3:58am August 4, 2013

“
When facing a difficult decision, I check which considerations are consequentialist – which considerations are actually about future consequences. (Recent example from Eliezer: I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet hence much cheaper than the mattress I tried in the store, but non-returnable. When the new mattress didn’t seem to work too well once I actually tried sleeping nights on it, this was making me reluctant to spend even more money trying another mattress. I reminded myself that the $1400 was a sunk cost rather than a future consequence, and didn’t change the importance and scope of future better sleep at stake (occurring once per day and a large effect size each day).)
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Only someone with way more money than I will ever have could possibly consider this rational thinking. I never have $1400 at one time. If I spent that much on a frigging mattress, you better believe that being out $1400 affects whether I can spend MORE MONEY on a mattress. I just… I can’t get over the weirdness of living in a world where being out $1400 only affects you in the past, and therefore is irrelevant to future decisions about spending money. And this is from a website about teaching rationality to people????? I hope they aren’t trying to teach this kind of thinking to people where $1400 is more than we have to cover our whole month’s expenses. They’d either get laughed at, or worse, people would spend themselves broke believing them? Even scaling down the amount of money, this kind of thinking would be financial suicide for a poor person. It doesn’t matter how important sleep is, there’s only so much money you can spend on mattresses before more important things.

And I just… Even the idea of solving your sleep problems with a super expensive mattress seems so very class-based. What would this guy do if his income was like mine, and he had to sleep on a crappy cot for years with chronic nerve and joint qqlpain at the level mine was at the time? The only reason that changed was my hospital bed. And a gift of memory foam… Which from checking online probably cost the giver $150. Out of reach of many people still, but WTF.

So they’re teaching people rationality, but never thought of the fact that poor people sleep too, and none of us have mattresses that cost more than a month’s (often more than two or more months!) income. Not unless we have rich friends. And that this might indicate that there are ways to sleep that don’t involve expensive mattresses.

But seriously. Spending $1400 affects the future, whether or not you’ve technically already done it. Teaching people that it doesn’t, scares me.

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