Constrained Bliss Point

Biases should be avoided if one is trying to do objective science. Some biases are relatively easy to see, like race or sex discrimination. Others are harder to combat, or even to identify. On a related note, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive list of cognitive biases if anyone is interested.

I’ve found one that’s very, very sneaky. I call it “measurability bias”, which I’m pretty sure I read somewhere but now I forget the exact reference. It comprises a few similar phenomena. For one, it is a tendency for researchers — notably those who pride themselves as scientists — to spend more time and resources focusing on problems where data are readily available, rather than what they identify as the most interesting or important problems.

A more general conception of measurability bias is when a decision maker weights more heavily the set of things that are quantitatively or accurately measurable when making decisions. For example, when Oreos increase in price by 20%, that’s very easy to see, but I’m not as good at noticing if the increase in quality leads to a greater-than-20% increase in the satisfaction I derive from said Oreos.

Cost-benefit analyses suffer from this bias a great deal. For example, in the case of climate change, the costs of carbon reduction programs are known relatively accurately, whereas things like the mitigated risk from rising sea levels, loss in biodiversity, chronic water scarcities in developing countries, etc. are much harder to measure. In this case, measurability bias is used as an excuse to do nothing — since the costs are large and the benefits are uncertain, we should defer climate stabilization policies.

The point to take away is that just because something is difficult to quantify does not mean it is not incredibly important.

The economics of slavery is an incredibly interesting topic to me. More accurately, what I imagine “the economics of slavery” entails is very interesting, as I have only begun studying it, and only at an amateur level.

And what got me started thinking about the economics of slavery? Robots. Specifically the movie “I, Robot”. I’m a fan of imagining in vivid detail post-apocalyptic futures, and a robot revolution is up there with a Class 4 zombie outbreak. At the end of that movie, the overtones of Sonny freeing a generation of robot “slaves” got me thinking about the economic distinction between capital and labor (I was taking a class in intermediate macroeconomics at the time).

If we had an entire workforce of humanoid robots doing things that people usually do, what would this make the economy look like? Traditional economics would probably treat the robots as capital. But then your capital is kind of producing labor, and that is weird. The only other time that happens (that I can think of) is slavery.

I still think it’s insane that people used to own people. But, from a strictly analytical perspective, if people are owning people (and not just purchasing their labor from them), doesn’t it make sense to treat owned people as capital? There are similarities, like people tend to depreciate rather quickly if you don’t feed them and give them shelter. I read somewhere that slavery is the only time when capital and labor are equal.

I guess I’m still not convinced that there should be a tight delineation between capital and labor. Need to look into that in the future.

My previous post described peoples’ aptitude to anchor themselves and their expectations to one particular perspective. This post explores a consequence of this aspect of the human condition.

I believe people have a comparative advantage in giving other people advice. That is, when you need to shift your perspective, it’s almost certain you’d do better to elicit someone else’s help than to try doing it yourself. A consequence of easy acclimatization is a difficulty in shifting one’s perspective.

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck for some reason, like you’re in a rut, and then you have a really good conversation with someone, and suddenly you’ve found a new direction? And then maybe you think back to the advice, and you realize that it was just appropriately-timed platitudes. You probably would have given your friend the same exact advice if he were in your situation. You just needed someone else to step outside your box, look inside, and tell you what they saw.

You could probably even build a platitude machine and program it with a good enough algorithm to give you all the perspective you need. If the machine responded with the right truisms in the right order, you’d have instant perspective. Until we engineer something that awesome, I guess we’re stuck with people.