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seer comments on Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015 - Less Wrong
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I just realized what bothers me about this quote. It seems boil down to Elster trying to admit that he was wrong without having to give credit to those who were right.
I think you've boiled away Elster's message there. He's vivifying a general observation about (meta-)motivated cognition (the first quoted sentence) with an embarrassing personal example (the following sentences).
Yup, he appears to be doing that. On the grounds that he has other reasons for thinking they don't deserve credit for it.
Rather than commenting on the credibility of that in Elster's specific case (which would depend on knowing more than I do about Elster and about the anti-communists he paid attention to), I'll remark that there certainly are cases in which most of us here would do likewise. (Not literally zero credit, but extremely little, which I think is also what Elster's doing.) For instance:
One of your friends is an avid lottery enthusiast and keeps urging you to buy a ticket "because today might be your lucky day". He disdains your statements that buying lottery tickets is a substantial loss on average and insists that he's made a profit from playing the lottery. (Maybe he actually has, maybe not.) Eventually you give in and buy one ticket. It happens to win a large prize.
Another of your friends is a fundamentalist of some sort and tells you confidently that the current scientific consensus on evolution is all bunk. Any time she reads of any scientific claim about evolution she is liable to tell you confidently that in time it'll be refuted by later research. One day, a new discovery is made that refutes something you had said to her about evolution (e.g., that X is more closely related to Y than to Z).
Another worships the ancient Roman gods and tells you with great confidence that it will rain tomorrow because he has made sacrifice to Jupiter, Neptune and the lares and penates of his household. You are expecting a dry day because that's what the weather forecasts say. It does in fact rain a bit.
No, you give them appropriate credit for their correct predictions, and and appropriate de-credit for their incorrect predictions.
You shouldn't give credit or discredit directly for correctness of predictions, if you have information about how those predictions were made. If you saw someone make their guess at tomorrow's Dow Jones figure by rolling dice, you don't then credit them with any extra stock-market expertise when it happens that their guess was on the nose; they just got lucky. (Though if they do it ten times in a row you may start to suspect that they have both stock-market expertise and skill in manipulating dice.)
Is being anti-lottery some kind of badge of honor amongst intelligent people? It is entertainment, not investment. It is spending money to buy a feeling excited expectance. It is like buying a movie ticket. Does anyone consider buying a ticket to scary horror movie irrational? Some people just like that kind of excitement. People who buy lottery tickets just like different kinds of excitement, dream, fantasy.
As for the argument that it is a mis-investment of emotions that is also false, people can decide to work forward the goal then what happens is a lot of grinding, they can still dream about something else, it is not like you cannot dream while you grind. Realistic goals do not need a lot of dream investment but rather time and effort and it is safe to invest dreams in unrealistic ones.
When I have read Eliezer's mis-investment of emotions argument it came accross to me an elitistic Bay Area upper middle class thing. People in slums usually need to grind until they get a better schooling and job experience to escape it, this takes time investment not dream investment, and this leaves them free to dream about one day being a prince.
I think this is factually untrue. It seems to me that time and effort investment follows dream investment, for basic psychological reasons.
I think that's because you misread it, or you're identifying correct financial attitudes with being upper middle class and throwing in the rest of the descriptions for free. Here's the part where he talks about mechanisms:
Going to technical school is not an "elitistic Bay Area upper middle class thing." Yes, later he talks about dot-com startups doing IPOs, but the vast majority of new businesses started are things like barbershops and restaurants, and people go to technical school to learn how to repair air conditioning systems, not to learn how to make Yelp. A person who dreams about owning their own barbershop or being an AC repairperson or demonstrating enough responsibility at work to earn a promotion is likely to do better than someone who dreams about being a lottery prince.
That is, I think a key component of grinding successfully is dreaming about grinding.
Basically you are saying constant grinding requires constant motivation - or discipline?
But in reality all it takes is the precommitment of shame.
Example 1. you come from a working-class or slum family, get into a university as the first one in the family. Your mom and grandma brags the whole kin and neighborhood full with what a genius you are. At that point, you are strongly precommitted, not exactly through your own choice, you don't want the shame of 100 people treating yoiu like a genius to be let down by you dropping out.
Example 2. you get your first real job and it sucks, but your dad is proudly supporting a family for 25 years know on a similarly sucky one and for you to get his approval / not feel ashamed in his eyes you need to stick to it until you get enough experience for a better one.
I think the elitism part is precisely in the lack of this kind of shame-precommitment: elites have discretionary goals, doing what they want, not what they must to get ahead, and thus need constant motivation. If you would quit a job once it stops being fun, you are of the elites in this sense. If you stick to it until it does not feel shameful to quit, then not.
And this is why for the majority constant motivation is not required for constant grinding.
I think it's quite the reverse: elites have strong shame-precommittment, it's only a few levels higher. All your family went to Harvard and you're going to fail?? Your ancestors have Ph.Ds three generations back and you're not enrolling in a graduate program?? X-D
Of course I mean elites not of the Kardashian kind.
I was careful to specify that your hypothetical friend enjoins you to buy lottery tickets on the grounds that it is good for you financially. I agree that if you get great enjoyment from the thought that you might win the lottery, buying lottery tickets may be worth it for you.
(But two caveats on that last point. Firstly, if you enjoy daydreaming about getting rich then you can equally daydream about unexpected legacies, spectacular success of companies in your pension/investment portfolio if you have one, eccentric billionaire arbitrarily giving you a pile of money, etc. Of course these are improbable, but so is winning much in the lottery. Secondly, "dream investment" may lead you astray by, e.g., making all the most mentally salient paths to success the terribly improbable ones involving lotteries rather than the more-probable ones involving lots of hard work, and demotivating the hard work. Whether it actually has that effect is a question for the psychologists; I don't know whether it's one that's been answered.)
Good point; I'm retracting my comment elsethread.
I'm guessing the hard part is figuring out which way the causation goes -- maybe not having mentally salient paths to success involving lots of hard work makes people more likely to buy lottery tickets, rather than or as well as vice versa.
Why do you need to pay money to someone in order to daydream?
The problem is that "dreaming" often replaces grinding.
Don't people who go to amusement parks or Disneyland basically pay other people in order to have a daydream session? I mean, I can't imagine people walking around dreaming about winning a lottery, it would be Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Now that's a book about humanity outcompeted by a more profitable life form under the guidance of an omnipotent being.)
No, they pay other people to provide experiences for them, experiences which they can't get otherwise on their own.
How is 'you can safely put on a princess's dress when you are in certain company, and pay in some amount of social embarrassment if you are wrong about the company' different from 'you can safely pay a small amount for a chance to put on any dress you want in any company whatsoever'? Buying a ticket is an experience you can't get otherwise on your own. (I mean yes, I largely agree with you, but I am not sure what exactly I agree with, therefore the nitpicking.)
Huh? I don't understand.
Well, in what way is buying a ticket not paying other people to provide you an experience which you can't get otherwise on your own? Earning money is different, you expect to be paid a fixed sum and for many, there are multiple ways to do it.
In the way that I can, on my own, daydream about having a million dollars. I don't need to pay other people for that.
Substantial? The tickets of all lotteries I'm familiar with cost less than a movie ticket.
Yes. Households earning less than $13,000 a year spend a shocking 9% of their money on lottery tickets.
Someone else follows the citation trail and claims the source thinks the actual number is lower:
$300/year (unless someone is a bored millionaire) is still shocking to me.
Assume a flat distribution from 0 to 10000 and it's $150 a year, or about a lottery ticket and a half per week at $2 a ticket. Not too unreasonable. But on the other hand, you've got to figure lottery spending's unevenly distributed, probably following something along the lines of the 80/20 rule, and that brings us back to a ticket a day or higher.
Seems plenty unreasonable to me. If your income is somewhere on "a flat distribution from 0 to $10000" then you are probably just barely getting by, and perpetually one minor financial difficulty away from disaster. If you were able to save $150/year, that could make a really substantial difference to your financial resilience.
(Though I don't much like pronouncing from my quite comfortable position on how those in poverty should spend their money. It's liable to sound like a claim of superiority, but in fact I do plenty of stupid and counterproductive things and it's entirely possible that if I were suddenly thrown into poverty I'd manage much worse than those people; I doubt I'd be buying lottery tickets, but I'd probably be making other mistakes that they don't.)
[EDITED to fix a bit of incredibly clunky writing style.]
It still break my formerly favourite analogy, movie tickets -- I don't think the average household making <$10k/year spends $150/year on movie tickets. (Some such households probably do, but I strongly doubt the average one does.)
But more on booze, probably, otherwise how could they bear it.
A family of four can probably blow $50 seeing one movie.
Upvoted for checking claims :-)
The link actually says that he cannot find the original source for the 9% number, but in the process found a 3% number.
I'll dig around for better numbers if I have time, but we can also look at significance from the other end:
(Wikipedia)
P.S. An interesting paper. Notable quotes:
And also
Okay, now I can see where all the people giving financial reasons why lotteries are bad are coming from.
Substantial as a fraction of what you spend on lottery tickets. Obviously if you don't spend much you can't lose much.