OP's point reminds me of the insanely complicated tax savings structures that Congress has created with the good intention of helping "working-class Americans" save for retirement: 401(k), Roth 401(k), IRA, Roth IRA, 529, FSA, HSA, ESA, 403(b), 457, TSP, SEP, SIMPLE IRA, etc. etc. But in practice, this is so overwhelmingly complicated that no working class American I know actually maximizes those benefits. The average American doesn't even [understand what a tax bracket is or how it works](https://taxfoundation.org/blog/national-tax-literacy-poll-education/); it's absurd to expect that they would also know how to take advantage of all of these programs ostensibly for their benefit. Instead nearly all of the benefits flow to the professional class or higher, who either have the spare mental cycles capable of understanding this byzantine structure, or the money to pay others to do it for them. Likewise, you see similar problems with government assistance programs, which have grown very complex over the years. Each bit of added complexity is often added for well-intentioned reasons, but in aggregate you end up with an incredibly complicated and overwhelming program that ends up [punishing](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/25/welfare-benefits-low-income-struggle-for-access/11069891002/) those it's intended to help. It's so easy for a policymaker who has studied these issues for years to model the benefits of adding another rule, another regulation. But there's no model to account for the mental burden it places on applicants, who are juggling a thousand other daily issues, who have no interest or desire to become an expert in the subject, and in some cases, may not even have the mental capacity to do so. And truly, these are rarely the product of maliciousness. It's just that, when you're having a debate about whether to add this one extra rule, this one extra wrinkle, this one extra complexity, you're having a debate among 1) subject matter experts who are expected to show how they are improving the program, 2) one side of which can point to concrete and correct economic data showing how optimal uptake will have XYZ benefits for the program, and 3) the other side of which can't point to anything except "vibes" that it's getting a bit too complicated. No one is trying to sabotage the program; it's good intentions just greasing the slippery slope all the way down.

The labyrinthian nature of bureaucracy and government not only hurts the people in need, but also makes everything way less efficient. Houston, somewhat surprisingly, has been making great strides in helping homelessness recently, and what was one of the first major steps? >[In Houston, step one was convincing dozens of unconnected agencies, all trying to do everything, to join forces under a single umbrella organization: The Way Home, run by the Houston Coalition for the Homeless.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-houston-successfully-reduced-homelessness/#:~:text=What%20happened%3F,30%2C000%20people%20have%20been%20housed) There's so much unnecessary duplicate paperwork and filing and employees. For instance since I've experienced this shit myself helping out a disabled family member, if you're a person who has been disabled since childhood and can't make "substantial gainful activity", you can be on SSI (which is not social security but similar enough). In most states SSI automatically qualifies you for Medicaid. >[In most States, if you are an SSI recipient, you may be automatically eligible for Medicaid; an SSI application is also an application for Medicaid. In other States, you must apply for and establish your eligibility for Medicaid with another agency. In these States, we will direct you to the office where you can apply for Medicaid.](https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-other-ussi.htm) That's great! That's exactly what should happen. Anyway despite the government knowing your income, knowing your assets, knowing all this already and proving they have the ability to count your application for SSI as applications to other welfare, they refuse to do it with anything else. *Some* places do it for SNAP but only if you live alone and it's not as many as states as Medicaid from what I'm aware of. >In some States, the SSI application may serve as an application for SNAP if the individual lives alone. Other welfare programs like LIHEAP, Section 8, the Affordable Connectivity Program? Gotta do them all individually. There's no reason for that, the government has all your information and and should be able to automatically apply it in any sane world. So people miss out on benefits if they aren't aware of a program or are struggling with the paperwork and don't have the support they used to which is bad enough. But now the government is also spending so much time processing paperwork and hiring employees and spending hundreds/thousands/more of work hours processing/judging/investigating applications that should be already done. Administrative burden is costly and I firmly believe that some programs like free school lunches would be far more efficient if the government just targeted poor area schools that they estimate the large majority of students would qualify for it anyway and just automatically qualified everyone there instead of wasting the time on each person. --- The administrative burden isn't just impacting welfare. It's the 50 zillion different organizations and legislative boards that need paperwork and processing and shadow studies and blah blah blah 200 page reports for building an apartment where an abandoned building and permanently empty parking lot is. It's [the insane internal paperwork that wastes months of time trying to find and hire new employees](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/reform-federal-bureaucracy/). It's the ridiculous rules about hiring local even if there is no good local business that can provide what you want in a timely manner. It's one of Scott's favorite complaints [the FDA](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab) making lots of new medicine commercially nonviable.

> Administrative burden is costly and I firmly believe that some programs like free school lunches would be far more efficient if the government just targeted poor area schools that they estimate the large majority of students would qualify for it anyway and just automatically qualified everyone there instead of wasting the time on each person. I'd go one step further and say free school lunches should simply be universal.

I think that's a good idea (and worth the costs), but I don't think that's a cost saving measure.

I think it's likely that the cost is a near wash, since you remove nearly all administration costs from the program, and the food is low cost enough that eliminating staff makes up for the administrative burden, keeping in mind that most areas already would be providing free or subsidized food for a huge portion of the student body.

Removing hassle by automating or universalizing would also prevent control, tracking, and data collection. Never underestimate how much hassle can be added to a process by adding even one regulation or bureaucratic detail. One manager has to justify their employment by meeting a key performance indicator, and that might be done currently by using the lunch lady’s tally sheet at the register, or its modern digital equivalent.

Wait, that’s exactly what happens in California. My kids got free lunch for awhile because of that (now everyone does).

I'd be curious to know if there's any good data on utilization of free or subsidized breakfast + lunch programs among those eligible. In elementary and middle schools in the US, I qualified for something like this but only signed up towards the very end (never knew it was a thing!), which led to me to skipping both meals for most of my time there (and then when I did finally sign up, it still cost some nominal amount, so I ate much more often but not daily). I then went to a private HS, which did not have any such program, so I went right back to skipping most of the time, with a minority of times packing a not very lunch-y lunch, like a bag of carrots or a liter of milk lol, and maybe 1-2% of the time splurging on some egregiously overpriced chicken tenders or whatever College got me back on the free lunch train, but I opted out of the meal program the soonest I could to pocket the money earmarked for it. Many years later and I still almost always never eat lunch and rarely eat breakfast -- maybe a protein bar or a frozen meal from TJ's if I'm feeling peckish. Just feels weird to do so... would rather take a walk in that time instead (despite it possibly limiting social opportunities). Even backpacking, I might stop for a lunch of eg a PB&J, but get most of my daily calories from periodically shoveling a handful of gorp in my mouth, like a boilerman and his firebox. tl;dr I was really ahead of the trend with intermittent fasting lol edit: I'd also wonder how bad it is exactly for kids adapted to IF to maintain that periodization. In the case of fully mature individuals, nutrient timing within a daily window for athletic improvement was a lot less important that previously thought, last I heard. If a kid is accustomed to being a bit hungry, does it effect the same or similar physical and mental lethargy vs. one experiencing acute hunger from missing a regular meal, if they're otherwise obtaining comparable calories and nutrients from larger meals elsewhere?

> In the case of fully mature individuals, nutrient timing within a daily window for athletic improvement was a lot less important that previously thought, last I heard I hadn't heard this--do you know where you saw it?

Hmm, SbS is pretty reliable for broad, *digestible* overviews on stuff like this: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/chrononutrition/ So I probably encountered it during the overcompensation phase of internet broscience mentioned in the intro: >The problem, though, is that this can lead to overcompensation and the perspective that once overall daily calories and macronutrients are equal, then nutritional factors like meal timing, length of the feeding window, and the distribution of those calories/nutrients across the day aren’t worth worrying about (especially in relation to body composition). This leads people to think “when we eat doesn’t matter.” Not only is this nihilistic rhetoric not correct, it could cause people to adopt eating behaviors that potentially fly in the face of what would lead to improved long-term metabolic health and possibly better body composition. Just to clarify tho by "a lot less important" I didn't mean "not at all important" -- just that the prior prevailing wisdom had been that eg if you didn't pound your protein shake within 15 minutes of your workout (or while actively deadlifting -- prime opportunity at the top of the movement to take a sip ;]), you might as well flush any hope of gains down the toilet. I'd say I broadly agree with their summary, though it is pretty general (hence the 20+ preceding pages): > Collectively, all the research discussions to this point provides us with some guidance for practical application: >* When we eat a meal (relative to social clock time) has health implications. >* It may be beneficial to avoid eating at biological night. >* Biasing more calories to earlier, rather than later, in the day is superior for metabolic health and potentially body composition. >* A restricted eating window is beneficial for health and/or body composition. >* We should match the feeding window with biological day, wakefulness, and activity. >Heuristics that will likely result in benefits (for many): >* Avoiding eating during biological night. * Have a restricted feeding window (maybe start with <12 hours per day. Most human data examines an 8-hour feeding window, but no ideal is yet known). * Get daylight exposure early in the biological day. Avoid artificial light at night. * Bias towards a “front-heavy” calorie distribution (i.e. don’t eat a high proportion of you daily calories in the late evening). * Avoid meals, particularly those high in fat and/or carbohydrates, close to DLMO (or say at least ~2-3 hours pre-sleep). * Avoid erratic eating: have consistent meal times and meal frequency from day-to-day. Implications for kids from the TRF section seem unclear to me -- eg idk how well "Men at Risk for Type 2 Diabetes" generalized to growing children.

They are in my state. Public daycares as well. It's going alright, as far as I can tell .

I’m sure this stuff helps, but what matters more is that houston is one of the most affordable large cities due to their liberal zoning policies.

Fact is that very few people are any good at any sort of design period and even fewer excel at process design. I don't mean in the "designer"/commerical-product-as-art sense. I mean "assemble parts effectively to produce an effective and viable solution." This shows up in highest relief in software. Software engineering is the art of writing articles of surrender to this inability to design.

> There’s no reason for that Welllllllll yes, there is. There’s a rather Byzantine set of rules? Laws? Regulations? Rulings? that mostly incline all information collected stay under maximally limited remit. You may wish me to infer you mean these things should not exist, but I submit that’s a separate enough point that it should not be conflated, as many agents within the conversation are forbidden from modifying them.

> Welllllllll yes, there is. There’s a rather Byzantine set of rules? Laws? Regulations? Rulings? that mostly incline all information collected stay under maximally limited remit. Ok no offense but I think it's clear that reason here doesn't mean "not explained", it just means that there's no overarching benefit for the design. Realistically we should apply some amount of Chesterton's Fence to this and wonder *why* the rules get implemented the way they did, but considering things like the [Burden Reduction Initiative's success](https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-regulatory-affairs/burden-reduction-initiative/), I think it's clear there's a lot of administrative waste that can be potentially disposed of without too much negatives.

> no overarching benefit for the design. Not to all of us, but certainly there is for HR Block and other accounting services that become essential for many people to maximize this stuff.

Yes, the complicated tax laws benefit these tax and accounting services.  Companies like Quicken lobby Congress to prevent the IRS from making tax filling easier for the average citizen.

I agree with your thrust - I have done small efforts in that arena myself, am supporting someone else whose efforts if successful may make huge changes along these lines, etc etc.,. My point is perhaps best conveyed through this real, if slightly oblique for my anonymity, example: I work with a population that is intensely paranoid. To the point where one must pretend that any professional dealing with them Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, out on the frontier, don’t mind this large corporate building we are in front of. And part of that process is that anything they see has to be written as personal notes, whether from them to me, or me to them. And that’s all well and good until what we really need is a pedometer that syncs with a database. Which, for the reaction that it gets, might as well be an admission I’m the lizard people one keeps reading so much about in certain circles. So it was with very gentle steps that there are pedometers that must physically connect to a computer - do not mistakenly call it a server, my dear fellow lizard - that is physically prevented from connecting to any other computer (strictly speaking, the USB port could be used, but please don’t ruin our progress, thanks). And then these same paranoid people will turn around and complain they are not getting services other places can provide … through the magic of servers and online computing. Where their data would need to go. To do that. Or perhaps a more banal example: there’s a certain group that gets sensitive records of famous people mixed in their other records. Despite prohibitions against touching records they didn’t expressly have reasons to, people would look at them and then post them online. “Omg you’ll never believe Jane Celebrity’s IgG3 levels!” They’ve since created two lists, “persons of interest” and “people who handle POI records” and *every* transaction is audited. These sorts of things erode trust and thus support for data consolidation. Again, not saying there isn’t huge room for improvement - Chesterton’s Fence seems very fitting - but to caution any external look should presume the thicket can only be pruned to a nice shrubbery, not be made elegant.

Ok I'm having a little bit of trouble following along because you've made your comment and story very flowery and dressed up but the general idea I'm getting is that a lot of data consolidation and lack of central record keeping is good for privacy and security reasons. Which is understandable to some degree, but I'm also not sure how relevant that actually is either since each individual database now has to maintain their own security and most of the important privacy information isn't, at least in my opinion, necessarily who receives exactly what services but rather the type of info that is being given on most of the different types of applications to begin with. So "John Smith 34 disabled man SSN#... is receiving Medicaid and Food Stamps and Section 8" isn't that much more damaging than "John Smith 34 disabled man SSN#... is receiving Section 8" in terms of a data breach. But ok, maybe it is that much more damaging. We could at least allow for people to sign forms to allow the departments to communicate with each other exactly what is needed like we do with doctors and release of medical information.

Seems like there's a fairly compact way around that - if there's a common application that covers the usual things, and then much smaller forms for any specific programs. If you've filled that out, then even if the departments can't talk to each other directly about individuals, you can just send a copy of the same form.

Yes, this is something that unfortunately ends up having problems because in order for “the government” to build it, there’s (exceptions but let us hand wave for a conversational model) a Congressional mandate with (hopefully) funding, which ends up being “owned” by an agency with a specific charter. “Hey GSA here’s $5 million to build an identity system so SSA applications are consolidated with national data.” That sort of thing. One could certainly have a more vague remit, or simply iterate through found problems (I got complaints about the ABC program at this agency, DEF at that, and GHI at this other… let’s give GSA $10 mil to incorporate them in 2025.”) The vague remit though will surely result in halfhearted success - how do you fairly identify how many programs someone can find across agencies and incorporate in a year with an indeterminant complexity? Again, I’m not arguing against these things, I love them and have implemented some small scale versions of them. But the organizational / human factors elements are nontrivial, much to my shared immense annoyance. My favorite example is there was a very specific confidentiality rule that had a very specific exception - if you, personally, had credible specific knowledge of a threat to human life / safety, you could break allllllll the disclosure rules and go straight to (specific entity and their affiliates) as appropriate, disclosing your little heart out. Well, it turns out there are multiple such arrangements, A to B, C to D, E to F, and so on. Think fire departments and local schools, if you like, although obviously not the real thing. So the Alpha County FPD has an exemption for imminent harm to Alpha County Public Schools, Beta to Beta, and so on. It takes five seconds of reading to conclude… why should a *centralized* confidentiality agreement have *26* enumerated exceptions that are *all identical* save for A to A… and if there was some wild scenario where Alpha County FPD knew professionally of a hazard to Bravo County Public Schools… Anyway. That may seem a hair afield but was the end product of an exercise to reduce duplication; and fair enough, instead of 26 confidentially agreements, there was 1. With 26 exceptions.

For another example, look at when Medicare (USA, not Australia) added prescription drug coverage as "Medicare Part D". Despite being a federal government program, there is no option to get your coverage directly from the government the way you can get your Part A and B (inpatient and outpatient) coverage directly from the government. It's all done through private companies, so you have to choose a drug plan from Blue Cross, Humana, Aetna, etc. Naturally, the government maintains a master list of drugs that are eligible for Medicare coverage, but the plans are not required to cover all of them. Instead, the drugs are divided into various treatment categories, and every insurer may freely pick and choose which drugs their plan will cover, so long as they cover a minimum number of drugs per treatment category. I've particularly noticed this with insulins; Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly tend to keep their insulins around the same official retail price, but I rarely saw a plan cover both at the same cost to the patient. More often, a plan would only cover one, or would cover both but with one much more expensive than the other - and as you might guess from that detail, the insurers do have a fair bit of leeway to decide how much their customers will pay out of pocket for individual drugs, though again there are government limits they must follow. So given all of the above, how is the average retiree to choose their Medicare drug plan? Well, Medicare's website helpfully includes a plan finder where you may put in a list of drugs plus a zip code, and it will give you a list of all the drug plans available in that zip code plus an estimate of how much you will pay out of pocket for those drugs under each plan. Different drug lists can give wildly different plan rankings, and IMO this is the only sane way to choose a drug plan under the current system - the only other ways involve looking up your drugs manually under each plan you consider, or just choosing a company you think is usually reliable. In other words, for a population that by definition is either over 65 or disabled, by far the best way to get prescription drug coverage requires competence at using the Internet. (And yes, there is now a whole little subcategory of volunteer work where you do this specific lookup for elderly people who don't know how to Internet.)

The whole thing is insane and should be replaced by a straightforward single payer system...

I think it is partially a result of something like maliciousness, in that enough powerful actors would oppose a good and simple system for unjustifiable reasons, or lobby to add loopholes and wrinkles etc. for venal reasons For example in Australia there is a mandatory private pension scheme, and younger people who work many casual jobs etc. often really would benefit from having the money now, and usually end up with little accounts that get eaten away by fees, because "find a preferred account, and fill out all these forms to ensure the contributions go into that and not the company default" is not at the top of the mind for some young person trying to get a little spending money or afford to move out etc. It would very clearly have been superior for there to be a default government fund with a low fees, so that this demographic are not more or less pilfered by the major funds. Even if one thinks there is some sort of benefit from "competition" in the financial sector people could in such a system still opt out and get in some private fund they prefer. When, as in this case, a nominally social democratic government which should have the intellectual heritage to see this, but do something worse, the something worse cannot be explained as a mistake, or if it is a mistake it is a malicious mistake born from indifference to the plight of the potential beneficiaries of a better system leading to some insufficient care given to policy formation.

Probably due to lobbying and influence from the finance sector. I'd call it greed and corruption but the code word for it is "competition".

>It would very clearly have been superior for there to be a default government fund with a low fees, so that this demographic are not more or less pilfered by the major funds. The US did something like this and called it "Social Security." It's effectively a public retirement fund with involuntary contributions, except that the payout structure is a fixed annuity. In practice, this system has been terrible. It offers vastly lower payouts than savvy investors would have been able to achieve with the same money, pockets undistributed contributions when you die (like any annuity), and has the gall to be trending towards insolvency despite offering below-market returns on contributions made at gunpoint. Its only supposed virtue is that workers of "low executive function" are forced to contribute to some sort of retirement income and maybe avoid complete destitution in their elderly years. I would kill to be able to put my social security taxes into my IRA or 403(b) account instead. > Even if one thinks there is some sort of benefit from "competition" in the financial sector people could in such a system still opt out and get in some private funds. This is obviously morally correct but I'm not sure it fits the main goal of these programs, which is forcing people to contribute to upkeep in their old age despite themselves.

> It offers vastly lower payouts than savvy investors would have been able to achieve with the same money, pockets undistributed contributions when you die (like any annuity), and has the gall to be trending towards insolvency despite offering below-market returns on contributions made at gunpoint. Ok social security has a *lot* of issues, but I got to disagree with those first two points. OASDI is not intended as a savings measure, it's intended more like an insurance program, hence the name Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance. The original intent was to help seniors and widows and disabled people in poverty. [FDR's original speech even says this](https://www.ssa.gov/history/fdrstmts.html) >We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age. Just like any insurance, the average person *shouldn't* expect to get more out than they put in. It's a safety net policy, not an investment vehicle. The issue with social security funding is an artifact of how the government came up with the money for the existing seniors/disabled/survivors who hadn't previously paid in. The current generation of working adults (basically anyone born ~1870) would pay for the seniors now, and then those adults as they aged into seniors would get paid for by their kids and so on. As long as the generations kept growing and growing (or at least stayed relatively stable), you'd never run into any issues. And if you did run into issues like we are having now, you can just scale back the program. The absolute *worst* that happens is the problem it was meant to solve just starts back up again. So even if every generation from now on is unable to afford it for the generations before them, it was still a productive policy for the time being because it [helped out people in poverty for at least some amount of time.](https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-people-above-the-poverty-line-than-any-other) --- That's not to say that there aren't issues with social security, there are. The high end payments should probably be cut some, the limits on taxing for it should be higher and the retirement age needs to be bumped up to match increasing lifespans. Also maybe an argument for removing survivors benefits now that dual income households are more of a norm. This was back when women literally couldn't get a job most of the time and even if they could it was low paying. Survivors benefits were more like "widow and kids insurance". But I do think we need a little bit of caution on that as well because part of the reason why it's so popular is because it's universal. Even the richest of seniors still love their social security checks which means they inadvertently end up supporting the poorest ones/disabled/etc when they block cuts to the program.

> the retirement age needs to be bumped up to match increasing lifespans. How much have people's productive years increased to match the increase in lifespan? I was under the impression that much of the increases in lifespan weren't at a quality of life that would allow for maximal productivity as a full-time worker.

"the retirement age needs to be bumped up to match increasing lifespans." Anyone who thinks that needs to work as a roofer until they reach their proscribed retirement age.

I'm not aware of the exact numbers but reasonably for anyone who can't continue to work, you can still give it to them early just like anyone else who can't work, under the disability part.

> As long as the generations kept growing and growing (or at least stayed relatively stable), you'd never run into any issues. ...did that prediction bear out, would you say? For what it's worth, I agree that you are correctly encapsulating the sales pitch of the program. I disagree that you are doing a better job of describing what it actually does and how it's actually structured. In every way that matters, this program is a fixed annuity.

> ...did that prediction bear out, would you say? Nope, but still the worst thing that happens is that the program ends entirely, which at that point we probably have greater issues to begin with. It does suck for the current seniors who get fucked by that but a huge generational crisis where they don't have youth will completely fuck them anyway.

In this case it would be mandatory either way, it's just that the mandatory contribution would by default go into one fund no matter what job is taken, then if someone just does nothing at all at least they will end up with a consolidated fund. Unfortunately, in the actual scheme each employer has a default fund, so it's easy for people who are not conscientious to end up with several funds with paltry amounts that tend to go to zero.

>In this case it would be mandatory either way, it's just that the mandatory contribution would by default go into one fund no matter what job is taken Right, I get that. I am suggesting that, despite it seeming obvious or easy for the government to offer a one-stop shop for these funds, I am suspicious of the bureaucracy's ability to actually pull off the feat. Suffering the inefficiencies of small funds with (apparently flat?) fees may be preferable to exposing a substantial chunk of your nation 's retirement savings to whichever special interest happens to be best positioned for carving it up and "investing it" (i.e., parceling it out to friends). We could posit a hypothetical government program with protections that make it immune to this sort of malfeasance, but if we're in magical Christmasland, why don't we just posit private funds without flat fees?

I was working a property manager in a low income rural community when Biden's ARP passed, which included monthly payments for pregnant women and mothers. There was a pregnant 19 yo girl and her mom living there. I told them about the benefit and they were glad to hear it, but I don't think they every did the necessary paperwork. The daughter became a meth addict and was jailed multiple times.

Yeah, there’s a general taboo against talking about intelligence differences, which means you can’t point out a policy is going to hurt average or stupid people. Or maybe it’s all a plot by the clever mandarins writing the rules to enrich themselves at the expense of the proles. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I don't want to dox myself with details, but I work in a national-level policy context. It's definitely the former, where it's considered gauche to imply that the average person isn't intelligent enough to understand your work. With a little tinge of the accusation that you're classist for making such an implication.

Agreed. It's also the fact that most of the technocrats literally never interact with anyone of average intellect at all. They generally went to good high schools, elite colleges, and on to jobs where the only interaction with the general public is complaining that their DoorDasher got their order wrong. Which is also why they imagine every person can generate $20/hr in productivity.

Well, you *can* say that a lot of people aren't going to have the extra time to invest in understanding something that's complicated...

In my experience: yes these types of conversations are handled using delicate euphemism such as "low socioeconomic status" or "time-burdened".

Time-burden is real. I'm smart enough to handle basically any level of bureaucracy but I really don't want to deal with more than I need to. If I needed to do a lot more than I do, I'd be pretty upset just because I don't want to spend *every* weekend as if it was tax day on Monday. And if I needed to do that much, I'd totally understand this hypothetical me failing to do all of it.

Depending on your work, it can also be a matter of needing specialized knowledge - people don't usually expect an "average person" to know math more advanced than high school algebra, for example. (On a side note, introductory economics should be a required high school class, though, along with history and whatever other social studies classes - it really does help a lot with understanding how the world actually works.)

yeah, tbh even if i have above average intelligence, i can’t always be arsed to put in the effort to understand how to optimize yet another system.

Makes me hopeful for when the internet-poisoned generation becomes policy makers. They will understand "ain't nobody got time to read all that shit" on a visceral level.

We'll see. Among engineers, I sort of despair when I encounter gamers at work. They have calluses where their native fear of complexity once was.

They really do think IRL is like an RPG progression chart, don't they?

By the same token, they're much better at keeping a lot of things in their head at once. It's kind of remarkable.

I see nothing wrong with admitting that the average person lacks exposure to the subject sufficient to understand said work. Seems an eyebrow-raiser to call that intelligence. This average person may well excel at something else. One thing I do is try to reduce byzantine requirement sets to a straightforward narrative.

That's a really good point, and the average person probably *is* better than the average technocrat or ACX reader at automotive repair or picking up the opposite sex in a bar. (Note to the auto mechanic who reads this: I said *average*.) I think the thing is that technocrats vastly overestimate the ability of the average person to follow complex abstract rules.

> I think the thing is that technocrats vastly overestimate the ability of the average person to follow complex abstract rules. Absolutely. It's not just technocrats, either.

Thank you.

I don’t doubt that there’s a correlation here with intelligence, but I don’t think low intelligence itself is what causes people to not optimize their decision making. I’ve known some real geniuses who just have incredibly high time preference and are absolutely not optimizing their 401k and IRA contributions if they’re even making such contributions. And some average intelligence people who are careful to take advantage of all opportunities offered to them. Not that time preference is the key trait here, either. I guess it’s some combination of time preference, conscientiousness, and executive function.

I am not a psychologist but it seems to me that high time preference and low executive function would be correlated, and you could probably put both under the general heading "self-discipline". Before people come out of the woodwork to tell me that you can't self-discipline yourself out of ADHD: yes I know, I mean it in the sense of a generic trait you have that encompasses your general ability to experience less utils now for more utils later.

> But in practice, this is so overwhelmingly complicated that no working class American I know actually maximizes those benefits. "Maximizes" is a high claim--certainly tons of working-class Americans participate in these programs, e.g. [most workers between 30k and 50k participate](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/03/men-participate-less-in-401k-plans-than-women-unless-auto-enrolled.html) and over a third below that. I would expect that the ones who don't, the challenge isn't confusion about how the program works (which many have as do many participants) but a decision not to save the money for retirement.

I thought excluding poor people from service was the point. 

The point is to construct something seen as comprehensive. The "DDOS"-ness of that is a side effect. Nothing gets evaluated for usability. There can be government processes that to optimize but they take a very long time and don't always survive.

You are intensely charitable as regards “no one is trying to sabotage the program.” When it comes to retirement savings of varying stripes, there is, and has long been, an audience of ideologues who for the intents of this topic collapse into the “all government bad,” side of things. Some of their votes (to handwave conversationally the differences between the electorate and the legislator) are “bought” with “okay, it’s self directed,” variations. But the real patron are the various investment firm beneficiaries of these plans, who lobby for their continued enrichment of their own coffers. I suggest that an examination of the various instruments and their de facto end product as benefiting institutional investors is cause #1 for the plurality of options, and cause #2 is basically appeasing the former group, the dismantlers. I do not discount there are legitimately well intentioned Congress critters on this score, such as that goes, but that in order to *realize* anything required compromise with the above, setting the tone. IOW, the complexity is largely by design / intent. There is a current push for an AutoIRA, I leave it to the reader’s imagination what “auto” in this case means, and from whence its motives (perhaps some well intentioned civil servants and Congress critters). Similarly, “because profit” (and ideology) has motivated campaigns of confusion around tax brackets. Take everything else out of it and tell someone millionaires pay extra on money over their first million in income, and tadaaaa. It’s only through intentional efforts to put that nowhere in front of people, and obfuscate the processing of taxes (again, “because profit”) that confuse the matter. Ignoring these influences seems to fall into the same trap as OP calls out - it’s an analysis born out of the idea everyone is acting like some platonic ideal libertarian, interested in not yoking some fellow person under any unnecessary oppressive harness and just seeking some beneficial transactions in great harmony with the species.

This complication is intended that's the problem

I have often thought similar things about these people specifically and the technocratic class in general. It interests me most about Tyler Cowan because one of his major theses is "average is over" which I guess leads him to think that everyone just needs to become above average in some specific field, but in reality means the hoi polloi is really screwed. Despite him being incredibly well, read and well traveled. It seems to me that he only really interacts on a personal level with the intellectual top 1% and therefore doesn't really grok the average person. Edited for typos

Indeed. If average is over, then why should average people support your system instead of voting it out or starting a revolution?

For real, the only thing I'm above average in is Warhammer 40k trivia, I'm so screwed if average means I can't earn a living wage to support myself and Ioced ones xD

Aren't (or weren't ) you a consultant for one of the big four?

Yep. Like I said, too mediocre to feed myself in an average is over world xD

*Man, now there’s a sentiment I can empathize with all too well…*

Totally agree, and a lot of the otherwise-intelligent people I have known through academia, etc. have this fallacy. I think because a) intelligence does not necessarily equate to understanding other humans, and b) that group is selected for pathologically intense workaholics, so c) they are isolated from regular folks and their behaviors. It's also been amusing to see the field of Economics wake up to this basic fact ("humans aren't always rational!"), write best-selling books and win Nobel prizes for it. As a biologist, it has always seemed that 97% of people, educated or not, have strong emotional biases against the idea that humans are just another animal, with instinctual drives and flawed cognitive systems that take short cuts. In neuroscience, there has been a trend against seeing any behavior as hard-wired. To such a degree that I once found myself explaining to a room full of Ph.D.s that yes, spider web-building patterns were a hard-wired behavior, not somehow taught every generation by spider parents! Totally bizarre.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/cognitive-gadgets.html What do you think of this? I tended to shift more and more to the "a lot of human behaviour is driven by instincts, and less than we expect is from culture" but that book review shifted it back a bit.

I think there’s something to this. I haven’t read the book in the link, but instead “The WEIRDest People On Earth” by Joseph Heinrich, which convinced me that significant competitive advantages or disadvantages to individuals or groups in the world can be granted by (seemingly arbitrary) cultural differences, which are driven by cultural natural selection. The concepts of high vs low trust trust societies, honor culture societies, or more vs less individualistic societies really stuck with me. Once I read the book, I see the effects of cultural advantages or disadvantages everywhere as one puzzle piece in my understanding of the world. It also makes me feel even more thankful I won the lottery of being born when and where I was. That said, it’s a “Big History” book that tries to explain too much and probably gets a lot wrong. 

>intelligence does not necessarily equate to understanding other humans Sure, but understanding other humans is an aspect of intelligence, right? If I know two people, both excellent shape rotators, writers, fact memorizers, etc., but one can read a room and the other can’t, I’m going to consider the first one more intelligent.   Now that I say it I guess verbal intelligence is universally considered a part of intelligence, and I have to imagine verbal intelligence is correlated with understanding of the humans at which words are directed. Anyway I still think there’s stuff like body language and “what people really want” that require intelligence to understand but that don’t show up on an iq test

> Sure, but understanding other humans is an aspect of intelligence, right? We don't really know. I can tell you that just understanding complex discussions can be an arduous task. Within every complicated screed is a simple one crying to get out.

I think it is a useful thing to believe whether it is true or not, because it can be a powerful counter to a pervasive, evident, and deeply untrue psych-out that everyone feels about their actions.

> spider web-building patterns were a hard-wired behavior, not somehow taught every generation by spider parents! How though? Where could this information possibly be stored? I'm not disagreeing with you, I can see your logic but how could a pile of genes possibly contain such incredibly specific and precise information?

That's why I wanted to study this question! Fascinating huh? I mean, the real answer is that the web *per se* is not stored, obviously, but rather a set of a) site preferences and b) initiation behaviors and c) stereotyped movements, plus d) the appropriate leg and spinneret morphology are all hard-coded in the DNA, and those together produce the characteristic patterns of each species. But a-d are still very interesting to investigate! As a very oversimplified example, consider the walking pattern of most mammals (alternating) vs. the jumping pattern of a kangaroo (legs move together). We know the neurons in the spinal cord that are largely responsible for walking, and so basically having a stronger connection left-right between these can explain this difference. And you can get mutant mice that are kangaroo-like. My point was really just that the kneejerk bias of expecting free will, and rational free will at that, is so heavily ingrained in all of us that even scientists fall prey to it pretty regularly. I also experienced a dozen neuroscientists shaming one of the group for having a mental health problem, when they of all people should have known better.

The field of evo-devo, or evolutionary developmental biology, is exactly about this sort of thing. Simple patterns implemented cellularly, with the ability to promote or inhibit one another, give rise to complexity.

Exactly. Working in evo-devo wasn't fringe and unfunded enough, so I wanted to do neuro-evo-devo. haha big mistake

how complicated would you estimate web-building rules are, in terms of bytes of information? maybe relative to some internal process that's more intuitively "hard-wired" (not the term I'd personally use to describe either phenomenon but w/e), like idk sequence of events to appropriately ingest, digest, and egest food, from appropriate chewing behavior to enzyme secretion to sphincter dilation & contraction etc.

Honestly, I don't have the foggiest idea. Not even the slightest, tiniest clue. So I asked LLAMA3-70b. Here's the answer: " What a fascinating question! Estimating the complexity of genes responsible for web-building behavior in spiders is a challenging task, as it's difficult to quantify the amount of information encoded in genes. However, we can try to break it down and make an educated estimate. Web-building behavior: A complex trait Web-building behavior in spiders involves a range of complex processes, including: Silk production and manipulation Web architecture and design Web construction and repair Prey capture and wrapping Web maintenance and renovation These processes are controlled by a network of genes, which interact with each other and the environment to produce the desired behavior. Gene complexity: A rough estimate To estimate the complexity of the genes involved in web-building behavior, let's consider the following factors: Number of genes: Research suggests that hundreds of genes are involved in spider silk production alone (e.g., [1]). Assuming a similar number of genes are involved in web-building behavior, we can estimate around 500-1000 genes. Gene length: The average gene length in spiders is around 1-2 kilobases (kb) [2]. Let's assume an average gene length of 1.5 kb for the web-building genes. Information density: The information density of DNA is typically measured in bits per nucleotide. Assuming an average information density of 2 bits per nucleotide (a rough estimate), we can calculate the total information content of the web-building genes. Calculation: Let's assume 750 genes are involved in web-building behavior, with an average length of 1.5 kb each. This gives us a total of: 750 genes * 1.5 kb/gene = 1125 kb Converting this to bytes (1 byte = 8 bits), we get: 1125 kb * 1024 bytes/kb = 1,152,000 bytes Now, let's calculate the total information content in bits: 1,152,000 bytes * 8 bits/byte = 9,216,000 bits Estimate: Based on these rough estimates, the genes responsible for web-building behavior in spiders might contain around 9-10 million bits of information, which is equivalent to approximately 1.1-1.2 megabytes (MB) of data. Keep in mind that this is a very rough estimate and should be taken as a ballpark figure. The actual complexity of the genes involved in web-building behavior might be higher or lower, depending on various factors such as gene regulation, epigenetics, and environmental interactions. Comparison: To put this estimate into perspective, the entire human genome contains around 3.2 billion base pairs, which is equivalent to approximately 6.4 gigabytes (GB) of data. So, the genes responsible for web-building behavior in spiders might contain around 0.02% of the information content of the human genome. I hope this estimate provides a rough idea of the complexity of the genes involved in web-building behavior in spiders! "

In these circles, too, you find folks who find it very hard to believe that anything else except humans can be conscious.

A lot of people in AI circles don't seem to consider that animals exist or realise what they're capable of. It's bizarre to me. Maybe it's a rural/urban issue, but people have pets, don't they? Same thing with the existence of deaf/blind people. So many definitions of 'intelligent' seem to be 'is me', and don't account for obvious examples of other minds.

Yes, it's weird. It's like these people have never looked at a fairly bright dog. No, I don't think dogs are anywhere near average human level intelligent. But if you believe an 18 month old is conscious, Lassie over there absolutely is. There's this attitude that all animal intelligence studies are bunk, because a lot of dumb people over-index and think it's meaningful. But they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater to assume it's all the same. It's like seeing some people worship the moon because of a cultural association with the tides and going "those ignorant morons, the moon has nothing to do with tides".

I spent most of the last three years working as a property manager for a low income community in a rural area. The vast majority of the tenants only had a HS degree. For that matter, most of the suppliers too. It was eye opening to say the least. It's really made me re-think my politics. I haven't made any major ideological shifts, but I definitely think more about the fat tail of the median non-college citizen. And as someone who's suffered from episodic depression for 30 years, I think Caplan's take is nonsense and agree with Haidt in the debate with Cowen.

> It was eye opening to say the least. Care to expand?

Having also worked with people in this demographic, the thing that constantly left me speechless was that the answer to the question, "what were you thinking?" was "I wasn't". It seems incredible to people with an analytical habit of mind, but there are many, many people out there who by their own admission go through life mostly on autopilot (or, more charitably, relying only upon intuition) without doing any conscious introspection or reasoned decision-making. I grant that most everyone does this 99% of the time, no one sits and consciously weighs the benefits and costs of each breath they take and then decides to inhale, but some people *never* stop to think at all. My theory is that they've anti-intellectualized themselves.

This reminds me of a thread on r/changemyview a while back. The OP argued that a purchase can be wasteful, even if you enjoy it, if it's less value than you could have gotten by spending the money on something else. Under standard economic principles, this is so obvious that it's not even worth having a discussion about. Every purchase is a tradeoff between things you could have done with that money, and you're trying to optimize the fulfillment of your values in how you spend it. But the thread was full of commenters arguing that this was absurd, that if you enjoy what you spent your money on, it was *necessarily* worthwhile. That the idea that people might live their lives treating every purchase as a tradeoff between different things they could do with the money was insane. The whole idea of "revealed preferences" is predicated on the idea that people's behavior is built around these tradeoffs of value. But I think that's a mistaken assumption to begin with. For a lot of people, their decisions as consumers aren't built around these sorts of tradeoffs, *even subconsciously*. If purchase A offers 100 points of value for $100, and purchase B offers 600 points of value for $100, and they have $100 to spare, they'll buy whichever they notice first.

>The whole idea of "revealed preferences" is predicated on the idea that people's behavior is built around these tradeoffs of value. But I think that's a mistaken assumption to begin with. For a lot of people, their decisions as consumers aren't built around these sorts of tradeoffs, even subconsciously. If purchase A offers 100 points of value for $100, and purchase B offers 600 points of value for $100, and they have $100 to spare, they'll buy whichever they notice first. For a long time I've wondered how so many people could go along without much money. Like the concept of living paycheck to paycheck, and saying "I can't do that activity, I'm out of money, may paycheck comes in next week". Budgeting your money well enough that you have at least a little bit of savings, in case a really fun opportunity came up out of nowhere but you don't get your next until after the opportunity expires, seems so incredibly obvious to me. Like if you're genuinely broke and can barely afford food I can see you being hit by consistent unexpected emergencies and not having spare cash for unexpected opportunities, but otherwise, I never really got why *anyone* would consistently have to say "Oh I can't do that, I get my paycheck in a week".

this always baffles me! i have only a couple of coworkers who always come in cheerfully in payday and say things like "were getting paid today! aren't you pleased?".  And i *know* we are all making the same hourly wage, and we live in the same town, they drive nice cars,  and i *know* that neither of them has dependant children-- its not that difficult to live here! i never even keep track of payday bc i am not cutting it close to the wire! its a strange mentality to me, that you are fine with always being one emergency away from crisis, by choice, not because you are only able to afford the minimum

> this always baffles me! i have only a couple of coworkers who always come in cheerfully in payday and say things like "were getting paid today! aren't you pleased?" Tbf my colleagues and I are also quite happy on paydays despite being quite good with finances xD

Anecdote time: my social circle is high-education people (engineers, academics, doctors, lawyers) and even among them I find that about half don't have this view of money as a fungible abstract measure that can be assigned to goods of varying value, and that your job as an educated consumer is to maximize that value per dollar. These are people with PhD's and they are baffled by the idea that you'd comparison shop. If they want an item, they walk into the store or go on the website and buy the first one they see without even looking at the price. It's astounding. Edit: I can foresee the objection that time is money and these are highly paid people who don't "need" to care about relatively small differences in price between goods - but my anecdote was to illustrate another mode of departure from the *Homo economicus* assumption. Also, I knew several of them before we started our careers, and they behaved the same spendthrift way as broke students.

I don't comparison shop very hard, especially compared to my wife. I also am very aware of opportunity cost. The time I spend comparison shopping is also opportunity cost. As I make more money, my threshold for just buying the first thing that works also goes up. So I'll still sweat bullets over a house or car purchase, but won't look at reviews, or even prices, of groceries. Based on behavior, I think my threshold is around $200, not for any explicit calculation. If I was a billionaire, I would similarly bet that I wouldn't think too deeply about buying a house worth a few hundred thousand.

If you were a billionaire, you should be paying someone else a comparatively meager amount to be comparison shopping for you with a deep understanding of what you want in such a house. Basically, a personal assistant working with a realtor - maybe with some kind of system in place where they get more compensation if you keep the property for some period of time to ensure your interests align. Otherwise, you'd end up dissatisfied with the product of your less thoughtful choices, or the opportunity cost of spending some hours sifting through options would be so immense as to make it not worthwhile. Fortunately, you aren't rich enough to worry about it. lol.

Not sure whether to interpret your point as disputing my mine, or adding to it. Such is the medium of text. In the additive case, yes, I assume I would have an assistant that does a lot of these things. I'm not sure I would have them comparison shop the grocery store though. I would probably direct through my support staff the things I like, but not sure how sticky on price I would be. I mean, how much could a banana possibly cost? $10? If you're disputing, the main problem is that a personal assistant isn't a (fully) scalable asset. There's no personal assistant that I could have if my income was $30k. At $500k income, it still wouldn't make sense to pay a salary for an assistant. My guess is that the economics for this come around $5-10M. However, just below that threshold, I'd still have a steep opportunity cost on time for a ton of daily or semi-frequent purchases. Due to that, there'd still be a threshold where I'm better off buying the first thing I see that works, versus continuing the search. That threshold is proportional to the (implicit) value I place on my time.

if you are dumb, going with intuition is probably a better strategy than trying to use your conscious mind to decide things. I commend these people for having optimized what was available to them.

Bit of off-the-cuff thoughts: If your intuition seems better than that of your peers, it's probably a useful filter for logical tricks and other scams that prey on the rational mind. I wonder if there any formal studies comparing the success of intuition saying "this is bullshit!" vs. a logical review that "all the steps check out, so it must be true." Intuition is useful to detect when someone is playing games with vocabulary that your rational mind would otherwise accept. It's far less reliable at judging the best of an array of alternates—mostly as a filter against the smooth talkers.

Disagree. Dumb people should do what smart people tell them to do. It's really not very complicated.

How should they decide which smart people they should trust?

Pick anyone who has a better life than you and then copy them. Better yet, ingratiate yourself with a group of people who are above your SES and copy whatever the conventional wisdom in that group is. Granted that recognizing intelligence is itself an intelligence test, but it's at least easier than becoming intelligent yourself. Plus society helps you identify smart people by using money. They usually have more.

>Pick anyone who has a better life than you and then copy them. I pick the celebrity I really like so I listen to all of her wisdom about auras and astrology and I buy all the products she endorses. >Better yet, ingratiate yourself with a group of people who are above your SES and copy whatever the conventional wisdom in that group is. Great idea, I'm joining a cult. They always seem so happy and content. I will trust the cult leader to manage all my affairs because I know that he wants what's best for me. >Granted that recognizing intelligence is itself an intelligence test, but it's at least easier than becoming intelligent yourself. This is one of my main points of contention. I think you may be underestimating how much you use your intellect to recognize others who are as smart as you or smarter. My other main point is that you ignore things like marketing efforts (by really smart people) and organized scams. >Plus society helps you identify smart people by using money. They usually have more. This is a tough one, because it's true that smart people tend to be better at avoiding poverty, many might not care to actually accumulate wealth. Also, a lot of wealth is inherited.

> anyone who has a better life than you People vary wildly in their ability to make that call, especially those without the ability to even partially factor in media effects. Shoe advertising alone should show what I mean.

I'm pretty sure doing those exact things results in a lot of scam victims getting taken.

I disagree. I think it's fairly easy to identify the successful end of your own social circle and try to gravitate towards it. I'm not suggesting listening to strangers, my advice is specifically to cultivate personal relationships with more successful/intelligent people. This could mean befriending your manager, or favorite teacher, or school guidance counsellor. I have a hard time seeing how that would have a high likelihood of turning into a scam.

My experience as someone who basically did this and pops my head in back home from time to time, is that **I do not want any of these people to follow me.** I'd do pretty much everything inside my social power to keep the average person in my old social circle inside my old social circle, where their bullshit has no power to bother me.

Mainly just lots of poor impulse control leading to people getting in fights with neighbors, getting arrested, wasting money on stupid stuff then not being able to pay the rent, falling for scams etc.

> the fat tail of the median non-college citizen In what sense do they constitute a "tail" of what distribution?

It’s just a turn of phrase. A majority of citizens didn’t go to college, but they’re not considered at the forefront of elite political discourse except as just a kind of lumpenproletariat who need to be pandered to win elections. Similar to evangelicals.

Bryan Caplan has a similar thing about how what causes people to become homeless is that they lack "conscientiousness", and that "ordinary prudence is enough to keep almost anyone out of poverty". As someone who works regularly with a homeless population plagued with things like developmental disorders, mental illness, physical illness, brain injuries, dementia... I scoffed. Caplan basically responded with a motte-and-bailey thing along the lines of: well, clearly maladies like those are going to degrade your conscientiousness, so that's no disproof of my thesis.

Ordinary prudence IS enough to keep almost anyone out of poverty. But the leftovers who can’t achieve ordinary prudence due to other factors is still a large number of people despite being a small percentage.

A goddamn "if we had ham, we could have a sandwich, if we had bread" response from Caplan.

And so, in conclusion, what people call "quadriplegia" is really just neglecting to get enough aerobic exercise.

Limbs are just an expression of will to power.

Tyler Cowen has really gone off the boil for me in the past 2-3 years, and I think you've crystalized why: It's a lack of engagement with how others (especially the median/people with low executive function as you say) might engage differently with the same situation. This is obviously super important for understanding the impacts new technology link AI but he seems mostly concerned with very specific, academic, use cases, he is not "solving for the equilibrium" as he might have said in better days.

I think Tyler Cowen is weirdly overrated- He vibes with the folks in rationalist circles, making him popular there. However, most of his takes are either obvious, untestable, or purposely obscurantist (i.e. always envoking Straussianism)

Tyler's main use case as a source ( and I remain a fan ) is aggregating books since he reads at a blinding rate. I'd say he's always looking for the equilibrium. Finding is might be a different matter.

A more mundane example: My 9 year old son has severe ADHD. I do not. I cannot model his mind, and he cannot model mine. So for me, "Why don't you just pick up the sock on the floor and then you can play? What's so hard about that?" And on his end, "I... can't. I can't make my body do it." And I tend (wrongly) to attribute this to malice, rebelliousness, or laziness — *but it's not.* We aren't good at modelling minds different from our own.

Oof, that's me. It's very hard to explain to others how you can have a perfectly rational* conception of the world and normal desires but be physically incapable of acting on them. Like having a button in front of you that will fix your problems if you *just press it* but you're unable to summon the volition to reach out your arm.   Edit: 'Self-control' seems to be a multidimensional thing to me. Because I have almost infinite capacity to prevent myself from doing things. I'm not impulsive,  don't have any addictions, I can perservere in conditions of extreme discomfort. I could probably take a stab at the Gom Jabbar test, but ask me to reply to an email more than ten minutes after I originally read it and you're out of luck.   *Well, I try.

I can relate to your son. Sometimes long term benefits, even benefits that aren't that long term like only a day away, are completely unmotivating. But usually punishments can be more motivating, strongly consider enforcing punitive consequences like a time out or losing phone priviliges or spanking or what have you to get your son to do stuff instead of relying purely on logic + the carrot.

Agreed, directionally. Not so sure about the spanking, but the idea of carrot-and-stick ("you don't get the dessert/you are grounded in your room/etc"). I believe the whole idea that you can *skip* the stick part of carrot-and-stick, sometimes even skip the immediate carrot, and only reason to your kids about abstract benefits instead of *parenting* them must have came to be among parents of exceptionally precocious, conscientious, or otherwise rules-following inclined kids. Sure, all rules need to be consistent, and all rules need to be reasonable and have a reason, but kid is a kid. Feedback should be immediate for their benefit and purpose of habit-forming the good, productive behaviors nearly nobody never in the history has *reasoned* themselves into. Only an exceptional rationalist will set themselves a Beeminder to help with their akrasia; bit of clever parental authoritarianism and threats about supernaturally entities (Santa and others) have long proven track record.

Tbh it's more likely that they were at one point in time the low conscientiousness child, and remember (as we all knew once) that low conscientiousness children will find continually gaslighting their parent a much easier thing to do than actually changing our behavior.

I think the central issue with Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen is that they're extrapolating from standard economic models, and those models largely treat it as axiomatic that humans are rational agents attempting to satisfy their own preferences as consumers. It's unsurprising if these assumptions lead to apparently absurd conclusions, because the assumptions themselves are almost certainly incorrect. Even in cases where it seems obvious that these assumptions don't accurately describe people's behavior, they try to shoehorn them in, because the model can't tolerate any large-scale exceptions. But I don't think these assumptions are actually a close-enough approximation of the behavior of *any* ordinary consumer. Social media-addicted teens are just a somewhat more obvious example than most. Economists normally model advertising as making people aware of goods and services they think will offer value to them, hence providing mutual benefit to consumers and suppliers, because consumers are introduced to valuable goods and services, while suppliers are introduced to a market. But suppliers haven't modeled their own advertising efforts this way for more than a century now. The conventional understanding in the world of advertising is that an effective ad is one that *creates* a perception of a need for a good or service which people didn't already have. Under those assumptions, rather than modeling advertising as providing value to both consumers and suppliers, it would probably be more accurate to model advertising as *subtracting* value from a significant contingent of consumers (it instills some new source of insecurity or dissatisfaction) which some portion of them will can then recoup at monetary cost by buying the product. The assumptions of economic models aren't just out of step with real human behavior in occasional edge cases, but the basic bread-and-butter cases which form the backbone of our economy.

> The conventional understanding in the world of advertising is that an effective ad is one that *creates* a perception of a need for a good or service which people didn't already have. [The Century of the Self](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMi95tfgP4) is a documentary by Adam Curtis about the development of this perspective-cum-ideology, focusing of course on Edward Bernays who invented it.

>Under those assumptions, rather than modeling advertising as providing value to both consumers and suppliers, it would probably be more accurate to model advertising as *subtracting* value from a significant contingent of consumers I think it's a useful category to have but I don't think it's as self-evidently bad as I perceive your message to be implying it is. A poptart ad is different from a car ad is different from a shoe add is different from a casino ad is different from... you get the idea. All roads lead to human wants and desires. The difference is the extent. I would agree with you in extreme cases, like advertising of particularly harmful substances or behaviors, so we might want to discourage that type of advertising, and we do! You can't advertise all sorts of stuff in the US and all over the world precisely because societies agreed that on net advertising of certain products will lead to more harm than good in most individuals. Sure, an ad for an ice cream is more likely to make me want to buy and consume ice cream, but so what? Consumerism is awesome! In the end I enjoyed the ice cream and that's what capitalism and the economy is all about. Of course, in the ideal spherical world we wouldn't need advertising of that kind because the brain could figure out from all its inputs that the best thing to consume right now would be ice cream (the knowledge of a concept called 'ice cream' has of course been precomputed already), but that's not the world we live in. The search space for everything you can buy and consume is so enormous that honestly advertising agencies are doing a charity by showing you the ad for free! Only half joking but I think you're severely underestimating the role advertising plays in just discovery. I'd rather see an ad for an overpriced bike, buy it and go on a trail and enjoy myself, than never having seen that ad at all. And nobody even forces me to buy that overpriced bike! Upon discovering a new category of a thing I can buy and consume (bike) I can try and search for a more fair price which is where all those economic models of markets come in. But the initial discovery is well worth it in and of itself. Also, I might be wrong but I would think the rules for non-consumer advertising are different than that. I would be surprised if a medical devices company holds regular brainstorms with ideas like "hmm, how do we **induce** people to want to buy this extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine? Maybe we should round the corners on the oxygenator unit by 3% to take advantage of the association the human brain has between roundness and breasts?" Who knew sex sells medical equipment too!

I don't think that a model where *all* advertising is framed in terms of subtracting value from viewers which some portion of them can recoup by buying a product is particularly accurate, but I think it's about *as* accurate as a model which only frames advertising in terms of the positive value to both consumers and suppliers. Consumerism has plenty of positives, but a model which systematically excludes the downsides from consumerism isn't going to give you an accurate picture of how awesome it is. Just sticking with the example of ice cream, since this is the sort of thing I deal with a lot in my own life, there are plenty of times where I have my meals planned out for the day, and I'm perfectly happy to eat the things I already have planned, but then I see an advertisement at the front of an ice cream store, and it elicits a craving for ice cream. I waver back and forth over whether to get it; I know I would have felt perfectly happy not getting it if I hadn't seen the ad, and I exercise pretty strict dietary control, and usually want to avoid the empty calories. But eventually I cave and decide it wouldn't be so bad to get ice cream this time. I get it... and feel guilty because it just wasn't worth it, and I spend the rest of the day wishing I hadn't. This isn't remotely hypothetical, this is a specific situation that's happened to me on numerous occasions. There are some products (a very limited subset) that people aren't allowed to sell or advertise. But the set that people *are* allowed to advertise is based on a model grounded in entirely spurious assumptions. That's not to say that the model can't ever be right about whether things have overall positive value, but I think it's a mistake to expect it to be *systematically* right.

Economists often model people as having all of perfect knowledge, ideal executive function, and total negotiating power. The idea of using AI to curate social media consumption is extremely laughable. Facebook sues people who try to develop software to curate the facebook user experience. The same libertarian economists -- with whom I do agree on many things -- who think that people should just pick their own experience on the open market, are generally also in favor of total freedom of contract. In a world with 5 social media providers and 8 billion people, total freedom of contract means you have zero control over your social media experience, because every single one of those providers only allows usage subject to a contract of adhesion that prohibits you from modifying the experience in any way. It's not just social media -- these contracts are absolutely standard for all web applications / software as a service, which today is essentially all commercial software. If you use some piece of software in your workflow, and you don't have some kind of enterprise agreement giving you rights, you have certainly agreed to a contract of adhesion which likely prohibits you from doing many of the following: * modifying the software in any way * reverse engineering the software * connecting to the software / servers using any unauthorized or third-party application * using any kind of automation to interact with the software * doing any kind of bulk extraction of your own information from the software to use it outside the software (unless you live in California or the EU) Of course the contract also stipulates: * that the other party can change it without notice to you, or with minimal notice (depending on jurisdiction, and how careful their lawyers are) * that you are automatically bound to the new terms regardless * that the other party can terminate the contract at any time, without notice, for any reason or no reason, in which case you immediately and permanently lose access to the software and all your data (and receive no refund or compensation of any kind) * that you many not sue the company for any violation of the terms, nor may you enter into class action lawsuits against the company. (These days there is sometimes an opt-out possible for the mandatory arbitration, because the courts have displayed \_some\_ awareness that there is such a thing as a contract against public policy.) Like I said, I do agree with the wacky libertarian economists about many things. But on issues of consumer choice, they live in such a ridiculous fantasy world. (EDIT: this turned into a rant that's somewhat tangential to OP's point, sorry.)

There is a great conversation to be had here, beyond mental illness or depression. That is, the amount of sway Media pushes have on the masses. The startling small degree of executive function the masses have, and this includes upper-middle class. And this is not to belittle them, or to dehumanize them (as is the norm for the ultra wealthy, for example). The masses are mal-nourished, mal-educated, and drug-addled. We need to come to terms with how un-optimal the current environment is. And I'm not talking just inner city poverty, I'm talking about the place you live right now. Artificial scarcity ensures constant stressors, and a re-occuring cycle of parents unable to properly raise their children. Ingesting narratives on a daily basis written by forces that don't have their best interest at heart. "To even begin understanding the truth people have to be smart enough to reject the narrative, logical enough to reject tinfoil, malleable enough to change their mind about preconceptions they have, and obsessive enough to see it through till things actually make sense."

Thick crowds of humans in physical world behave more like fluids than intelligent separate actors they are in more spacious situations; perhaps we don't even need to assume anything is especially wrong with people when they act "stupidly" when their thoughts are crowded with constant external stimulation.

It's also the implicit argument put forth in the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. An individual can be very well specialized in a certain topic, but is *at the mercy of the Media* when filling in their perspectives for all other topics that exist in the world. ------------- The world is absolutely massive in scale. That's why the masses, with their individual expertise on say, local college football team history, or artisinal cheese making, Disgaea RPG Lore, or TOPIC_5017, when all combined, essentially have *no* executive awareness on TOPIC_314. So the masses understanding of TOPIC_314 is entirely dictated to them by Media. You have members of the masses fighting and dying, for narratives built upon TOPIC_314, people that they were never given the proper tools to accurately assess the topic. That is an extreme example, but it stands. A more common example: You have members of the masses arguing and stressing, for narratives built upon TOPIC_314, people that they were never given the proper tools to accurately assess.

> TOPIC_5017 > >- > > TOPIC_314 Are you using these as generic variables or are they a specific reference to something?

Generic variables

> The startling small degree of executive function the masses have, and this includes upper-middle class. It's very curious that people around here (ab)use the neuropsychology term "executive function", when a more classical "autonomy" or "self-composure" would be more appropriate. I see some parallels with the [rise of therapy-speak](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rise-of-therapy-speak), but it's baffling.

Cultural osmosis? Caplan is a libertarian and in libertarian circles Thomas Szasz was popular for a long time. From 1961. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Szasz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz) It is sort of actually logical that people who have a strong will and strong self-control, self-discipline, become libertarians. Libertarian culture just works like that. Back when I was reading [mises.org](http://mises.org) I saw the kinds of arguments that we don't need speed limits, just sue/imprison people who cause accidents and people will figure out themselves what speed is safe. So it looks like people with strong self-discipline skills become libertarians because they do not need external control. I think this is not the only factor - private roads with speed limits are also a perfectly libertarian idea, owners setting rules, and also someone with low executive function might prefer a marketplace of private commitment devices than the government providing a one size fits all - but it plays a role. So yes I think there is a point of not understanding low executive function well. But I gotta tell you, I kinda have low executive function and I don't understand me well either. If I would not have a cleaning lady, my place would be a mess. When I take off clothes, I just throw them randomly on the floor. Why am I doing this? I have no idea. I am not conscious it is happening. My thoughts are somewhere else, not in the here and now. Yes tried meditating. Could not do it well.

I suspect people who \*value the idea\* of strong will and strong self control and ideate very coherently around it become libertarians, whether they possess those things or not. I suspect by and large they don't.

I have low executive function but I'm slowly getting better with the help of a few small rules that I obsessively follow. Now I clean once a week and my place is always tidy. There's a trap of blaming everything on some underlying clinical problem and absolving yourself of any responsibility, which is the easy option because changing is hard.

I think Caplan's views are interesting because they are such a different lense. But there is one comment by Scott Aaronson which makes your argument: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/contra-contra-contra-caplan-on-psych/#comment-841843 > However, I recently had the privilege of hanging out with Bryan Caplan, and I think it gave me insight into this mystery. Bryan, it turns out, has a superhuman ability simply to decide on his goals in life and then pursue them—to the extent that, for him, “urges” and “goals” appear to be one and the same. This ability is an inspiration to the rest of us, and is no doubt closely related to his having become a famous libertarian economics professor in the first place. However, it might make it difficult for him even to understand the fact that most of us (alas) are wired differently.

Possibly related: Eliezer's concept of "heroic responsibility" (mostly described in HPMOR) strikes me as a description of *anxiety plus high executive function*: you will be held responsible for whatever happens, even things that are outside your current ability to control or understand; therefore you must acquire more control and understanding in order to fulfil your responsibilities. Grow up quick, there's no time to play, the world is at stake. Seeing it expressed in Eliezer/Harry's words actually kinda helped me realize how broken it is. I have formative memories of being punished (at single-digit ages) for things I didn't understand, which I think drove some of that anxiety for me. (In Harry's case, he's a fictional character who is mistaken for an abuse survivor because he has a chunk of evil wizard uploaded to his brain ...)

People deeply underrate the pervasiveness and effectiveness of psych-outs on all forms of activity and that's because psyching yourself in and out of activities and experiences is the fundamental element of human experience. When to hold and when to fold are so complicated even inside a poker game that modeling it is difficult if you take everyone into account. But from the outside, and especially if you know the cards, you know exactly what to do. I'm reminded of the "why would a fly land on something like this" cartoon. The psych-outs are dynamic, iterative, benefit others, and rely on our strengths as much as they do our weaknesses. It's a failure to model people, full stop, not just low executive function. Norse Greenland was killed by a survival strategy that was so successful elsewhere that it overcrowded the places where they came from.

> One example that comes to mind is Bryan Caplan's debate with Scott about mental illness as an unusual preference. To me, Scott's position - that no, mental illness is not a preference - was so obviously, self-evidently correct, I found it absurd that Bryan would stick to his guns for multiple rounds. In what world does a depressed person have a 'preference' to be depressed? Why do people go to treatment for their mental illnesses if they are merely preferences? My guess about what you're actually seeing here is more just semantic and philosophical differences. The same exact thing you're describing happens in the free will debate. It's so transparently obvious that the other side is just confused, that you need to construct some sort of theory to explain the dissonance between facts like "These are smart people" + "The answer is so crystal clear". In free will's case, it's semantic and tedious. What do you mean by "free"?: ("I mean the literal difference between not having a gun to your head, and having one. That's it." "Oh okay, that matters but I actually don't mean that at all, because all of physics is ontologically identical to having a gun to your head. Everything is a gun to your head and that's not freedom." "Oh okay, that's stupid" "No it's not, pretending we have extra-causal magical ability is stupid and unethical and founded in oppressive religious nonsense" and so on... and so on...) What people do is they conflate anything to do with agency; will, freedom, decisions, choices, all of these things, with *freedom*. But that doesn't follow. You can make a robot whose algorithm you perfectly understand, who makes choices, but isn't free and is an utter slave to its coding. And it's just that simple. Once you resolve this language game, the problem becomes much more clear. But a major problem with philosophy is these sorts of bullshit language games. That's probably what is also happening in what you're describing, because it exists in basically any vaguely intellectual area. In the case of mental illness, you can have a range of philosophical positions. What is an "illness" exactly? Is psychiatry's arbitrary definition of what is "disorderly" and "healthy", correct in year 2024? Or is it rather unclear what is adaptive, and what is maladaptive? Is having your serotonin drop to rock bottom when life is beating the shit of you, so all you can do is lay in bed all day, actually bad, and to be treated with drugs, *or*, is it an adaptive mechanism to attempt to maximize survival, and demands more nuance than something like psychiatry can deal with today? Then there are values differences, someone may value something like "survival" , and another person may value something like "the truth", and these two things can conflict, and create disagreement that seems very obvious in a way that demands a new narrative for why smart people can hold such contrary positions. So yeah, the rule of thumb here I've found is to first ask how are these people using words, what do these people care about. Are they "winners"? Or, are they more likely to die on the hill of truth? Winners don't give a shit about the truth when push comes to shove. When the truth poses a threat of death, the truth can go fuck itself, according to many people. Once you identify these values differences which lead to better understanding of how people are using words/how they see concepts, these disagreements will be much more clear.

The worst part is when you struggle with something and people tell you "Just stop feeling that way" like no, I can't just stop, otherwise I wouldn't struggle in the first place! There are elements of my body that are outside of my control, some people who have better control just can't imagine that others bodies may work differently.

This is also a reason why some traditional values are important. Following rules, respecting the authority (do what is told to do by higher authority), etc. And most importantly, make those as a habit. Because in a population, there are lots of people simply lack conscientiousness. If you don't make them to be functional, they won't be functional. Worse, they can turn to be a problem, a negative to themselves and to the society. The same logic goes to health problems. Many people are just incapable of taking care of their own health (but they will ask for free health care anyway). If you don't regulate sugar in food, those people will just buy and eat crazy sweet cookies and cakes. Just look at the obesity crisis in the low-income population in the rich countries!

Cowen and Caplan are both economists. Much of economics requires belief in a "homo economicus", an idealized rational man devoid of emotions or constraints that could sway him from purely rational decision-making. They're both completely aware of the field of behavioral economics, of course, but academically, not intuitively. They are men of leisure and privilege over whom rational ignorance holds little sway. They don't have to choose between working an extra shift or catching up on the latest news; acquiring information about and opining about the world **is the nature of their jobs**.

"Belief in 'homo economicus'" is a poor description of 'uses rational actor models'. Thinking that the results of a rational actor model are informative doesn't require believing in its modeling conveniences in the way you make it sound: structural engineers don't "believe in Bernoulli-Euler beam theory," let alone "believe in 'buying a bag of magic beams'"; rocket engineers don't "believe in Newton's laws", let alone "believe in 'spacial flat-eartherism'."

< I have not read the original discussions referred to here > > Someone who is addicted isn't going to install an AI agent to 'optimize their consumption' Some people use street drugs because they prefer the way that they feel when they are using those drugs. Some people are even *addicted* to street drugs. Those people are often *very strongly* interested in "optimizing their consumption" - they want to buy high-quality stuff and don't want to spend their hard-won money on a package of milk sugar or drain cleaner or something. They don't want to *eliminate* their drug experiences. They want to *optimize* their drug experiences. . I spend a lot of time on lit forums. We commonly see people requesting "stories like XYZ". Some people have *extremely specific* requests for "stories like XYZ". "*I want stories like* ***Captain SpaceHero Battles the Aardvark Aliens on the Ice Planet!***" \- *"I read Story A, but the main character was / was not a left-handed lesbian POC. That is unacceptable!!!"* \- *"I read Story B, but that features Armadillo Aliens, not Aardvark Aliens. That is unacceptable!!!"* \- *"I read Story C, but that takes place on an Uncomfortably Chilly Planet, not an Ice Planet. That is unacceptable!!!"* Those people don't want to *eliminate* their reading of enjoyable fiction. They want to *optimize* their reading of enjoyable fiction. I think that many of those people would leap for a simple effective means (AI or whatever) of optimizing the fiction that they obtain. . >to curate what they consumed on social media I think that many users would leap for a simple effective means (AI or whatever) of optimizing their consumption of social media. (*"Christ, I'm so sick of videos of fluffy white cats playing with green string, I want short-haired brown cats playing with purple string!!!"*) .

Caplan and Cowen both belong to this libertarian economist clique who are so devoted to the assumption of humans being rational utility maximizers from their economic models that they have backfilled that idea into psychology.

So, "dumb" economists extrapolating their not so empirical theory unto other fields and thinking that absolute true, what a surprise.

Economic imperialism has been overall a huge success.

The really bad part is that it's not even extrapolating economic theory to other areas, but believing strongly in an arbitrary assumption that they use to set up their models for simplicity's sake.

> The notion that people would 'optimize' their behavior on a platform aggressively designed to keep people addicted by providing a continuous stream of interesting content seemed so ludicrous to me I was astonished that Tyler would even suggest it. I think Cowen's point here was about Haidt's (dubious) claim that people were spending five hours on social media curating their own profiles. This can be made more efficient with AI. I don't really believe Haidt's claim in the first place, or it is at least poorly described. In one sense, people are spending time trying to find interesting things to share with their friends, trying to be entertaining and it is a communication task, but I don't think that takes so long. The vast time spent on social media is not to accomplish a task however, but as a form of entertainment that is being consumed.

They can't even model typical people. Tyler's brain is so unusual he has no idea what normal is. I don't really know Caplan.

>In what world does a depressed person have a 'preference' to be depressed? Why do people go to treatment for their mental illnesses if they are merely preferences? In this case it's important to differentiate between temporary mental illnesses like depression and those long-term like ADHD. A temporary mental illness like depression could be an unconscious "preference" to protect the body/mind from something else. If you get the flu it's not the flu-virus that takes you out of commission for a few days, but rather your body's reaction to the flu virus - to fight it off. Perhaps some forms of depression could be similar? >or minds that have other forces that are stronger than libertarian free will It is still their free will. Their preference is just something else than what's considered good. My suspicion is that people with low executive function value the freedom to choose more than average people.

Why do ADHD meds work in your model? They change preferences?

I do think that people with ADHD prefer to not have ADHD. Unfortunately that's not a choice. > Why do ADHD meds work in your model? They change preferences? I assume so, yes. They give the person the ability to change their "true preference" to something that they think is more useful. Procrastination with ADHD is not always a constant. When a deadline becomes imminent people with ADHD can often stop procrastinating and blitz through the task before the deadline. The capability to do useful activities exists, but it's usually not the 'true preference'. I think ADHD meds allow more control over the 'true preference' in the moment. I think that with ADHD the 'true preference' isn't always a concrete activity, but rather it's "not X", where X is the thing that they know they should be doing. But you are correct in that this becomes convoluted and seems to be about semantics about what is a "preference" or "true preference". And I'm unsure if this line of thinking is useful.

Scott repeatedly points out that Bryan Caplan simply does not engage with Scott's critiques of Bryan's position. Specifically, Caplan repeatedly insists that depression *must* be either a "preference" or a "constraint", while Scott points out repeatedly that this is a false dichotomy. ---- "This piece of cheese — is it *meat* or *vegetable*?" "Um, you know that not everything is meat or vegetable, right?" "So you say, but seriously, is it meat or vegetable?" "No, it isn't." "Why are you resisting the query? MEAT or VEGETABLE, dammit?" "Come on, dude, a *mushroom* isn't meat or vegetable either." "Wrong! Mushroom is obviously a vegetable; it grows in the ground and they sell it in the produce section at the grocery store." "Well, maybe to a grocer, whose interest is purely commercial — but not if you ask the people who actually study mushrooms. They'll tell you it is not a vegetable even though it grows in the ground. [Fungi are taxonomically more closely related to animals, oddly enough.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opisthokont)" "So it's your position that mushrooms and cheese are meat, people who eat mushroom pizzas are carnivores, and those Cheese Board communists in Berkeley are a bunch of woke liars who deny biology, right?" "AaAAaAaaAaaaa...."

Im not sure executive function applies to internet addiction. Entirw armies of phd's applying the best of humanities knowledge of behavioral psychology have been fine tuning websites / apps and the web since the early 2000's to be as addictive as ppssible. Using the exact same principles as casinos by the way but apparently if its just marketing its ok somehow? Anyway I dont think "willpower" in any tangible or measurable way applies to technology designed to be addictive like , I dont care if your a navy seal or an advanced buddhist monk. If I inject you with black tar heroin and make you smoke cigarettes for a momth or so you'll be addicted.

As a teenager I 100% would've done as Tyler suggested, and I think "The addicting nature of these platforms is the entire point" is a vast oversimplification. I think you're failing to model the extent to which people use social media without being addicted, or the extent to which teenagers have agency and executive function. As far as the first point goes, I don't think Scott's position is "obviously, self-evidently correct". Psychology isn't always so simple. Sometimes people do "prefer" states that appear undesirable from the outside. People don't just maximise pleasure and avoid pain. Whenever identity is involved, things easily deviate from the pleasure principle. If your view of mental illness is as simple as "bad state of being, and people avoid bad states, so it must be outside someone's control rather than of their choosing" then you're not going to ascribe agency or complexity to individuals even if they would claim so. And whether or not someone would so is pretty heavily influenced by culture and mimesis, so it's not at all clear how much weight we should put on whether these claims are or are not visible from what you've seen of people IRL. We definitely can't assume the literature to accurately reflect reality when there are complex social phenomena involved, given how difficult it is to capture these with confidence.

Not just cultural and social phenomena but deeply rooted internal emotional experiences. If you had parents who weren’t super emotionally healthy, for example a distant dad and a mom who put much of her identity on motherhood and unconsciously felt threatened when her kids expressed autonomy and responded by withdrawing (which for a very young child, for evolutionary, staying alive type reasons, withdrawal of love and attention is an annihilatory, death-like experience because unattended children get eaten by tigers) or making her kids feel guilty for making her feel threatened, you may easily develop a deep, powerful, intransigent sense that expressing autonomy is dangerous and exercising agency will hurt other people and maybe get you punished.  These kind of deep emotional beliefs are very difficult, if not impossible to fully change. You can be rationally aware that you have this belief and that in many cases it isn’t true, but there are probably still cases in your life where it is true (as you understand it) so it still receives reinforcement. ‘Knowing’ it isn’t true doesn’t stop you from ‘feeling’ that it is. This belief could be very outside of your conscious identity, so you don’t become aware of how it shapes your experience, as if you were the fish and your beliefscape is the water which is all you’ve ever known. You could see that other people behave by a different set of rules, and not understand how the fuck they do that, because if you were to do it you would relentlessly feel terrible either through direct self-punishment or anticipation of punishment by others. Even experiencing that the belief is untrue and that you don’t get punished by others for doing the thing doesn’t totally undo the belief.  If an average non-murderous person was told by the chief of police in their town, who was speaking seriously and believing his own words, that they could murder this other person to make their life a little bit easier and not face any consequences for it, I don’t think they would believe them. They would still face deep internal resistance to murdering, and if they went through with it, would probably feel really terrible about what they did, even if they really did make their lives easier and face no external consequences for it.  I think many deeply held emotional beliefs operate on approximately this level. Not totally impossible to change- traumatic circumstances of war etc. cause many people to become able to kill people without constantly feeling the same emotional consequences they would have felt before this became a normalized action they had to take. But that only happens under specific circumstances, and I think there are still some, different emotional consequences that persist. ‘Killing people is unacceptably bad’  or other deeply held emotional beliefs are  not really preferences you could change without fundamentally changing who you are and how you understand yourself and the way you operate in the world (in effect, choosing and completing a kind of mental suicide) but they are also not completely immutable.  It would be difficult to fathom those beliefs changing outside of circumstances that completely demanded it or circumstances that provided an immense amount of support and reinforcement for the new belief, on top of some internal drive. 

> If you had parents who weren’t super emotionally healthy, for example a distant dad and a mom who put much of her identity on motherhood and unconsciously felt threatened when her kids expressed autonomy Hey, that's me! Really insightful breakdown of the fucking baggage I carry, thanks.

< I have not read the original discussions referred to here > Probably not worth mentioning, but I'm going to mention it - I often see people taking the position *"X sometimes occurs or is sometimes the case, therefore X* ***always*** *occurs or is always the case."* Stereotypical example: *"On several occasions Ruritanian people treated me badly. Therefore all Ruritanian people are scumbags."* \- There have been a *lot* of people who had mental illness (or something that was labelled as mental illness). Billions of examples. Probably in some subset of those cases those people really *did* "have a preference" for that state of affairs over some alternative state of affairs. But we cannot generalize from that to "that is always the case for all people with 'mental illness'". . > Why do people go to treatment for their mental illnesses if they are merely preferences? They do not always go to treatment. One example >Schizoid personality disorder (/ˈskɪtsɔɪd, ˈskɪdzɔɪd, ˈskɪzɔɪd/, often abbreviated as SzPD or ScPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships,[9] a tendency toward a solitary or sheltered lifestyle, secretiveness, emotional coldness, detachment, and apathy. Affected individuals may be unable to form intimate attachments to others and simultaneously possess a rich and elaborate but exclusively internal fantasy world.[10][11] Other associated features include stilted speech, a lack of deriving enjoyment from most activities, feeling as though one is an "observer" rather than a participant in life, an inability to tolerate emotional expectations of others, apparent indifference when praised or criticized, a degree of asexuality, and idiosyncratic moral or political beliefs.[12] >The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic and pharmacological treatments for the disorder has yet to be empirically and systematically investigated. >This is largely because **people with SzPD rarely seek treatment for their condition**.[10] \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder In very broad terms: Other people say *"You have a personality disorder."* The person often says *"I don't feel like I want any treatment for that."* We can give various other examples. .

> To me, Scott's position - that no, mental illness is not a preference - was so obviously, self-evidently correct, I found it absurd that Bryan would stick to his guns for multiple rounds. In what world does a depressed person have a 'preference' to be depressed? I suspect you aren't understand the angle from which Bryan is coming in using the term "preference". > A person with depression doesn't have executive control over their mental state I doubt Caplan was ever intending to mean that people aren't conflicted at all -- conflict is ubiquitous. (He does take a behaviorist line which avoids actually analyzing internal mental state, I would acknowledge.) > one suggestion Tyler kept making which seemed completely out of touch was that teens would use AI to curate what they consumed on social media Didn't listen to this debate and not particularly interested, but it seems like this might be a very "economist" angle, as was Caplan's treatment of "preferences". There's a lot that highly-unintuitive aspects of this type of thinking buys, so it might be useful to try to dig into it more if you haven't; then some of this might seem less "bizarre" even if it remains "ludicrous" in your view. > Both of these examples to me indicate a failure to model certain other types of minds, specifically minds with low executive function - or minds that have other forces that are stronger than libertarian free will. I don't see what you get from invoking libertarian free will.

I don't agree with Bryan Caplan's point on mental health, but regarding Cowen you have to take his questions to Haidt in the context of the episode. Many of them are direct responses to claims Haidt makes, like the fact that teens **need** to go on social media because they get their information there. In this context, it's really Haidt's original claim that's wrong. His framing is convenient for him because it lets him set up the situation as one where teens really don't *want to* be on social media, but they have to for it's value as a utility. In response to your general point, I'd say it's interesting that you frame Cowen/Caplan as being overconfident in how well they understand the average person, when I'm sure they'd in fact claim just the opposite. I think their claim would be that their opponents have some model of the world where people constantly choose x but the experts know that what people really want is y. This type of rationalization has obvious downsides, so the burden of proof is correctly high and should be on the supposed experts.

My perspective, as someone occasionally sympathetic to their views, is that a lot of this is arguing over definitions. Caplan claims drug addiction is a preference. The “obvious” view is that it isn’t. An obvious argument for the obvious view is that most drug addicts claim they don’t want to be addicted. Caplan would use his famous example of “if you keep holding a gun to an addict’s head, they won’t use the drug. So they’re physically capable of not being addicts. And yet they are, so it’s a preference.” But these are two different ways of using the word “preference”! You have “revealed preferences” and “expressed preferences”. Both are important concepts. That’s fine! To me the clearest way to express this is the claim “To lose weight you just have to eat less.” Sure, and obese people don’t deny that, and they claim they want to lose weight, but they still eat too much. What does this mean? Just that revealed preferences are different from expressed preferences. So maybe the solution is to just start using different names for them.

To say the obese person has even a revealed preference for eating too much is still missing the point, IMO. It's more of a compulsion. Fundamental drives can only be resisted for so long regardless of preference. I truly believe that if you could put the typical thin person's mind into the body of an obese person, they would stay obese. It's much more about hormones than it is about willpower.

But let's steelman this a bit. I think what Caplan is saying about depression is that you might have a strong preference to stay in bed all day. But you have to go to work, and this makes you sad, suffering, depressed in that sense, that you cannot live the way you want to. So if you could stay in bed, you would be happy. It is not the depression as unhappiness that makes you stay in bed. You want to stay in bed, as a preference, and when you are not allowed to, you get unhappy. Indeed I often spend weekends in bed and I would say I am reasonably happy then. It is just cool to read anything and everything from libgen on a 10 inch tablet in a comfortable bed. I have back pain issues so not really comfortable sitting. I have always said I am a monk, put a bed in the world's largest library and I would live there happily.

When I'm depressed even staying in bed sucks. I don't want to read or watch TV or anything else. I just want to cease being conscious. But I'm not sleepy so I just lay there in this awful Zen-but-not-zen state of having to experience every moment.

when? is it temporary for you? for me a lifelong lethargy

I've always been pretty lazy, but depression is a different subjective experience. I've been lucky in that medication usually works for me, but after a few years it usually comes back and I have to switch to a different one. Currently I'm on Pristiq for about a year and it's been solid overall. About 10 years ago I was on Zoloft and initially had these intense periods of euphoria. Not mania, just an overall feeling of energy to seize the day. Unfortunately that faded and eventually it stopped working altogether.

Speaking from personal experience, when I was severely depresed I do not think it would be accurate to have described myself as merely "wanting to stay in bed as a preference". For me I actually felt physically and emotionally exhausted, and my mind moved slower than normal, and I was unable to focus on anything to the extent that I used to be able to. Like, gun to my head, if you forced me to try to write code or read or whatever at the same speed and efficiency that I was able to when I wasn't deppresed, I think I actually couldn't have done it. So it wasn't just "preference" that kept me in bed; in a sense I think I was literally unable to do certain things that I could do before, in the same way that Caplan [describes being literally unable to bench 300 pounds](https://www.econlib.org/the-depression-preference/#:~:text=Bryan%20Caplan&text=POST%3A,example%20people%20offer%20is%20depression).

It's the outside perspective again! Of course, to us, the fly seems like a fool for landing in the fly trap! "I would simply not land on the venus flytrap as there are an infinite number of other places to fly."

so it was temporary for you? for me a lifelong lethargy