Advantageous Trades Vastly Outnumber Strict Upgrades

Why do we stereotype politicians as being liars? No, really! Why do dishonest, slimy, used car salesman types keep bubbling to the top of every electoral system? You would think that the most appealing candidates would be people of integrity, saints that radiate blinding virtue from their angelic face like a madonna. Instead we have… you know… these guys.

Survivor: A Case Study

A little over a month ago I told my wife I’d like to have a tv show we can watch together. I had noticed that every evening we both retreated into our own little hyper-personalized algorithmic entertainment bubbles. I feared our household might begin to replay the broader atomization that the algorithm has wrought in our society, leaving us bereft of a shared culture to draw upon. Finding a show to watch was no easy task—our tastes have little overlap. Eventually we settled on Survivor as something mutually palatable: I was interested in the social game theory and she was interested in the wacky personalities colliding with each other. We’ve watched 2 seasons now and I think it’s pretty high quality (at least the “good seasons” are) as far as reality TV goes. Unfortunately, I have also learned that I don’t really like reality TV. So maybe it’s back to the drawing board.

What was this essay about again?

Oh yeah! There’s this thing that happens quite frequently (at least in the two seasons I’ve seen) in the show when people are arguing over who to vote out: Alice really wants them to vote out Bob. So Alice tells Charlie that Bob is the spawn of Satan and needs to be gone yesterday. This is after three weeks of her treating Bob completely normal/forgetting he even exists. But now he’s the worst thing since unsliced bread and also guaranteed to win if he doesn’t get voted out right now.

Now Charlie is kind of impressionable and listens intently to all of Alice’s rationale and maybe does some higher level analysis to try to figure out how it advantages her to feel this way but ultimately treats her concerns as worth reasoning with. So Charlie might raise his own concern: doesn’t Bob going home weaken their position against Danielle? Doesn’t Bob not pose that much of a physical threat and could be easy to vote out later? Isn’t Bob unpopular with the jury and basically a non-threat? Or something of that nature. Alice has the choice to validate Charlie’s insight, at least pretend to consider it, and let the conversation shift to a debate over pros and cons. But Alice won’t ever do such a thing, because she can’t show any wavering in her conviction. She can’t yield a single inch lest she open up space for somebody else to begin building a narrative. It’s very straightforward Frame Control. Sometimes it seems to work out for Alice and she succeeds in coordinating the Charlies to remove Bob, other times it seems getting bossed around really annoys the Charlies and they decide to rid themselves of Alice instead. Such is life on a deserted island surrounded by your enemies.

But it reminds me of the way politicians respond to a reporter challenging a claim they made or a policy they proposed. You basically never see a politician entertain a possible world where they are not completely correct about everything and implementing their policies will not strictly better the lives of every being in the universe. That would be poor strategy. The Nash Equilibrium in popularity contests appears to be just spewing ridiculous levels of optimism and confidence. But in implementation that’s not how politics works or has ever worked. Policy has winners and losers. Maybe you think the losers deserve it or they’ll be fine or whatever other neutralization theory you want to deploy. But the losers exist. There are downsides.

Professionals and Convicts

We didn’t put lead in our gasoline because we wanted to make America dumber and more criminal. We did it because tetraethyl lead was an extraordinarily cheap way to suppress pre-detonation, enabling straightforward engine designs that didn’t have to account for all these unwanted explosions going on in the wrong places. Likewise, banning leaded gasoline was not an easy win in any sense. The most economical alternative to get the octane level up was ethanol, which is corrosive to engines not designed with it in mind. The alternatives to ethanol are all quite a bit more expensive. So you’re dooming all old cars to corrosion and/or higher gas prices for what exactly? Oh yeah, no more vaporized neurotoxins in the air. Ugh, I guess it was a smart move despite the costs.

Ok, so I’m just repeating what Eliezer says (though he distractingly seems to presuppose that his reader is a libertarian) in Policy Debates Should Not Appear One Sided. Nevertheless I feel that he does not go far enough to apply this prescription outside of politics and consider its implications. Essentially every action any agent takes is a trade of resources and time in pursuit of some greater reward. But the way we talk about these actions often utilizes the same vocabulary and framing as the politicians.

I’ve argued that overconfidence in object-level facts represents a defection that drags down any conversation, political or not. I’ve also advocated for seriously examining (and maybe even stealing) good ideas that come from disagreeable sources. I think all of these subjects I keep coming back to are in response to the outsized amount of human attention devoted to domestic politics (which I have suggested paying little mind for your own sanity except maybe when it’s time to literally cast a vote) as well as narrative media rooted in highly simplified abstractions of the real world. Like it or not, these media diets have an ability to influence your thinking in every domain unless you consciously posture yourself against them. But we can develop a posture against them and be better for it.

So we’ve already identified why a politician can’t acknowledge a drawback to their policy, but what do I mean about the narrative media?

The Monomyth

Life… it’s long and complicated. These are the stunning and original insights you come to me for. You’re never going to capture life in full resolution in a piece of media because your work needs to take less than a lifetime to consume. So you’re going to need to cut some corners, which is fine and expected. One shortcut that has always played well with audiences who don’t want to think too hard while they’re trying to relax and enjoy some entertainment is black-and-white morality and utility. Cutting out the long gray middle that defines all the complexity of life improves your plot’s legibility, allowing you to pull off compelling narrative mechanisms like dramatic irony. The core of dramatic irony really comes down to the viewer yelling “No! Don’t do that!” at the character which requires the viewer to know that “that” is bad. It doesn’t work out quite as well when it’s like “Uh… are you sure you should do that? The downsides could potentially outweigh the upsides?” because the desired emotions are not felt nearly as strongly. While there are ample chances for fictional protagonists to put themselves in a strictly worse situation by entering a haunted house, reality usually isn’t quite so simple.

Your character just leveled up! What aspect of life does an RPG’s level try to to capture and abstract? Experience, gained over time and tension. But does it also capture the things time and tension take away from you? Your youth, your dynamism, your health, that sparkle in your eye? The uncomfortable reality many people must grapple with as they grow older is that we gain very few experience points in the course of life, and mostly spend our time reallocating them, letting some muscles grow while others atrophy. This is something that can be quite stable—even beautiful, but only if one is clear-eyed about the cost of grinding XP in the first place. Otherwise you’ll wake up one day being able to bench 250 lbs and speak fluent Latin and discover your marriage is in shambles.¹

These abstractions are really cool and fun. Nevertheless, they completely shatter the moment they enter reality. So how do we overcome their influence and keep our epistemics realistically grounded? We can just stop paying attention to the politicians, but what if we still want to be able to partake in narrative media? I don’t pretend to have all the answers (ok well maybe sometimes I do), but I think the solution might lay somewhere in analysis and criticism. One can consume them alongside the media they critique, maybe thoughtfully generating one’s own analyses. By subjecting our media diet to the dialectic and denying it the unipolarity it desires, we can really take the edge off the cognitohazard that is a compelling narrative. I intend to write more about this later.

The Political is Personal

Once you’ve freed yourself from the strict upgrader mindset and start thinking in terms of what you’re willing to trade, you’re going to have more interesting conversations. Yielding points against your proposed solutions makes your interlocutor—accustomed to, nay traumatized by a public discourse characterized by an ever-widening gap between two parallel cultural realities—lower the defenses and retract their claws.

But how well your fun arguments over hypotheticals go is pretty low stakes. There’s a far more important endeavor to deploy the trader’s mindset against: your life! As you seek advice for big decisions you’re probably going to find a lot of people approach the subject with a politician mindset, choosing their favored option and only giving air to its positives. This is a great signal that you should probably ignore them and find somebody who is actually interested in an honest accounting of pros and cons for both options.

By forcing yourself to face the drawbacks of your favored outcomes, you can keep doors open that would otherwise swing shut, and conversely avoid potential traps that will ripple through the rest of your life. Your dedication to school and your hobbies, the college you go to, the profession you pursue, the people you date, the groups you join and identify with, the way you handle money. The paths through these junctures are entirely non-obvious, but the choices you make will have major consequences for decades to come. The same is true in your career. When advocating for a certain business or product strategy, an exhaustive reckoning of benefits and drawbacks will signal that you understand what you’re talking about and that your solution has been thoroughly considered.

There’s a very powerful algorithm called the simplex method that is used to solve optimization problems where you wish to maximize an objective while bound by a set of constraints. Practicing some optimization problems (the math involved is usually quite simple!) can teach you a deep truth about the nature of trading between outputs, and give you the intuition to seek Pareto frontiers rather than absolute winners.

Traders will always beat upgraders basically everywhere except maybe the morale department. And maybe there too, when the inevitable shattering of unrealistic expectations really steals the wind out of the upgrader’s sails (see: the approval ratings of every US president over time). And maybe most importantly of all for me, trader mindset helps me keep my mouth shut about recommending a course of action before I’ve properly ascertained my advisee’s values and priorities. But to you dear reader I can heartily recommend this: stop looking for strict upgrades and start looking for advantageous trades. You will find trades are everywhere (some suggestions for locations to look for advantageous trades you can make right now: the gym, the church, your desk), just waiting for someone canny enough to pay their price.

Post Scriptum: Recommended Trades for the Novice Trader

There’s a concept in investing called alpha, which represents your edge over the market. If you accept the broad claim of the Efficient-market Hypothesis—that essentially all information gets priced into the market faster than you can consistently take advantage of it—then genuine alpha is worth its weight in gold. Alpha, grit, and product-market fit are the ingredients billion dollar startups are made of.

Alpha is not given away lightly, but I’m going to give you some right now in the form of trades you can make in your life that can multiply a small investment into a far greater benefit. You might call them “life hacks”.

1. Offset Your Schedule

Public and private infrastructure are built to just barely handle peak load. If you are not optimizing against this, you will likely spend a lot of your time waiting around in some sort of rush hour at the gym, on the highway, at the coffee shop. If you have any way to control your schedule, just shifting your waking hours forward or backward two hours can reap enormous time savings as you become offset from the peak hours. For me, waking up around 5:30 means my bus is less crowded, I arrive at work faster, the gym is less crowded, and I can have some focused productivity before all my coworkers show up. The cost of losing some free time at night and a bit of extra bleariness in the morning is something I’m very willing to pay.

2. Exile Your Phone

Your phone is the worst anti-sleep pill ever invented and it should be all the way across the house, far far away from your bedroom. Bonus: you have to get up and walk some distance to shut off the alarm, which wakes you right up.

3. Get a Water Bottle

Getting in the habit of carrying a water bottle around will naturally make you drink more water. I will not exhaustively list all of the benefits of hydration here, but an underrated one is that having to pee all the time makes you stand up and walk frequently which blunts the health impact of long sedentary periods.

4. Stop Getting Angry at Fake Things Online

Deleting your social media apps and ignoring the news are actions I’ve advocated for that can reclaim time which you can now spend on more fruitful endeavors at the cost of some temporary (but major) dopamine withdrawal and no longer feeling “with it”.

5. Keep Surfaces Clear

Seek to aggressively limit the number of objects that “live” on any surface in your home, be it your floor, counters, tables, desks, shelves, or windowsills. Clutter impedes cleaning, hides dust and grime, and can even be hazardous. People with clean houses have clear surfaces, because you can’t clean what you can’t see or reach.

6. Escape the Matrix

Many consumer behaviors are psyops, but you can choose to break the cycle by waking up to your own propagandization. You don’t need concessions at the movie theatre, you don’t need to pay $5 for a 10¢ fountain drink at a restaurant—in fact you don’t ever need to drink soda—you don’t need a mined diamond for your wedding ring, you don’t need to pay extra money for ordinary quality clothes backed by a big marketing budget (and if you still really want them you can just get the “fake” version and literally nobody will know or care), and you don’t ever need to doordash!!! If your kids grow up believing that drinking soda is cringe (and hopefully pass that disdain down to their kids) then you’ve just created several DALYs out of thin air (repeat for nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, etc etc).

7. Write to Think

Writing about your thoughts and feelings is the best way to exercise your powers of metacognition, which is the secret sauce to ever changing your behavior or mindset. If you actually want to implement any of these suggestions, you probably ought to write about it first.