-it. Even if the transaction costs are still high enough that I may end up foregoing some of those luxuries, just having the option is itself a kind of wealth.
And in a way this bounty of materialism leads one to be anti-materialistic. If I own all these wonderful things, why bother with the inconvenience of storing them in my own house until/unless I'm ready to really experience them?
Fortunately for you, my use of spaced repetition means I know exactly what interesting paragraphs you are talking about: http://www.metafilter.com/65284/Collect-em-all#1862024
This is indeed the exact quote I have saved. Apparently a good memory is even better than grep or a search engine, at least when the latter have nothing more to go on than keywords from a bad memory.
I'd love to hear more details on how you recalled it, though - do you have an Anki deck or something filled with particularly interesting quotes including that one? Or do you believe that your use of spaced repetition has improved your memory even for data that you're not specifically using spaced repetition to remember?
Mnemosyne, yeah.
Alternately, having all those options might also be a form of poverty, or at least disutility.
I suspect that a personification of Capitalism would find the notion of this inflationary use of "own" rather offensive. It has rather strong ideas about what "ownership" means. The personification of Free Market may also be a tad disgruntled that Capitalism is being given the credit for its work when it believes it should be respected as an individual. Neither of those is (strictly) dependent on the other.
That's an awesome perspective. I need to remember this.
You seem to conflate owning with sharing. The original meaning is "mine and no one else's". Lots of people derive pleasure from having something others don't, be at an art collection, an antique car or even a partner.
No, it's conflating ownership with potential-ownership. The idea is, I can store apples at the grocery store or in my pantry - there is basically no chance that I will go to pick up my apples at the grocery store and they won't be available for sale, so it's just trivial that I haven't spent the money on them yet.
It seems pretty silly to conflate the two when ownership implies that it is no longer an opportunity cost to acquire "your" possession, as the cost has already been paid. If you have a million dollars, you potentially own any of all the million dollar possessions on the market, but only one of them at most. Owning all of them would be very different.
Subjectively, though, I for one get that feeling. It's like "within my reach" and "owned by me" were equivalent to my brain on some level. And, when, once I've made my purchase, I find my money diminished by that same amount, I find that I feel cheated, somehow. Like accumulated money should work like an access clearance threshold, rather than a reservoir of resources across space and time. Which is economically absurd...
The comment I was replying to said
None of those qualify as "potential-ownership", they are a shared-access resource.
Is there something about "potential-ownership" that gives it a different meaning to "an item that I could potentially buy and thereby become the owner of"?
I'm confused. How are jet skis relevantly different from apples?
From the context, roystgnr meant renting jet skis for a day, rather than owning and maintaining them. You can hardly do that with apples.
No, really.
(emphasis added)
Buy, not rent.
I interpreted it as buying a service, not an object, but it's up to roystgnr to clarify.
My recollection and interpretation was buying/objects not renting/services. Picking an object like a jet ski that is probably more often rented than bought was probably a misleading choice of example, sorry.
Anyway, it's not up to me to clarify anymore - gwern found the original quote, so you can debate the interpretation of that rather than of my half-recollected paraphrasing. :-)
This suddenly strikes me as a very important issue of study.
I would be extremely relieved to find a large body of experimental evidence that would confirm the hypothesis that all those people enjoy this for other reasons, such as status display or signalling, rather than actually having part of their brain directly place actual value on being the sole owner and user of something without notions of availability or other logistical problems of sharing stuff, i.e. as a terminal value in some sense.
Strikes me that a lot of communal living would have this. Even just living with a roommate, she "owns" some of our kitchenware, and I "own" other portions, but we're both 100% free to use it.
Quotes on "own" because we'd probably work out who-gets-what based on practical considerations if it ever mattered (for example, I would have no use for most of our baking supplies if I moved out, since I only bake socially)
I think I might be the same way. It almost seems weird to be any other way.
If you want to become this way yourself, here's a possible way to do it. Next time you're moving, as you're packing your stuff, decide, for each item, whether you ought to keep, sell, or trash it. (Keep in mind that most of the things you own you could buy anew pretty easily, so selling something amounts to converting it to a more convenient form of wealth (currency) for a certain overhead cost.) I used to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance when I did this, because I'd find myself wanting to hold on to stuff that had negligible market value and no obvious use cases. Then I made the connection with the endowment effect, realized I was irrationally overvaluing the stuff just because it was mine, and became way more willing to throw stuff out.
Or read this essay. Or watch this video.
If you place positive value on the fact of ownership the endowment effect isn't irrational.
But it is worth reexamining this particular terminal value and see if it is indeed terminal. If there is an answer to "I value owning things because..." beyond "because the mere fact of owning things gives me warm fuzzies", then maybe there is a better way to get those warm fuzzies.
OK, I'm not an expert on the endowment effect. But from what I recall, behavioral economists have found that if you randomly give a gift to half of a classroom, then offer everyone the option to sell their gift if they have one or buy one if they don't, very few transactions take place. This is considered odd because you'd expect naively that everyone values the gift according to a certain dollar amount before any gifting happens, and you'd expect to see lots of cases where people could gain by selling/buying a gift.
It sounds like maybe the way you're using the word "rational", anything that anyone does can be considered "rational" just by postulating the right utility function. I don't think that approximates the standard usage of the word.
If you prefer to place value on the fact of ownership, I recommend you avoid reading the GP, as it was directed at people who wanted to hack themselves to no longer place value on the fact of ownership. If you prefer not to, knowing that economists consider your impulses odd and not very useful (in a certain technical sense) might help.
No, they actually have to have that utility function. That my actions would be rational if I did value something doesn't mean they actually are. However, in the case we're discussing it seemed you were stipulating just those people - people who value possessions qua possessions.
I'd say it's usually that there's a small, immediate negative effect of losing the object, but a larger-over-time positive effect of not living with clutter. I suspect most people run in to up-front-costs issues, and also don't realize how much of a negative effect clutter can have ("it takes an extra 2-3 seconds to find any utensil while cooking; therefor cooking is less fun; therefor I cook less often" style chains seem fairly common)
I'm not saying that most people do value ownership. I'm simply pointing out that JohnMaxwellIV's advice was aimed specifically at a group which did.
I think that for some people, and some things, it may be rational to value things with 'negligible market value' just because they are theirs. Examples are knicknacks that you bought as souvenirs of an enjoyable trip, gifts that you don't use but like looking at once in a while, photos, etc... I don't personally like having souvenirs lying around, and gifts that I don't use are annoying, but I know other people who seem to get a lot of emotional comfort from physical objects.
Sure. One good test might be: If you lost this item and miraculously found it again at a flea market, would you buy it back? If you would not, that suggests the item is worth less than its market price to you, and you might want to sell it for its market price (assuming that's not too difficult).
I'd say valuing something as a memento and valuing it just-for-ownership are different traits. I routinely gift away my dishes when I move because the effort of moving them is less than the cost of replacing them. I keep a box of ticket stubs, love letters, certificates / awards, and other mementos.
That said, there's definitely a failure state where everything gets labelled a "memento" to protect it from being thrown out.
...giving away/smashing to bits/losing/selling.
That seems more wasteful.
But it can still be better than keeping stuff around you don't need or like. It takes up space that could be used for nicer things, you have to clean (around) it, you have to see it and hate it (even if it's just a tiny little bit) every time you do... So yes, it can be better to just put it in the trash if you can't find anyone to give it to.
All kinds of used stuff can be traded online at sites such as eBay.
Leasing contracts are generally more complex than simple sale transactions, and they are more likely to generate contention between the parties, hence they are typically avoided for all except very expensive goods.
I take some comfort in knowing that some things are available for my immediate use at no marginal cost beyond that inherent in their use.
I also take some pleasure in knowing that I am responsible for the creation, maintenance, and decisions regarding some things.
Both of those are things that I consider 'mine', even when I recognize that the title belongs to someone else.
That's really interesting. Do you think this has to do with the hassle of looking after stuff you own, maintaining it, having it take up space, etc? Or is it something else?
Thinking about it, it's also true for me that I dislike some aspects of owning things I need–storage, mostly, and having to organize stuff and keep track of it. Every time I move apartments, I feel a brief urge to give away half of my belongings, even though nearly all of them I do use on a day-to-day basis. I still err on the side of buying rather than renting/leasing, though, mostly because it usually leads to long-term savings and this is something I place a high value on.
I tend to think of "stuff" as tools required to perform a task or accomplish a goal. An ideal tool only exists at the time you use it, magically appearing only when needed and disappearing after the job is done. This is pretty standard in the GUI design, where a (well designed) context menu (right-click on Windows) only contains the items you can use in a current situation. Many computer games are like that, too. A physical world (rather non-ideal) example would be something like cab service or a zipcar.
"Looking after stuff you own" could be a goal in itself, like when if it's your pet or your antique car, or, in extreme narcissistic cases, your child or your partner (50 shades is an example of the last from the currently popular fiction). When it's not the goal, however, it's a waste of space, time and effort. I have no attachment to my computer beyond the convenient setup and the information that is stored there. This is also one of the reasons I lease my car rather than own it.
There is a balance between savings from ownership and expense of maintaining stuff, paying for the extra space it requires and spending time keeping it ship-shape vs earning more or doing something else useful/fun. It can tip either way, for different people, items and situations. I wonder, maybe examples of such optimization decisions could be useful on this forum.