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Not one wants to live in a society where your every moment must be dominated by one cost-benefit analysis or another. There is an assumption, I would argue, in

Not one wants to live in a society where your every moment must be dominated by one cost-benefit analysis or another. There is an assumption, I would argue, in the everyday notion that society exists for the common good, that our lives not be either 100% optimized or, otherwise, exploited for profit by some other optimizer. There is a sense in which being induced to consider whether your life is efficient or not is virtuous, of course. Since much of what we use every day is common resource, rather than private resource, we don't want people to be completely careless. But things don't shake out fairly in the real world. The people who are most often punished for failing to optimize are not, by any stretch, the most profligate resource consumers. And yet no one is particularly concerned about whether the lifestyles of the wealthy are completely optimal or whether they could be making more rational use of their resources. Even this state of affairs could be tolerable except that only a clown would suggest the distribution of resources we see now is one that aligns with what people deserve. For the most part, its the vagueries of history which have decided who gets to live without too much care for optimization and who must be completely rational or get fucked.

WalterBright 7y ago
> Not one wants to live in a society where your every moment must be dominated by one cost-benefit analysis or another. Except we all do, regardless of how society is organized. For example, is that luscious chocolate torte's taste worth the detriment to one's health? Is driving a little faster worth the extra risk of getting a ticket? Should I buy or rent? Should I buy the expensive shoes or the knockoffs? Should I buy it now at the higher price or wait till I get home and order it online for cheaper?
- nathan_compton 7y ago
  To some extent what you describe is paradigmatic - the product of a particular set of circumstances (one might even say an ideology, if they were of that frame of mind). Its not inherent to the human condition. Imagine, either as a practical possibility, or an as yet manifested, potentially utopian ideal, where your time wasn't being metered out by any immediate demands and you moved through life on the basis of purely aesthetic concerns. Think of the supposed hunter-gatherers who lived in times of abundance. Only a bit of time was given each day to the dumb gods of survival. The rest of the time could be used for leisure - an idea almost dead in contemporary life (as your comment demonstrates). In fact, just a few days ago, Paul Graham was posting about one important aspect of genius: an impractical (say aesthetically motivated) obsession unconnected to (though perhaps restrained by) practical concerns. Almost every human has some purely aesthetic desires which they would like to act on in the portion of their life which they can carve out from practicalities of survival. I see the social contract or whatever you'd like to call it (if the name contract offends) as an attempt to carve out some portion, hopefully not too meager, of our lives out for just such living, for every human. Its only an immediate condition of modernity, which I'd attribute vaguely to the vague "liberal" zeitgeist, which makes that idea seem alien to all but the wealthiest. Its certainly true that we could rationalize our every moment but in almost any reasonable account a person who wanted to do that or who tried would be considered mentally ill and certainly unhappy. Its inhuman. Its not what we should want. When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky, is what I'm saying. That should be the privilege of every person.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > Its not inherent to the human condition. It is. Should you give up hunting that mastondon and instead look for easier and less risky prey? > When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky You are, whether you consciously realize it or not. You are always making cost-benefit choices. Watch TV or read a book. Play with kid or have a beer with buddies. Etc.
    - nathan_compton 7y ago
      I think you are conflating two distinct things, one of which is an incontrovertible reality and the other not. Its certainly the case that in a sense we are always making choices which you could apply a cost benefit analysis to (although and as an aside, there is no universally agreed upon system for making such analyses, so what this means is unclear). What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis. What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time. If you really must think of the spreadsheet, think of it this way: most people prefer for most of their decisions to be made ahead of time and for the circumstances of life, if at all possible, the change infrequently enough that they don't need to go back to the spreadsheet every single minute of their lives. If you find that people react negatively to modernity, it might be because the liberal fantasy is that we're all just fucking going crazy on our spreadsheets all of the time (unless we're rich, then we pay someone else to think about our spreadsheets all the time and we live on the margins, as irrational and happy as pigs in the mud).
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        > What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis. Every time a person makes a decision, they are doing a cost benefit analysis, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not. > What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time. It is true that many people (including me) prefer to "wing" decisions because they don't want to expend effort on it. But that itself is yet another cost-benefit decision.

WalterBright 7y ago

> Not one wants to live in a society where your every moment must be dominated by one cost-benefit analysis or another. Except we all do, regardless of how society is organized. For example, is that luscious chocolate torte's taste worth the detriment to one's health? Is driving a little faster worth the extra risk of getting a ticket? Should I buy or rent? Should I buy the expensive shoes or the knockoffs? Should I buy it now at the higher price or wait till I get home and order it online for cheaper?

nathan_compton 7y ago
To some extent what you describe is paradigmatic - the product of a particular set of circumstances (one might even say an ideology, if they were of that frame of mind). Its not inherent to the human condition. Imagine, either as a practical possibility, or an as yet manifested, potentially utopian ideal, where your time wasn't being metered out by any immediate demands and you moved through life on the basis of purely aesthetic concerns. Think of the supposed hunter-gatherers who lived in times of abundance. Only a bit of time was given each day to the dumb gods of survival. The rest of the time could be used for leisure - an idea almost dead in contemporary life (as your comment demonstrates). In fact, just a few days ago, Paul Graham was posting about one important aspect of genius: an impractical (say aesthetically motivated) obsession unconnected to (though perhaps restrained by) practical concerns. Almost every human has some purely aesthetic desires which they would like to act on in the portion of their life which they can carve out from practicalities of survival. I see the social contract or whatever you'd like to call it (if the name contract offends) as an attempt to carve out some portion, hopefully not too meager, of our lives out for just such living, for every human. Its only an immediate condition of modernity, which I'd attribute vaguely to the vague "liberal" zeitgeist, which makes that idea seem alien to all but the wealthiest. Its certainly true that we could rationalize our every moment but in almost any reasonable account a person who wanted to do that or who tried would be considered mentally ill and certainly unhappy. Its inhuman. Its not what we should want. When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky, is what I'm saying. That should be the privilege of every person.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > Its not inherent to the human condition. It is. Should you give up hunting that mastondon and instead look for easier and less risky prey? > When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky You are, whether you consciously realize it or not. You are always making cost-benefit choices. Watch TV or read a book. Play with kid or have a beer with buddies. Etc.
  - nathan_compton 7y ago
    I think you are conflating two distinct things, one of which is an incontrovertible reality and the other not. Its certainly the case that in a sense we are always making choices which you could apply a cost benefit analysis to (although and as an aside, there is no universally agreed upon system for making such analyses, so what this means is unclear). What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis. What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time. If you really must think of the spreadsheet, think of it this way: most people prefer for most of their decisions to be made ahead of time and for the circumstances of life, if at all possible, the change infrequently enough that they don't need to go back to the spreadsheet every single minute of their lives. If you find that people react negatively to modernity, it might be because the liberal fantasy is that we're all just fucking going crazy on our spreadsheets all of the time (unless we're rich, then we pay someone else to think about our spreadsheets all the time and we live on the margins, as irrational and happy as pigs in the mud).
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      > What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis. Every time a person makes a decision, they are doing a cost benefit analysis, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not. > What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time. It is true that many people (including me) prefer to "wing" decisions because they don't want to expend effort on it. But that itself is yet another cost-benefit decision.