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Oct. 4th, 2010 10:46 pmPredictable Irrationality described the following study: people, by which we undergraduates, probably taking psych classes, were put in front a computer program with three "doors" and told they had N clicks of the mouse. If they clicked in a room, they got some amount of money (they were told the precise amount immediately). Switching rooms took one click. Depending on which version of the experiment we're discussing, they may be given some information about the range of possible click values, but I believe they're always informed the rooms have different values. The optimum thing to do is click several times in each room till you get a sense of the distribution of money per click, then stay in that room and hit the mouse like rat requesting heroin, and that's just what people do.
Unless you tell them that if they stay out of a room too long (i.e. too many clicks on a row in other rooms), it will disappear. People just aren't willing to lose those options, even if it's clearly inferior. So they waste clicks going from room to room preserving options that are of no value. So the scientists changed the parameters of the experiment again. This time you could never truly lose a door. They could go dormant, but you could reactivate them with a single click. People still wasted clicks keeping all the rooms alive. So they weakened the restriction again. Now a dormant door was free to reactivate, but you (still? I think this may have been introduced in step 2) had the visual of a door getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Despite the fact that they were literally losing absolutely nothing, people moved rooms to keep all three doors visible.
The point is, people like options. I think this is why I have/had such trouble throwing things away. I can always throw it away later if I don't need it, but if I throw it away and do need it there's nothing I can do. That's terrifying. I've been decluttering like a motherfucker for the last year and a half, and it was a minor miracle the first time I realized I'd given away something I now needed- and not something cheap either- and didn't have a meltdown. The space and time I had gained by throwing away all the things that met the same threshold that thing did was more valuable to me then the money I had to spend buying a new thing. So I've been slowly but steadily decluttering for a while now, but it's kicked into high gear since I started the hydroortisone. For example, I had pounds and pounds of mail that's I've been carrying around for years but never gotten around to filing. Over the past month+ I've been slowly working my way through it. After I started the hydrocortisone, it became almost an pathological *need* to throw this stuff out or get it filed. I think I'm down to one box of unsorted, unfiled misc (still haven't found the jewelry I lost in the move, alas).
I have three species of fish in my tank, one of which is a prodigious breeder. It wasn't so bad before I put so many hiding spots in the tank, because the babies would get eaten. I'm fine with the idea of carnivores, but it bothered me that 1. the fry had no chance and 2. they were being eaten by their own parents, so I put in some driftwood and denser plants. It worked-from my original stock of 10 black mollies, 3 of whom died, I had over 30 juveniles. This was not good for the tank, or the fish. So I placed an ad on craigslist offering them up for nearly free, and found a taker. As I removed the fish from the tank, I had to decide how many to keep in reserve. The original limit was going to be "only those with good coloring", because the tank density or food scarcity had left the juveniles silver with black shadowing, rather than the black they should be. But as I picked more and more out of the tank and into the transit bucket, I began to panic. Was I leaving myself enough fish? What if they never had any more babies? Would they freak out about the sudden drop in school size? What if my adults died? I want to say it was a strength of will to defeat this, but it was almost the exact opposite- a surrender to the fact that no one plan was best for all eventualities, and that the current reality was more important that these hypothetical. So I kept with the original plan, which left me with 8 adults or late-age juveniles, and two or three tiny fry that dodged the net. I think that's about right.
In a weird way, I think this ties into the energy/focus thing. We think of energy as almost opposed to focus, but it's not. When you have the energy to fully commit to one option, it becomes less important to preserve the others. Without my organizational system at work, I'd run around like a chicken with its head cut off. An extremely energetic chicken with its head cut off. Possibly a chicken that had had meth rubbed into its neck hole. Anyways, I would not be particularly productive and most of my new energy would go into context switching costs. With my organization system, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and I go after it like a sheepdog. Energy and focus need to be in balance, but that's not because they're opposed.
Unless you tell them that if they stay out of a room too long (i.e. too many clicks on a row in other rooms), it will disappear. People just aren't willing to lose those options, even if it's clearly inferior. So they waste clicks going from room to room preserving options that are of no value. So the scientists changed the parameters of the experiment again. This time you could never truly lose a door. They could go dormant, but you could reactivate them with a single click. People still wasted clicks keeping all the rooms alive. So they weakened the restriction again. Now a dormant door was free to reactivate, but you (still? I think this may have been introduced in step 2) had the visual of a door getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Despite the fact that they were literally losing absolutely nothing, people moved rooms to keep all three doors visible.
The point is, people like options. I think this is why I have/had such trouble throwing things away. I can always throw it away later if I don't need it, but if I throw it away and do need it there's nothing I can do. That's terrifying. I've been decluttering like a motherfucker for the last year and a half, and it was a minor miracle the first time I realized I'd given away something I now needed- and not something cheap either- and didn't have a meltdown. The space and time I had gained by throwing away all the things that met the same threshold that thing did was more valuable to me then the money I had to spend buying a new thing. So I've been slowly but steadily decluttering for a while now, but it's kicked into high gear since I started the hydroortisone. For example, I had pounds and pounds of mail that's I've been carrying around for years but never gotten around to filing. Over the past month+ I've been slowly working my way through it. After I started the hydrocortisone, it became almost an pathological *need* to throw this stuff out or get it filed. I think I'm down to one box of unsorted, unfiled misc (still haven't found the jewelry I lost in the move, alas).
I have three species of fish in my tank, one of which is a prodigious breeder. It wasn't so bad before I put so many hiding spots in the tank, because the babies would get eaten. I'm fine with the idea of carnivores, but it bothered me that 1. the fry had no chance and 2. they were being eaten by their own parents, so I put in some driftwood and denser plants. It worked-from my original stock of 10 black mollies, 3 of whom died, I had over 30 juveniles. This was not good for the tank, or the fish. So I placed an ad on craigslist offering them up for nearly free, and found a taker. As I removed the fish from the tank, I had to decide how many to keep in reserve. The original limit was going to be "only those with good coloring", because the tank density or food scarcity had left the juveniles silver with black shadowing, rather than the black they should be. But as I picked more and more out of the tank and into the transit bucket, I began to panic. Was I leaving myself enough fish? What if they never had any more babies? Would they freak out about the sudden drop in school size? What if my adults died? I want to say it was a strength of will to defeat this, but it was almost the exact opposite- a surrender to the fact that no one plan was best for all eventualities, and that the current reality was more important that these hypothetical. So I kept with the original plan, which left me with 8 adults or late-age juveniles, and two or three tiny fry that dodged the net. I think that's about right.
In a weird way, I think this ties into the energy/focus thing. We think of energy as almost opposed to focus, but it's not. When you have the energy to fully commit to one option, it becomes less important to preserve the others. Without my organizational system at work, I'd run around like a chicken with its head cut off. An extremely energetic chicken with its head cut off. Possibly a chicken that had had meth rubbed into its neck hole. Anyways, I would not be particularly productive and most of my new energy would go into context switching costs. With my organization system, I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and I go after it like a sheepdog. Energy and focus need to be in balance, but that's not because they're opposed.
