I See You Shiver With Procrastin...

via Adam the G., Heath and Anderson on the dragging of one's heels. I assume, Adam, that you ran across this on the References page for this paper on gamification and eudaimonia. I assume further that you, as did I, got the heebie-jeebies from the phrase "eudaimonic design," appalled perhaps by the idea that eudaimonia could be the product of [central] conscious design rather than the messily informed trial and error conducted by ordinary men and women who have virtuous intent but imperfect will. I am sure, my dear Adam, that you share my conclusion that humans are learning creatures, striving towards improvement, but stumbling along the way, and ever bound by the shackles of opportunity cost.

So I also assume that you share with me a somewhat subtle understanding of what opportunity cost really means, and in the case of procrastination, what it implies. I assume that you, like me, don't conflate pen-and-ink game theoretical predictions with contextual decision calculus made in the face of a mighty array of tempting choices. I assume that we two fellows are of like mind on the topic of prudence: that it is the routine exercise of this virtue that strengthens it and that without such exercise it tends towards flab in the median human.

Procrastination provokes ex post regret. Therefore procrastination is not euvoluntary. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. The "Protestant work ethic" is characterized by its antipathy toward sloth. Be thrifty, be industrious, create capital. Don't be lazy, don't give in to the pleasure of sin. The ant survives the winter; the grasshopper freezes to death (without the charity of those more prudent).

Procrastination sure seems irrational. It's nuts to give up big future gains just so you can be content to sit back, maybe watch a little Mork and Mindy on channel 57. Maybe kick back a cool Coors 16-ouncer. And yeah, maybe that means that the dishes pile up in the sink (to pick one of the benign examples from the H&A paper) or maybe that tumor in your colon grows another few centimeters (to pick a less-benign example from the paper), but hyperbolic discounting is just one way to model this decision. Maybe it's satisfactory enough for analytical purposes, but analysis has an unsettling tendency to show up uninvited, particularly in policy settings, where Calculation Problems and Public Choice Issues have already taken up residence. Put another way, procrastination is a private problem, and overcoming it requires private solutions. Consider instead that we might model procrastination not as a failure to properly consider the future, but rather as choice paralysis or even as a profit opportunity for a clever entrepreneur to reap rewards in a missing market.

Look people, traditional technologies for overcoming procrastination exist, and they include sermonizing, peer pressure, nagging, folklore, inspirational speeches & al. But for reasons too numerous (and uncertain) to list here, they've lately become increasingly obsolete. A more modern tech would include gamifying. After all, how do you get players to continue clicking in an otherwise unrewarding MMO? Meter out little dopamine rewards stretched out as time progresses. If the ordinary procrastinator can make the performance of unpleasant tasks immediately rewarding, they can convert dull, onerous work into a pleasurable little voluntary addiction, one they can walk away from at a moment's notice with no hard feelings.

It is important therefore to distinguish anti-procrastination gamification from state-run choice architecture. In both cases, the EE condition fought is regret. The difference is clear from a virtue ethics standpoint: by voluntarily opting into gamifying anti-procrastination, the player intends on his own behalf to oblige himself to pursue his eudaimonia; if he decides ex post that his earlier decision was a mistake, he has no one to blame but himself; his regret creates no public strife. If, contrarily, a bureaucrat has modified his choice set for him, his inconvenience will, rightly or wrongly, be directed at agents of the state, at the gently coercive choice czar appointed to be the Jiminy Cricket to his Pinocchio. With a sufficiently large constituency, this would introduce more long-tail risk than I think is prudent for a nation. Add to this the nearly intractable knowledge problem faced by the bureaucrat (how to distinguish deleterious procrastination from welfare-enhancing choice at a great distance) and the pernicious risk of regulatory capture by people whose interest lie in their own pocketbooks rather than in the public trust.

Given the heritage of Western Civilization, I think many of my readers could be pressed to agree that procrastination as described in the Heath and Anderson paper is a vice rather than a virtue. I hope that upon reflection, my same readers will agree that the sensible, prudent solution to the erosion of the traditional checks on procrastination is to allow new technologies to emerge from the maelstrom of ideas and be tested in an environment where bad ideas can be rejected and discarded. It is not in the nature of the typical government-run program to dissolve in response to the failure of obtaining favorable results.

Related remarks here.

..ation

Intellectual Pork Rinds

In a post heralding the pending Adamularity, The OG excoriates intemperance in media consumption. Just as too many mini-muffins and Funyuns can enporkulate your jiggling posterior, popular media is at once rewarding while you consume it, and destructive the more you indulge and the longer the habit persists.

And in another devious parallel (assuming Straussian intent in Adam is probably not far off the mark), both gorging your corpse and your mind suffer from pretty dreadful pecuniary externalities. To wit, if the taxpayer is obliged to pick up the bill for Corpulent Sam's Eternal Snacking, and if this obligation is exogenous, then there is a public interest in imposing dietary restraint on the less temperate among us. Symmetrically, if constituents suffer political risk from Mad Mike's Media Malingering, then there is a public interest in, say, arresting climate change deniers.

Free speech ain't so free. Or, if you prefer, yikes!

The crux is whether or not the policy is exogenous. If the taxpayer isn't on the hook for my snackological protocols, I'm more generally at liberty to stuff my craw as I see fit (nb, this cuts against farm subsidies [particularly mega agribusiness] a lot harder than against SNAP restrictions). Ditto a free press. A state that restricts its operations to enforcing the natural rule of law rather than disseminating party favors to the mess of tatterdemalions, rogues, pettifoggers, lickspittles, louts, knaves, clods, cluttermidges, churls, and skiddermarks under their weal can far more graciously suffer a clamor of saffron journalists. 'Tis no accident that state-provided media is a staple of dictators.

The press is not euvoluntary in a big, big way. How we approach our moral intuition towards it depends in no small part on the role it plays in forming policy opinion. A sensible, Bayesian precautionary principle hints that perhaps a natural immunity to the shenanigans implied by the First Amendment can be discovered when the sovereign more closely hews to restraint rather than the profligacy that so characterizes its many functions. Small steps to a more euvoluntary world, people.

Of Dingoes and Deacons

Trigger warning. This post discusses missing and exploited children. If this is the sort of topic that bothers you, come back tomorrow for the hidden link between GDP and Justin Bieber.

Adam The OG sends a tale of coercion in the First Estate. In 1955 Ireland, a single mother gave up her baby at the behest of the Church. To avoid burying the lede:

Such was the power of the church, and of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, that the state bowed before its demands, ceding responsibility for the mothers and babies to the nuns. For them it was not only a matter of sin and morality, but one of pounds, shillings and pence. At the time young Anthony Lee was born, I discovered that the Irish government was paying the Catholic church a pound a week for every woman in its care, and two shillings and sixpence for every baby. And that was not all.

After giving birth, the girls were allowed to leave the convent only if they or their family could pay the nuns £100. It was a substantial sum, and those who couldn't afford it – the vast majority – were kept in the convent for three years, working in kitchens, greenhouses and laundries or making rosary beads and religious artefacts, while the church kept the profits from their labour.

Sometimes the bootleggers and the Baptists are one and the same.

Consider the institutions here. From a broad point of view, the proscription against single motherhood was likely adaptive for farmers. Fixed land assets and stationary capital depend on intergenerational discounting to have a high enough PDV to justify the expense. The "sin against God" fig leaf covered justifiable concerns about the relationships between land and labor, lord and fiefdom. Imagine the Domesday Book without clear lineage.

So the alliance between the first and second estates did well in promoting institutions that supported the feudal-manorial systems, though it should be clear by the time that 1955 rolled around, the memo that the times they were a-changin' evidently hadn't reached the desk of the Irish archdiocese. The mostly adaptive institutions that had supported an œconomy of culchies and lords stuck despite the transformation to burghers and the House o' Commons. And this is pretty much what you should expect. Why should London, Rome, and Dublin be on the same cultural timetable? Why should NYC and Moscow be on the same cultural timetable for that matter?

You can read this story several ways. The author seems to be going for the human tragedy angle. You can also look at it as the Church conspiring with the state to a) exploit the powerless and b) rip off the taxpayer. You can even see it as a simple tragedy in service of a larger, mostly-useful institution.

For the EE-minded? It's a matter of inseparable institutions. On their own, both the state and the Church were doing what they thought was right. State officials believed they were serving the needy – funding cash-strapped parishes sure sounds charitable. And the Church thought they were doing the Lord's work, as they had understood it for centuries. But both of these notions were based on clear misconceptions about the nature of the alliance between the estates. And that's the great tragedy.

It might even be that a similar tragedy exists when the second and the third estates seek to collaborate. The errors of corruption that arise from unwarranted state support (or "regulation") of trade may well look quite benevolent from afar, without the benefit of prudent discipline. But get up close and you'll find children torn from parents, or pallets full of cash vanishing under the relentless glare of the Iraqi sun.

Crony beware.

My Beautiful Confluence

If you'd have told me 20 years back that I'd not only be able to quickly and easily curate my own periodical (I didn't know the word "blog" in 1994), I'd have laughed offhandedly and gone back to doing my routine critical checkoff.

On off on on, Gus. On. Off. On. On.

Things are different now. Things exceed the dreams of Harun al-Rashid on his throne of gold. Not only do I curate, but I contribute. And I'm actual real-deal pals with some truly incredible people whose overflowing wisdom and sincerity I can only hope to emulate.

But even with that, there are still little effervescent moments of synchronicity that hint at a glorious unseen order to my little corner of the universe. Moments like this:

TGP and Fishy FiSH on the increasing euvoluntarity of domestic arrangements.

And

Adam The OG on the natural limits of a virtuous life.

Twin points, gorgeously complementary, when considered from an EE perspective lend credence to a Hayekian aversion of mine: ill-fitted dominion from afar over issues personal in scope. It baffles me to no end that anyone who doesn't know me personally could possibly hold a strong opinion one way or the other about the nature or condition of my family. The idea that a distant scold would pretend to such knowledge puzzles me greatly. And I'm grateful to have good friends who are far more adept than I at illustrating the deep flaws in such reasoning.

This post is for you, guys. Well done.