This man is quantifying his life into two things, money and freetime, nothing about quantifying the quality of your time at work, nothing about happiness, and nothing about being an ethical person. What's the point of having all the money, and all the free time in the world if you're an unhappy jackass who hates his job?
I don't know if it is good to love your job. Anything that you do professionally has a tendency to get boring after a time. If you're working for someone else, that also constitutes a blow to your happiness.
I think finding a sustainable balance should be sought after when looking for a job. Does the job let you disconnect? Does the job feel satisfying to you? Do you like the office environment? How much does it pay? And how does this job affect your career?
If you have sufficient money, you can quit at any time and find a suitable less-demanding (both physically and psychologically) job.
I like to think that, I can provide value to a company. If they don't appreciate that and try to take advantage of me without compensation I am always free to look for better opportunities.
Once I did an internship working crazy hours. The people I worked with also worked non-stop. A couple of them slept in the office, a guy slept in the gym. Everyone there was telling us to evaluate our options, think carefully before committing to that firm. And we were thinking that once we got in, our lives would be on hold for the next 10 years. While we were discussing this in the middle of the night another employee looked at us and said "You can quit at any time. See this job as an opportunity to learn things while making good money. Once you stop working, they take the firm cellphone away. All notifications stop. Everything will be back to normal." That talk stuck with me. Whatever the circumstances are a job is a means to make some money. You are free and nobody's slave.
How about those in the arts as a profession? I don't think they'd have a successful career if they didn't love their job. I think they'd produce pretty abysmal art.
You can be a perfectly good artist as a 9-5 worker; producing good art is much more about, well, doing work, than anything else. The problem is that you're unlikely to be paid well, because you'll have to compete with all the people who are doing art for the fun of it.
I've produced music for others (as a job, if you will), and I've produced music for my own enjoyment and satisfaction.
While I do get an amount of enjoyment out of producing music for others, it may or may not be music that I personally like. It has to meet certain criteria. It has to sound like this, use these instruments, or be that duration, or whatever.
A lot like programming, I think. I can program on my own time, making whatever I fancy, using whatever language I want, to my own maximum enjoyment. At a programming job, I will likely enjoy it to at least some degree, but I may or may not be doing everything in a way that I think best, because I'm doing the work for the satisfaction of someone else.
But then, producing something for someone else, be it software or music or whatever, results in a different kind of satisfaction on my end: the satisfaction of meeting someone else's need. They wanted X, and I made X for them, and they are happy with it. I may or may not like X myself, but I am pleased that they like it!
Given the choice, I would like to do more than just make money when something takes the majority ( or a large minority) of my time. A job can have meaning, and for me that makes it a lot was it? We to wake up in the morning.
There are a few metrics other people have considered that he seems to have overlooked; daylights, sunsets, midnights, and cups of coffee are all highly quantitative.
Qualitative measures are probably to be preferred though, e.g. Love.
Whenever I whine on my b'day about turning-a-certain-age, there's always some older person in the room who gets all wistful and says, "Ah, to be N again..."
I measure my life in a very abstract way. How much my existence is positive or negative to the world and to the people around me. Can I make people around me happier / have better lifes? How much of an environmental footprint am I creating?
These are all impossible things to measure and I know that I might even contradict myself in how a feel about some of the things that I do but for me it's good enough for me to know what direction I would like to be heading.
The book, "How Will You Measure Your Life," by Clayton Christensen is easily on my list of Top 5 Most Important books, I cannot recommend it enough.
Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them.
Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a subset of the book.
For those unaware, the author (and HN submitter apparently) is Kent Beck [0] who wrote Extreme Programming Explained and was one of the original signatories of the "Agile Manifesto."
“A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. […]
“I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands
“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”
Inverting the first 2 into positive form would be better: maybe "Pay attention to your dreams" or "Listen to your dreams". I'm not finding the second one so easy to invert...
"many of the things that make life worth living aren’t measurable at all, or if they are measurable then they aren’t comparable. How many dinners with family equal one random act of kindness?"
I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement. It may be difficult to reason about the value of family dinners or acts of kindness, and more difficult still to calculate or approximate some kind of dinners-per-kindness measurement, but that's a different thing entirely from claiming there is not and cannot be such a measurement.
For example, you could adopt the axes from the rest of the article, and ask questions like "how much of my money and/or free time would I give up for a family dinner?" "how much would I give up for a random act of kindness?" "is there a minimum amount of money and/or free time I need to be able to afford family dinners or acts of kindness?" "if I only had enough to afford one of the two, which would I choose?"
Saying "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" is the start of a series of interesting questions that ultimately yields a better understanding of yourself. Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.
Worse, the entire foundation of the premise is rotten. Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
Yes you can. And the sooner you stop thinking that significance demands ignorance, the sooner you can start understanding and improving the things that are most important to you.
That would still be quantifying values against the tangible axes of time and/or money. There are still various other intangible factors such as happiness, goodwill etc which are immeasurable, yet contribute to the overall picture.
They are definitely measurable (by virtue of being a part of a physical process happening in the real world), we just haven't figured out a proper framework for them yet. Eventually, hopefully, we will.
No, not "definitely". You are assuming they are because "reasons". However, we have no idea whether those "reasons" apply, or whether they mean something is measurable.
You may have an argument that they should be measurable, but that's a far cry from "they are definitely".
It's not about humility. The only way for them to be not measurable in principle is if they were running out-of-band on a supernatural plane, magically inaccessible and yet affecting the real world. Because unless you assume magic, everything that affects the real world in any way is observable and thus measurable, by definition.
We have no good evidence so far to believe in magic.
Measurement problem is a problem of our understanding of the quantum world, but otherwise a feature of the entire universe, not a human limitation - and definitely not a license for magic under the hood.
>the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but it seems like your only way of appreciating the value of such experiences is by determining a monetary opportunity cost?
> What about human feelings (e.g. mental/physical health)? Are those important in evaluating experiences?
If, and only if, they have a monetary effect.
For example a professional foot-racer becoming more healthy by X amount means the expected value of him/her running a race increases by some $Y amount (due to higher probability of winning a [higher] prize).
> The definition of opportunity cost does not mandate that the "cost" is monetary.
The cost in-question is important if and only if it is equivalent to some loss of (monetary) value.
To someone suffering depression or similar mental troubles, both may be worth potentially the entirety of possible future lifetime earnings, potentially zero ... or potentially some trivial amount in between due to, say, reduced frequency of making mistakes.
What is the extent that (a) you value passing your assets to a child/descendant upon death, (b) you don't have a (living) child, and (c) you expect to have a legitimate child with that lover in the future? That is precisely the extent to which the warmth of a lover's embrace is valuable to you.
But I expect that item "(a)" is zero for most people, including myself, so generally the value is still zero.
(I consider death to be an ultimate loss of everything, no matter what kind of other-person, descendant or otherwise, ends up in possession of what I owned whilst I lived. ... Of course, if one's balance sheet were negative and one had no expectation of being able to remedy that situation, then death would not seem so bad...)
>I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement.
In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?
It's actually kind of an interesting philosophical question, I linked to some background reading at the end of this post.
>Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.
It's not anti-intellectual, it's a different intellectual viewpoint from yours.
>Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
> It's not anti-intellectual, it's a different intellectual viewpoint from yours.
It is anti-intellectual, in the sense that it posits a separate magisterium of things "too complex to reason about" (or sometimes, "too profound to dare and reason about") and asks to give up the attempt. That way lies supernatural.
No. Though I am implying that we can get asymptotically close to omniscience (to the extent it's allowed by physics; full omniscience would probably have infinite energy requirements anywy) through the systems we build - which include mental frameworks, organizational structures and computing devices.
Except our goal here is how to measure the worth of your own life. That's a lot more like "a hundred million light years" than it is "5 meters away." We've literally been trying for millennia to evaluate what 'the good life' is and are probably not that much closer than when we started.
So why train for a hundred million light year race when you're already standing in front of the finish line?
Why try to find an objective scientific/monetary measurement of the value of a subjective experience like the warmth of a lovers embrace when you can feel it directly and immediately?
"too complex to reason about" strikes me as a layman's way of lumping overlapping subjective and objective valuations together. I believe "too complex" is a way to describe this and, ironically, an accurate objective statement.
>>I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement.
>In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?
Mysticism is dangerous because it challenges the status quo ideal of extreme materialism; that your worth as a human being is defined by the size of your bank account.
E.g. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
Not really. Mysticism (in this unquantifiable form) does not challenge anything. It is instead based on acceptance that things are out of your control therefore not worth to quantify in quality or to judge.
A real mystic of this kind would practice a strong version of fate or destiny principle which essentially makes free will irrelevant.
To judge is to measure and quantify (or classify) in a less strict way.
When I look at the things that I am most grateful to have experienced in my life, none of the decisions that would have been motivated by optimization processes would have led to them coming about.
So what, then, is the point of optimization criteria, if they wouldn't actually enable any possible decision making that accomplishes the "goal"?
Sorry to be so down on this, Kent, but this line of reasoning is such a fail on so many levels. Once in a while--maybe often!--we should just turn off the optimizer and let life unfold.
A standard explore/exploit model can work here. Perhaps it's semantics, but I consider that strategy an optimizer, although it's non a linear or deterministic one. Optimize the things I know are working; add semi-random decision making for some percent of my decisions to explore new spaces.
Good summary, thanks. I'd come to a less clear version of the same tradeoffs, thinking in terms of commitment level and capacity over time. Eg. 70hr week might be okay once a year but not 60hr for several weeks in a row due to draining personal reinvestment, which stunts the capacity growth that also would happen with the reinvestment time. "Vetting (commitment)" is the title of my freestyle lecture on YT. Your post is much more to the point; thanks again.
I believe the purpose of life is joy. It comes from growth (ie learning, developing abilities, raising a happy family etc), and service to others (helping them grow or have happier lives), and from knowing one's life is pleasing to God (which can be personally known, it's not all that complicated nor needs to be argumentative). The things you'd want someone to talk about at your funeral. This belief is connected to a strong belief that life has a background, a purpose, is eternal, and growth can also be eternal (I'm a Mormon). I think much about maturity models for the various aspects of life, and how to use/share them. I have written some things about that (more to be added later I hope, just haven't got to posting it), somewhere buried under the features descriptions at http://onemodel.org . This life is hard, but very good, and the best is yet to come.
I believe it's about something far different. From two perspectives; one that discuses why humans exist at all and the other from my own perspective as an individual consciousness.
Humanities existence provides no inherent meaning. That we exist is a result of physical laws of nature.
From the perspective of an individual consciousness, my goal is not joy, but contentment which I'd describe as something like "reducing existential dread."
I think humans have invented a number of ways of achieving that; religions, philosophy, technology. Some are more valuable to all than others, but no one should be behooved their personal spin on things outside the achieving of utilitarian good for the masses so they can partake in the investigation of those personal things with a clear head and as able a body as possible.
I dunno why I'm so certain of this; I think it's due to two car accidents, and an emergency surgery leading me to "black out" and lose time. I'm fairly certain it all just goes dark in the end.
Something I still have bookmarked to likely get is a "Your Life in Weeks" poster (https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html). This would not be so much for planning as for keeping a sense of scope and proportion.
Everyone measures and compares oneself to others all the time, why spend even more energy and time on that? Just try to not make stupid moves and all the rest should be fine
Meditating on it I realised that this is where a lot of suffering in my life comes from - comparing myself to others. I can't think of much positive that comes from it.
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI shudder to think about all the data Facebook manages to suck up when you give it the ability.
I think finding a sustainable balance should be sought after when looking for a job. Does the job let you disconnect? Does the job feel satisfying to you? Do you like the office environment? How much does it pay? And how does this job affect your career?
If you have sufficient money, you can quit at any time and find a suitable less-demanding (both physically and psychologically) job.
I like to think that, I can provide value to a company. If they don't appreciate that and try to take advantage of me without compensation I am always free to look for better opportunities.
Once I did an internship working crazy hours. The people I worked with also worked non-stop. A couple of them slept in the office, a guy slept in the gym. Everyone there was telling us to evaluate our options, think carefully before committing to that firm. And we were thinking that once we got in, our lives would be on hold for the next 10 years. While we were discussing this in the middle of the night another employee looked at us and said "You can quit at any time. See this job as an opportunity to learn things while making good money. Once you stop working, they take the firm cellphone away. All notifications stop. Everything will be back to normal." That talk stuck with me. Whatever the circumstances are a job is a means to make some money. You are free and nobody's slave.
While I do get an amount of enjoyment out of producing music for others, it may or may not be music that I personally like. It has to meet certain criteria. It has to sound like this, use these instruments, or be that duration, or whatever.
A lot like programming, I think. I can program on my own time, making whatever I fancy, using whatever language I want, to my own maximum enjoyment. At a programming job, I will likely enjoy it to at least some degree, but I may or may not be doing everything in a way that I think best, because I'm doing the work for the satisfaction of someone else.
But then, producing something for someone else, be it software or music or whatever, results in a different kind of satisfaction on my end: the satisfaction of meeting someone else's need. They wanted X, and I made X for them, and they are happy with it. I may or may not like X myself, but I am pleased that they like it!
Also, may lead to build fragile in the Talebian sense structures, that is, a lifestyle too dependent on the local minima.
What happens if they change and your life isn't as optimized as you wanted?
These are questions, but the answers are too personal for everyone to respond here.
Qualitative measures are probably to be preferred though, e.g. Love.
Whenever I whine on my b'day about turning-a-certain-age, there's always some older person in the room who gets all wistful and says, "Ah, to be N again..."
Oh thanks! Way to mellow my harsh man!
(I gotta stop inviting that guy.)
Interestingly, Kent seems to have focused in on hygiene-motivation factors more than anything else, while the large takeaway I brought from the book is more about relationships than money/freetime options. While it is important to be locally maximizing the balance of those two, I found the message of the book to be about focusing outward, more away from one's self and career, and more towards others in ways that you can positively effect them.
Not saying at all that the content is wrong (because it's not, it's a fun engineering way of looking at it), but for those curious it also represents a subset of the book.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck
“A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. […]
“I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands
“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”
* "Take time to spend on leisure" or "allow yourself to 'waste' some time"
* say what you think
* cultivate friendships
* be happy
I think there is a dangerous mysticism in this idea of the immeasurable, incomparable, and unfalsifiable value judgement. It may be difficult to reason about the value of family dinners or acts of kindness, and more difficult still to calculate or approximate some kind of dinners-per-kindness measurement, but that's a different thing entirely from claiming there is not and cannot be such a measurement.
For example, you could adopt the axes from the rest of the article, and ask questions like "how much of my money and/or free time would I give up for a family dinner?" "how much would I give up for a random act of kindness?" "is there a minimum amount of money and/or free time I need to be able to afford family dinners or acts of kindness?" "if I only had enough to afford one of the two, which would I choose?"
Saying "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them" is the start of a series of interesting questions that ultimately yields a better understanding of yourself. Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.
Worse, the entire foundation of the premise is rotten. Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
Yes you can. And the sooner you stop thinking that significance demands ignorance, the sooner you can start understanding and improving the things that are most important to you.
> "my values are complex and I don't know how to reason about them"
The article implies nothing of the sort.
No, not "definitely". You are assuming they are because "reasons". However, we have no idea whether those "reasons" apply, or whether they mean something is measurable.
You may have an argument that they should be measurable, but that's a far cry from "they are definitely".
A little humility is a Good Thing™
We have no good evidence so far to believe in magic.
Everything is definitely measureable? How did you solve the Measurement Problem? It seems to have all the other quantum physicists stumped.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem
The problem with saying "everything in reality is physical/material", is that we don't even know what that is on a quantum level.
It is however a license for doubt over certainty.
>not a human limitation
Once again, no one is sure about this.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but it seems like your only way of appreciating the value of such experiences is by determining a monetary opportunity cost?
(The adjective "monetary" is redundant when discussing evaluations and costs.)
Obviously, educational experiences can be evaluated as any other investment.
What about human feelings (e.g. mental/physical health)? Are those important in evaluating experiences?
>(The adjective "monetary" is redundant when discussing evaluations and costs.)
The definition of opportunity cost does not mandate that the "cost" is monetary.
If, and only if, they have a monetary effect.
For example a professional foot-racer becoming more healthy by X amount means the expected value of him/her running a race increases by some $Y amount (due to higher probability of winning a [higher] prize).
> The definition of opportunity cost does not mandate that the "cost" is monetary.
The cost in-question is important if and only if it is equivalent to some loss of (monetary) value.
To someone suffering depression or similar mental troubles, both may be worth potentially the entirety of possible future lifetime earnings, potentially zero ... or potentially some trivial amount in between due to, say, reduced frequency of making mistakes.
What is the extent that (a) you value passing your assets to a child/descendant upon death, (b) you don't have a (living) child, and (c) you expect to have a legitimate child with that lover in the future? That is precisely the extent to which the warmth of a lover's embrace is valuable to you.
But I expect that item "(a)" is zero for most people, including myself, so generally the value is still zero.
(I consider death to be an ultimate loss of everything, no matter what kind of other-person, descendant or otherwise, ends up in possession of what I owned whilst I lived. ... Of course, if one's balance sheet were negative and one had no expectation of being able to remedy that situation, then death would not seem so bad...)
In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?
It's actually kind of an interesting philosophical question, I linked to some background reading at the end of this post.
>Saying "my values are so complex that they cannot be reasoned about" is anti-intellectualism dressed up as profundity; it's nothing more than an excuse to stop trying to understand.
It's not anti-intellectual, it's a different intellectual viewpoint from yours.
>Oh, sure, rational thinking is great for measuring laser waves or whatever, but can you reason about the beauty of a sunset, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the blissful confusion of waking from a nap on a summer afternoon?
This isn't an anti-rational viewpoint.
[1] https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAI-2.pdf
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-incommensurable/#Va...
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/#Inc
[4] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674447561
It is anti-intellectual, in the sense that it posits a separate magisterium of things "too complex to reason about" (or sometimes, "too profound to dare and reason about") and asks to give up the attempt. That way lies supernatural.
Why try to find an objective scientific/monetary measurement of the value of a subjective experience like the warmth of a lovers embrace when you can feel it directly and immediately?
http://maverikeducation.blogspot.com/2014/03/difficulty-vs-c...
>In what sense is it dangerous and in what sense is it mysticism?
Mysticism is dangerous because it challenges the status quo ideal of extreme materialism; that your worth as a human being is defined by the size of your bank account.
E.g. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
A real mystic of this kind would practice a strong version of fate or destiny principle which essentially makes free will irrelevant.
To judge is to measure and quantify (or classify) in a less strict way.
The tone of your response has piqued my curiosity more than the content of your response. Why such a strong, negative reaction?
Many software engineers get paid a lot of money, so it's not too difficult to retire at 35 if you can keep your expenses down.
So what, then, is the point of optimization criteria, if they wouldn't actually enable any possible decision making that accomplishes the "goal"?
Sorry to be so down on this, Kent, but this line of reasoning is such a fail on so many levels. Once in a while--maybe often!--we should just turn off the optimizer and let life unfold.
Humanities existence provides no inherent meaning. That we exist is a result of physical laws of nature.
From the perspective of an individual consciousness, my goal is not joy, but contentment which I'd describe as something like "reducing existential dread."
I think humans have invented a number of ways of achieving that; religions, philosophy, technology. Some are more valuable to all than others, but no one should be behooved their personal spin on things outside the achieving of utilitarian good for the masses so they can partake in the investigation of those personal things with a clear head and as able a body as possible.
I dunno why I'm so certain of this; I think it's due to two car accidents, and an emergency surgery leading me to "black out" and lose time. I'm fairly certain it all just goes dark in the end.
Could unit of life be
money? time? number of pizza's u ate? number of babies u had?
Or are they binary in nature?
Happy or Unhappy, Satisfied or Unsatisfied, Enjoyed or Not Enjoyed. Fulfilled or Unfulfilled?
What could it be?
You will only end up comparing your life to others, (which is not a particularly good thing to do in my opinion).