Tag: mood affiliation

Marshmallow moods

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Recap: Mood affiliation is when an attitude unduly influence our perception, for example cruise ships. Bayesian thinking is updating our beliefs relative to the information.

“The marshmallow study,” Andrew Huberman told Shane Parrish, “was when they gave kids the option to have one now or two if they wait. It’s fun to watch the videos where the kids sit there and use all sorts of distractions and strategies (to keep from eating the marshmallows).”

It’s enjoyable to like the marshmallow study.

We must discount it.

Being Bayesian means updating on new information and liking is information.

Selling is information too. I believe in meditation, vegetarianism, and exercise because they are hard to sell. If someone said: Sit a room and focus on your breathing and you’ll feel better, I would believe them because one of their incentives is NOT financial. Kinda. Health as a product: vitamins, beds, bells, rings, bands and so on, fails this test. Regulating my sleeping temperature (which Huberman helpfully explains) may be helpful, but the bar of persuasion is higher. That’s being Bayesian.

Deferred gratification works. It makes sense, it shows up in the lab though “the studies aren’t as robust as we once thought,” and “it’s obvious deferred gratifiers do better over the long pull than these impulsive children.” But we must raise the bar when when we want to like it – a form of deferred gratification itself.

Cruising mood

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One of Tyler Cowen’s suggestions for thinking better is to avoid mood affiliation. From 2011:

“It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood.”

This is clear in politics when people judge ideas on whichever party is blaming/praising on whichever media. Rather than the easy pickins of politics though, let’s journey a sunnier path: cruising.

Cruise ships are awesome. Many miss this thanks to mood affiliation. It’s not their people. It’s not their food (buffets!). I don’t want someone to dictate where to be and when is the comment I hear the most. Some non-zero number of people look at a cruise vacation and decide they don’t like it and then come up with reasons for why.

But cruises balance flexibility with stability. The only rules are the times the ship arrives and leaves. That’s it. In that window people can do nearly whatever they want. Cruises are like Crocs, they can be as laid back or “attack mode” as the vacationer likes.

Food on cruise ships is good. The buffet is good, especially the vegetarian curry options because that is home-cooking for the international staff. Ships also offer a number of (revenue growth) fine dining options. The best of these are magnificent. It won’t be extraordinarily but how many people prioritize this on vacation?

On board are a variety of options like rock walls, FlowRiders, theaters, slides, escape rooms, and kids clubs. Off the ship are many interesting tours, excursions, and experiences. Private drivers are especially adaptable, this is another Tyler Cowen suggestion.

Look at that form!
Flowing

Cruising is not for everyone, but maybe not for the stated reasons. And Cowen, probably couldn’t stand cruising.

The 3 Ways to Spend your Day

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There are three ways to spend your day working in the knowledge economy.

The first day is to spend it trending. Follow the popular topics on Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. This is good for serendipitous moments of discovery, awareness of the world, and to ‘keep-up’ with what the external algorithms suggest.

The second way to spend your day is to spend it in the feed. Cultivated email, RSS, and perennial podcasts. An infovore knows what they like and has is delivered. Often it will be confirmatory information from familiar sources, that’s okay if you’re honest about it.

The final way to spend your day is in search. There’s something to be curious about and you intend to do just that. Google offers the broadest service but new entries like Listen Notes and Twitter search modifiers have started to index novel parts of the internet.

There’s no ‘best practice’ for the 3 Ways to Work, rather the work of the day dictates the way.

Much of what we call knowledge work focuses on decision making and much of this is a cycle between the exploration of the new and application of the familiar. It’s a balance between finding new things and digging into curio-seams.

Tyler Cowen is an example. His feeds at Marginal Revolution and Twitter offer the day-to-day goings-on, but searches on Listen Notes, YouTube, and the blog allow someone to figure out ideas like mood affiliation (my notes here), which is one way we make mistakes.

For example: Are plastic bags more harmful than paper? Are bag-bans beneficial? What’s the metric? We’ve already noted another Cowen-ism about solving for the equilibrium, but without search, we’d have missed the idea about mood affiliation. Cowen told Russ Roberts:

“Plastic is often more environmentally friendly than having a paper bag because it takes less energy to make and dispose of. Plastic is better for the world and can even be better than those reusable cloth bags unless you use them two-hundred times and up but that’s hard to do and that’s the break-even point. The environmental virtues of plastic compared to a lot of other alternatives is underrated.”

The question of bag bans for me was pure mood. Us good, them bad. I didn’t consider transport costs (paper is much heavier) and production costs (efficiency figures). Instead, I took the easy route of WYSIATI: what you see is all there is, and all I see in my laundry cupboard is plastic bags.