Tag Archives: Work

Real Drama

By Robin Hanson · February 3, 2013 4:40 pm · Comments (20)

I’ve now seen all nine of the 2013 Best Picture Oscar nominees. Metacritic.com rates Zero Dark Thirty highest at 95, but gives second highest at 94 to my favorite, Amour. (Intrade gives Argo, rated 84, a 72% chance, and Lincoln, rated 86, a 23% chance, to win.)

There’s an apt old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Which highlights the fact that while we like stories with drama, we don’t actually want drama in our lives. If you ignore the very end, and the fact that the characters are very high status artists, Amour is quite realistic and by far the drama most likely to actually be experienced by many of you. Which is why most folks don’t like it, because they don’t actually want to see realistic ordinary drama.

Amour is about a women who gets sick and then dies. I was stuck by the fact that what most bothered her and her husband were the insults to her pride. They could mostly handle the pain, the drudgery, and the loss of opportunity. But the loss of status, oh that stung.

I was struck by something similar lately while reading the classic Studs Terkel book Working, in which dozens of ordinary workers tell how they feel about their jobs. While they sometimes complain about being bored or tired, they seem mostly ok with this. What really bothers them is when other people don’t give them as much respect or pay as they think they deserve. Again, it is status that seems to drive them most.

I found this quote interesting:

I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, “See, that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.” Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to. (Studs Terkel, Working)

I’d guess that if building makers could get this if they were willing to take a 5% pay cut to pay for it, and that it doesn’t happen because such workers don’t want it that much. Anyone know how much of a pay cut people take to get their name in the credits of a movie? How much of a pay cut to get your name shown as author of a novel? Do artists care more about getting visible public credit more than construction workers? If so, why?

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Impatient Idealism

By Robin Hanson · October 31, 2012 8:00 am · Comments (37)

Humans have long lives. We are unusually dependent on our parents when young, and we then slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. Most of the time we are aware of this. For example, we count on our peak earning years by taking out loans as young students, and later saving for retirement. And we prefer leaders at those peak ages.

But when people get idealistic, they tend to forget this. Young idealists often ask me and others what they can do to most help the world. Which is a fine question. But such folks tend to be impatient – they want to know how to most help the world in the next few years, not over their lifetime. So when they consider joining an idealistic project, they focus more on whether the project will succeed than on what skills and contacts they would acquire.

Yet young folks shouldn’t expect to have their biggest influence when young. Yes young folks have higher variance, and so sometimes get very lucky, but they should expect to prepare and learn while young, and then have their biggest influence in their peak years. Why such a short term focus? Especially since idealism should if anything induce a far view. Yes young folks are often short-sighted, but why be more so about altruism than about school, relationships, etc.?

This seems related to the puzzle of why people don’t leverage the power of compound interest to donate to help the future needy, instead of today’s needy. Some argue that the future won’t have any needy, or that helping today’s needy automatically helps future needy, at a rate growing faster than investment rates of return. I’m pretty skeptical about both of these claims.

One plausible explanation is that a habit of extra youthful altruism evolved as a way to signal one’s attractiveness to potential associates. People tend more to form associations when young, associations that they tend more to rely on when old. And potential associates like to see altruism, because it correlates with generosity and cooperation (as near-far theory predicts). But if you save money to help the future needy, or if you invest now in skills useful in future idealistic projects, that is less clearly a signal of altruism, because you might later change your mind and use that money or those skills for other purposes.

So to signal your youthful idealism to potential associates, you must spend the money and time now, even if such spending is less effective toward the idealistic cause. But hey, at least the cause gets something.

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On Play Hell

By Robin Hanson · October 13, 2012 9:00 am · Comments (40)

Our activities split into work and play. And positive and negative extremes are described as heavens and hells. So there are four possible work-play extremes: work heaven, work hell, play heaven, and play hell.

Among common scenarios we discuss and imagine, we know of many work hells, such as galley slaves. We have fewer work heavens, such as where one gets work credit for a play-like activity. We also have a great many play heavens. But we rarely talk about play hells.

But consider: it might take you years to find out that you are embarrassingly bad at your chosen hobby or sport. The radical science theory you pursue for decades could just be just wrong. You might go out dancing every evening hoping to catch someone’s attention, only to always see him or her go home with someone else. Your so-called best friend could spread nasty rumors about you. Your kids could despise you. Your lover could cheat on you. You could get divorced. These are play hells, most every bit as hellishness as typical work hells.

In the US today, only 14% (24/168) of adult hours each week are devoted to formal work. Since we devote far more time to play than work, I’d guess that most of the actual hells around us are play hells. Yet such play hells seem neglected. There are far fewer charities devoted to helping folks cope with them. And there are far fewer regulations designed to reduce them. The law also slights them – rarely can one sue about harms that arise from romance and friendship. Storybook heroes sally off to rid the world of work hells far more often than play hells.

I suspect we inherited this tendency from our foragers ancestors. Foragers have many rules about fights, hunts, and sharing the product of work, but far fewer rules on romance and friends. To foragers, work was more overt, play more covert.

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Why Not Agents For All?

By Robin Hanson · August 5, 2012 2:00 pm · Comments (17)

Top actors, writers, and athletes have agents, who help them find good jobs, in exchange for a small part of their income. But having an agent is pretty rare – why don’t the rest of us have agents?

You might think its only worth paying an agent 5% of your income for jobs where wages vary by large factors, and that most people’s wages are pretty much set by their occupation, education, etc. Not true, however. Consider: workers in the same occupation, with the same observable experience, school, etc. can easily earn 30% more, or 30% less, just based on the industry they work in. For example, in the auto industry both janitors and truck drivers make twice the salary of janitors and truck drivers in the “eating and drinking place” industry. (More on industry wage differences below.)

Having an agent can also signal high quality, as agents usually won’t represent low quality folks. Also, while prior employers, often avoid being honest about your prior experience to potential future employers, agents can have incentives to be more honest, being repeat players with reputations to protect.

For an interesting example of ordinary people with “agents”, consider Giving What We Can (GWWC), an organization that “asks members to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities.” Since GWWC wants to promote charity donations, it wants its members’ to have high incomes, all else equal. So affiliated folks advise members on how to find better paying jobs. If they put enough effort into this, I can believe members might actually earn more on net than they otherwise would, even after accounting for their 10% charity donation.

That promised info on industry wages differences: Continue reading "Why Not Agents For All?" »

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What Is Your Sermon?

By Robin Hanson · July 22, 2012 12:00 pm · Comments (18)

Here is a simple model of intellectuals. It is wrong, but insightful:

  1. Intellectuals discover insights, and better intellectuals find more and better insights.
  2. Insights can be ranked by net value of personal effort. This net value includes how much it would matter if the idea was taken more seriously, and a person’s marginal ability to achieve this.
  3. Insight value falls with the number of others well placed and motivated to pursue an idea, and by the effectiveness of effort to sustainably change opinions on the subject. Value tends to fall with costs to explain and explore a subject, and with the previous efforts already made.
  4. Insights vary greatly in value. Topics vary in how unequally distributed are their insight values, and with the potential for very large values.
  5. Usually, insight value is distributed so unequally that one’s best insight is a substantial fraction, even most, of the value of all one’s lifetime insights.
  6. When value is very unequal, intellectuals best help the world by following a career plan of first mostly searching for their one best insight, and then mostly promoting and developing that insight.
  7. Intellectuals following this search-then-promote career plan would do most preaching in the second half of their career. At least if a lot of promotion is possible.
  8. Greatly diminishing returns to promotion efforts might justify ending promotion of your best insight, and returning to a search for more, or promoting your second best insight.
  9. An intellectual uncertain about which insight is best might pursue several while studying them, but the world is better off if they soon focus on their one best guess.
  10. If “preaching” differs from “teaching” in focusing more on fewer bigger insights, then intellectuals promoting their one best insight are roughly “preaching” “sermons”.

In reality, the tendency to preach as a function of status seems to have a roughly slanted-N shape: /\/. While non-intellectuals preach little, amateur intellectuals preach a lot, and even more early in their career. Among academics, high status folks often find a new angle very early in their career, and then publish variations on that for the rest of their career. In contrast, low status folks tend to produce a steady stream of publications, which don’t much build on each other.

Getting the Nobel prize often triggers a burst of preaching, but mostly on the subject where the prize shows that their insight has long since won out, and doesn’t need promoting. The rest of their preaching is usually spread across many topics, rather than a single second best topic.

A lot of intellectual preaching is about the “insight” that one political ideology is better than others. Given the number of others motivated to promote each such idea, the marginal value of these promotion efforts by any one person must be very low.

Most of these deviations from the simple model can be seen as puzzles – we can ask what needs to be added to the simple model to explain them. Some possible missing elements:

  • Status – The freedom to preach may be seen as high status, with low status academics punished when they presume to take on this high status mark. Amateurs can more freely ignore such pressures.
  • Signaling – Common forms of preaching may be seen as too easy. If academics are mainly selected for being impressive, they need to do other things to show off.
  • Power – Academics tied to powerful social institutions could make such institutions uncomfortable by endorsing disruptive ideas. Preaching by such academics needs to be channeled into institutionally approved directions.

If you are an intellectual, occasionally ask yourself:

  1. Of all your insights so far, which is most worth devoting a life?
  2. If you are young and promoting, shouldn’t you keep looking instead?
  3. If you are old and not yet focused on promoting your best, isn’t it time?

That is: What is your sermon?

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Far Mode Overly Praised

By Robin Hanson · July 16, 2012 12:00 pm · Comments (13)

Roughly speaking, in near mode we focus practically on acting in our local situation, while in far mode we talk about how people in general should act in more ideal socially approved ways. So while we should expect near mode to usually be the best mode for practical purposes, we should also expect social discussions of near-far to celebrate far mode. For example, an article on Psychological Distance: 10 Fascinating Effects of a Simple Mind Hack gives nine advantages of being in far mode:

1. Make challenging tasks seem easier 2. Generate self-insight 3. Become more persuasive 4. Gain emotional self-control … 6. Be true to yourself 7. Become more polite 8. Fire your creativity 9. Improve your self-control 10. Trigger wise thoughts

And only one disadvantage:

5. Beware the illusion of explanatory depth!

A similar idealistic distortion is found is this article that suggests we let our minds wander because wandering minds are more creative:

In one study, volunteers had to read extracts of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. … People’s minds wandered from the words for more than 20 per cent of the time. … A recent study asking people to report their state of mind at random intervals during the day – via a smartphone app – showed that their attention was wandering from the task at hand a whopping 47 per cent of the time. …

For a long time, … the ability to filter out distractions and focus on a task – dubbed executive control – was considered to lie behind smart thinking. … A host of studies have shown that people who can focus well tend to ace analytical problems: they are whizzes at arithmetic and verbal reasoning tasks, and often have a higher IQ. … Yet … while people with a high level of working memory are good at analytical problems, they tend to struggle on tasks that require flashes of inspiration. …. Various studies show that people with high working-memory capacity, and therefore good executive control, can find it more difficult to solve these problems than people who are more easily distracted. …

All participants were asked to take another crack at the [creativity] task. … Those whose minds had been wandering came up with, on average, 40 per cent more answers. … [Researchers] studied people who had written a published novel, patented an invention or had art shown at a gallery. In computer tests that required participants to screen out irrelevant information – latent inhibition tests – she found these high-achievers were less likely to disregard inconsequential details and focus on the task, compared with an average person. In other words, their minds more frequently wandered from the task at hand. …

Instead of forcing yourself to concentrate, the best approach when a deadline looms may be to loosen your grip and take a quick break. … People in a relaxed mood were more likely to find creative solutions to word puzzles. … Even listening to jokes helps. … you might want to flex your creativity when you feel most groggy. Early birds, for instance, find more original solutions late at night, while night owls do better early in the morning. … If all else fails, a stiff drink can lubricate the mind’s cogs. … By the same token, you should avoid coffee – since caffeine focuses your concentration. (more)

Gee, then why do schools tend to drill creativity out of their students, and why don’t employers like groggy drunk joking employees with wandering minds? Yes, there are some jobs where creativity increases productivity, but for most jobs an ability to focus, concentrate, and analyze helps more. Which is why caffeine is a lot more popular than alcohol on most jobs.

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Work, Play Extremes

By Robin Hanson · June 26, 2012 6:55 am · Comments (37)

Humanity’s mix of work vs. play has varied over the millennia. Farmers played less less than foragers, and with industry we’ve moved back to, and even past, forager levels of play. In the future, the work-play mix could move in either direction, possibly to extremes.

Pause for a moment to ask yourself: which extreme do you most fear, a mostly-work future, or a mostly-play future? Yes, all else equal play is probably better than work, but all else may not be equal – ask yourself what knowing that a world is mostly-work or mostly-play would tell you about the rest of that world.

Me, I more fear a mostly-play future. I fear a world of people so overwhelmed by the pleasures of music, movies, games, virtual reality, drugs, etc. that they don’t build for the future, or even maintain support structures inherited from the past. Failing to invest in capital or children, humanity shrinks and falls into oblivion.

Yes, there are things to fear about a mostly-work future. Mainly, the opportunity cost of fun not had. Play is often more fun, and even fulfilling, than work. Given a momentary choice, we tend to choose play over work, and for good reason. Even so, I’d expect a mostly-work world to continue to invest and grow, building to a larger population and capacity. So that if later that world devolves into most-play, at least more people will have more fun on the way down.

Notice that this issue suggests that status isn’t such a bad thing. Locally, the possibility of efforts to gain status seem to cause a market failure, as your status gains come at the expense of the status of others. This would seem to make us work too hard to gain status. But since we can more reliably gain status via work than via play, the existence of status pushes us toward work, and away from the more dangerous mostly-play extreme.

I’m not thrilled that the em future I envision is a mostly-work world. But it at least seems safer than the other extreme to which the work-play mix could have evolved.

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Work Face Signals

By Robin Hanson · May 30, 2012 12:15 pm · Comments (38)

Imagine that a firm required its employees to be constantly monitored by the new rapidly-improving techs for reading face/body/voice tones. Employees must also wear body sensors to measure their heart rate, skin sweat, etc., to further read their mood and emotions. This firm argues that this will let them better measure who is working how hard, who is really engaged in their work, etc. Are you outraged? Will laws be passed to stop this?

Now consider how much we now waste on commuting, so firms can monitor employees better via face-to-face interactions:

Americans spend a ton of time commuting. According to happiness researchers, commuting is the low point of the typical day. If you look at the jobs that people actually do, though, it’s hard to understand why so many workers continue to commute. Given a computer and high-speed Internet, most desk jobs could now be done from home – or so it seems. Telecommuting wouldn’t just save workers time, frustration, and fuel; it would also let firms drastically reduce their overhead – and pass the savings along to their customers. … [Alas,] workers physically commute for signaling reasons. Employers can monitor your productivity better when you actually come to the office. Workers who telecommute put themselves on the slow track to success – if they can even get hired in the first place. (more)

Not outraged by this? The added cost of the tone readers is far less than the added cost of commuting. So if you think the value of the signals found by seeing people face to face is worth the huge added cost of commuting, how can you object to getting even more info at a far lower added cost?

This seems to me an obvious example of a status quo bias. Because face-to-face monitoring has long been the status quo, it seems ok. But adding tone monitors and body sensors would be new, so they are horrible intrusions on our natural privacy.

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Work Signals

By Robin Hanson · May 29, 2012 2:00 pm · Comments (25)

The average American worker gets 14 vacation days a year and only uses 12 of them. That adds up to 226 million unused vacation days, or approximately $34.3 billion dollars of work. That’s amazing. It’s not that surprising though as we are in one of the worst periods of unemployment in quite some time and many people are probably cutting back on vacation days in order to be more productive. It’s not exactly fair but it’s human nature, if I’m concerned about getting fired then the last thing I’m going to do is take a vacation day. (more)

For workers ages 55 and older, the survey found that nearly 30 percent have between five and 10 vacation days left over at the end of each year. Further, it found that only a quarter of workers 55 and older had used up all of their allotted vacation time by year’s end. (more)

66% of employees failed to use up their vacation days last year. … “Tons of people feel they don’t have the discretionary spending to take vacation, so they just stay at work.” That’s a very bad idea, experts say. “The research is clear that failing to take a vacation creates higher levels of stress and greater levels of disengagement at work,” Matthews reports.

“It’s silly to think that giving up vacation is going to make your colleagues think how important you are,” says … a career services expert. … “Take your vacation and let them miss you.” After all, you can never get back those days you didn’t use–or the once-in-a-lifetime memories they might have produced. “Vacations are underrated,” agrees Joan Kane, a Manhattan psychologist who has worked as a therapist for 22 years. … They satisfy a deep need to feel that you’re in control of your own time. “On vacation you have no boss to satisfy.” (more)

Oddly, most who comment on unused vacation time both note that there exist signaling incentives to work more than required, and tell people that taking vacation time would be good for them, as if they were ignorant of such advantages. This seems a common idealistic message – exhorting people to do what they would if there were no signaling incentives. If the point were to give people useful info this would be pointless, but if the point is to reaffirm shared sacred values, it works fine.

While many commenters lament the presumed inefficiency of this signaling equilibrium, it is worth noting that employees often also inefficiently go out of their way to signal defiance of employers. Most employers are reluctant to cut wages in a downturn, to give employees frequent direct negative feedback, or to require them to wear uniforms, sing corporate songs, etc., all because employers know that employees would respond badly with signals of defiance. These signaling equilbria can be just as inefficient as taking too little vacation, but few commenters lament these distortions. Because the sacred shared values we want to affirm are more about defying firm authorities, rather than submitting to them.

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Those Who Love Work

By Robin Hanson · April 30, 2012 8:20 am · Comments (43)

Christina Alger expresses her, and her dad’s, passion for work:

I was 6 at the time, maybe 7 … I was playing Office. In order to play Office, I had to get into character. I would don one of my dad’s suit jackets — I preferred a nice gray pinstripe — and would attempt to balance a spare pair of his glasses on my small snub nose. Sometimes I would shuffle around in his wingtips. Then I would organize piles of papers on my desk, filing them away in folders once they had been properly reviewed. …

My dad’s office … felt like Cheers: it was a place where I could relax after a long day, where everyone knew my name. … Dad was always willing to give me tasks that made me feel important. … My dad was then, and remains to this day, one of the few grown-ups I have come across who truly loved his job. … His enthusiasm for work was infectious. Dad loved playing office; why wouldn’t I? …

“Isn’t writing from home lonely?” My friend Anne asked me over coffee. “I have this vision of you stuck in your apartment all day, talking to imaginary people.” … “I’m an only child,” I shrugged. “I like being alone.” … Dad would like my new office, I think. He would see how much I enjoy working here. Whenever I have a successful day of writing, I wish I could share it with him. But not once have I ever felt lonely. (more)

Sure some who pretend to love work are fooling themselves, but I’m pretty sure that many others like Christina do honestly love their work. Yes Christina and her dad probably enjoy their work more because it is high status, but it is hard to believe their work love is entirely status driven – they’d probably still love their work, if a bit less, if it were low status.

It seems likely that we could find a few hundred humans like Jiro, Christina and her dad, productive folks who love work even when they put in many hours, and who are willing to adapt to the changed world ems would inhabit. If so, that world could be a vast wonderful world full of life and fulfillment.

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