A Clearer Example

A friend misunderstood my post on bike-shedding and bottomless pits. This is my fault, I should have realized anything so short and seemingly concise would be inadequate to communicate what I really meant. Remind me to write on epistemic distance sometime.

Allow me to present a clearer example of the difference: environmentalism.

Bike-shedding, for the environmentalist, would be the sort of things most of us were subjected to in kindergarten, about recycling small scraps of paper, turning off the faucet, and walking instead of driving short distances.

To be clear, these are generally of direct self-interest or useful for signalling that you're a good neighbor, but have little impact on the environment as a whole. Your individually not recycling will have a negligible impact on the global biosphere, even compounded over the course of your entire life. 

(In fact, it might actually make things worse, considering the energy costs to melt down and reuse certain materials. Metals are generally a good bargain, plastics and glass, less so. A good heuristic to use is whether manufacturers would pay for the materials, even before the government started subsidizing recycling out the wazoo.)

The environmentalist bottomless pit looks more like this:

This was the sort of thing I had in mind when writing about "increasingly impractical demands". These sorts of requests can not be met, except through extreme privation or, more plausibly, voluntary human extinction. Neither of those are realistic nor desirable goals.

When I read such things, my take away is that the speaker has no actionable agenda short of completely solving the problem permanently. As someone who knows a thing or two about interminable projects and the depression they introduce, let me assure you that that is not the approach you want to take.

Or rather, it's the approach you don't want to take assuming that your goal is to solve the problem. As I said before, for many movements, it really isn't. And I can't help but wonder if that's true for deep ecology folks as well.

If your goal is to see legitimate improvements in the world, then avoiding these twin failure modes is very important. In many ways they are not dichotomies: many movements play one off the other. The feminist movement, for instance, will often fight for trivial changes, barely even symbolic ones, in the name of "dismantling the patriarchy". Don't even get me started on the libertarians again.

This is an area where the effective altruist movement deserves some praise for trying to find the best ways to improve a given situation and then doing it. I would like to see some expansion into long term issues, but as we know there's reason to be wary of that.

Giving the Monkey What He Wants

[Please understand that this is a practical metaphor, not a scientific model of human psychology.]

One of my favorite pieces of motivational psychology is the idea of self-loyalty, which suggests that it is much easier to overcome willpower sinks, genuinely difficult tasks, and generalized akrasia if you can convincingly say to yourself, "yes, this currently sucks, but I'll have fun later". In other words, if you take consistent good care of your body and mind, it will deliver when you need it to.

My spin on this idea is putting your desire for sleep, entertainment, relaxation, and so on into a box called the monkey. This is a similar notion to the ape-brain, but that phrase often comes off slightly antagonistic. That's not what I'm going for here.

It may shock you to learn that he's not your enemy.

The monkey is you. It's the part of you that wants both physical and intellectual pleasures. The part that wants to sleep in, the part that wants to read books and watch movies, that part that wants to eat delicious meals. The part that wants hugs and camaraderie and an endless supply of kitten gifs.

Generally, the monkey will make very reasonable requests. Give him eight hours of sleep a night, enough food of sufficient quality, and a decent amount of entertainment and he will go along with whatever work you need to get done. Many times, that work will even benefit the monkey down the road (provided you pay up), but the monkey is not particularly smart.

More importantly, the monkey's trust is easily damaged. Willpower varies between individuals, so certain people can power through longer than others, but on the whole the monkey will eventually throw and fit and refuse to go along until some or all of his needs are met.

When this happens regularly, his demands will increase, just like a creditor will raise the interest rate on debts they're worried won't be paid back. Just like with creditors, this does not necessarily increase the odds of getting what's wanted, but is a rational response in the short term. Convincing the bank agent to keep your rates low requires evidence that you will be able to pay. Similarly, convincing the monkey to back down will require that you demonstrate that you do, in fact, have his best interests at heart.

If you consistently give the monkey what he wants, an occasional privation will not require a huge leap of intellectual faith. If, however, you don't pay your debts reliably, you can bet the monkey will be very unlikely to trust you in the future.

Promising the monkey a fortnight of rest and relaxation, of time to work on recreation and projects strictly selfish in purpose, is how I got through the last month of school projects and exams. The monkey did not want to do it, but he's sufficiently perceptive to realize that I was serious. Now it's time to pay up.

C'mon, give him what he wants.

This fall I will be taking senior design, along with three other technical classes. This will not be an easy undertaking, and I've been greatly concerned about my ability to meet those challenges. Another school break spent suffering and I won't be. Only if I lay down enough principal during May and August will I make graduation on time.

So, for the next few weeks, I'll be giving the monkey what he wants. Then it's back to work, but with a mind towards keeping that part of me not subdued but satisfied.