People compare things that are close together in some way. You compare yourself to your neighbors or family, or to your colleagues at work, or to people that do similar work as you do in other companies.

Isn't one pervasive problem today that many people compare themselves to those they see on social media, often including influencers with a very different lifestyle? So it seems to me that comparisons that are not so local are in fact often made, it primarily depends on what you're exposed to - which to some degree is indeed the people around you, but nowadays more and more also includes the skewed images people on the internet, who often don't even know you exist, broadcast to the world. 

But maybe this is also partially your point. Maybe it would theoretically help to expose people a lot to "the reality of the 90s" or something, but I guess it's a bit of an anti-meme and hence hard to do. 

I agree that telling people how well off they are on certain scales is probably not super effective, but I'm still sometimes glad these perspectives exist and I can take them into consideration during tough times.

Relatedly, at some point as a teenager I realized that being exposed to rain is actually usually not that terrible, and I had just kind of been accidentally conditioned to dislike it because it's a normal thing to dislike and I never met anyone who appeared to enjoy the experience. But turns out, once you stop actively maintaining that resistance and welcome the rain, it can be pretty nice to walk around in rain while everyone around you tries to escape it. (Some exceptions apply, of course)

Yeah, fair enough. My impression has been that some people feel guilty about caring about themselves more than about others, or that it's seen as not very virtuous. But maybe such views are less common (or less pronounced) than the vibes I've often picked up imply. :)

Egoism has a bad reputation, but I think that doesn't do it justice. Some degree of egoism is likely very helpful, as it's a form of ensuring available local knowledge is taken into account. If people were not at least mildly egoistic, a great deal of local knowledge would be ignored, leading to everyone supposedly helping others in not-actually-helpful ways.

What I think is much more harmful overall is the distinction between valuing public goods^[1] at least somewhat vs not valuing them at all in their decision-making. This is something I've in particular seen in some B2C companies I've been involved with: when things are going well for them, they're proud of the value they produce for the public (as in, typically, their paying + non-paying users). But when the market gets tough and their growth/existence is at risk, they often very quickly stop caring about public goods entirely and start making very one-sided trade-offs that are (supposedly) beneficial for them while often being incredibly annoying to many users, when other, similarly-beneficial-to-them solutions might exist that don't come at the expense of users. Two examples:

1. A software company I once worked at noticed that there was some account sharing between paying users. Their solution was to aggressively limit active logins to a single device / browser, so whenever you log in somewhere, you are logged out everywhere else. My best guess was that this may have increased sales by perhaps 0.3% at best, while being annoying to a large fraction of users. (Ultimately, I think it was even net negative for the company itself, as annoyed users are more likely to churn, but that's a topic for another time)
2. Staying a bit vague here, but in another instance, a feature that was frequently used by hundreds of thousands of non-paying users, and which caused negligible maintenance effort, was entirely removed because it didn't measurably drive conversions

So, the problem in such cases is not so much that the company cares about their own growth, the problem is when they completely disregard the (potential for positive) externalities^[1], compared to only mostly disregarding it, but at least having it represented in their model with a non-zero weight.

There are surely different reasons for why such absolute disregard for public goods can occur. Some speculation:

• zero-sum thinking where one implicitly assumes that the only variable in question is "benefits me" vs "benefits the public" and not seeing that these can move independently
• valuing something a bit vs not at all can increase the complexity of your decision and add to mental exhaustion^[2]
• diffusion of responsibility, where individuals inside the company may care about providing value to the public, yet nobody feels entirely responsible to defend this perspective in big decisions
• and, of course, Goodhart's law and optimizing what you can measure, which often does not include the real value you provide, but instead mostly easy-to-hack superficial metrics and costs/benefits to yourself

I don't pretend to have any solution for this. But my impression is that some of the decision-making, at least in the companies I've seen, tends to be highly path-dependent, and a good argument or suggestion made to the right people at the right point in time can make a huge difference. So I guess, even if this approach doesn't scale all that well, having well-meaning individuals within companies occasionally speak up and make productive proposals could move some needles.

1. ^{^}

   I can imagine that I'm not using "public goods" and "externalities" in precisely the ways they're usually used. I hope the post makes some sense anyway. If you know of any simple ways to phrase things more precisely, please let me know.

2. ^{^}

   I suspect this is why even many people who care about animals and dislike factory farming prefer to not think about the topic at all rather than making decisions case by case and trading off their comfort vs how much harm is caused. E.g., when you eat at a restaurant with a lot of veggy offers, it would (for most people) be very easy to eat something without meat. Whereas when friends invite you over and cook something with meat, it would be much more costly/unpleasant to refuse eating it. Still, I know only few people who are "vegetarian when it's easy", yet I know many people who dislike factory farming, but give it practically 0 weight in their decisions nonetheless.

Thanks for the write-up! Which Claude subscription did you use for this project, and what was your experience with rate limits?

Thanks for the comment! I like your granola bar example. Maybe survival-relevant properties like food are just more convincing to the mind than merely "feeling great afterwards". :)

Regarding 3 / conflict, I also realize now it's less general than I made it sound. I mostly react that way when explicitly blamed in the "you did something wrong and you really should have known better" sense, when I have the feeling that that wasn't obvious for me at all. But even then, it's always interesting to observe how my impression of reality can quickly shift when the circumstances change. 

If, on the other hand, an activation function is non-monotonic, as in ReLU, then some unrelated parts of the input space will get folded together into the same parts of the output space

Just a small technicality, but you probably mean "strictly monotonic" instead of monotonic, because ReLU actually is monotonic, right? (Or perhaps "injective" would be even closer, although I suppose in continuous spaces that's practically the same as strict monotonicity)
Of course, your actual point here still holds.

I wonder if the disagree votes here are trying to say that people disagree with my argument being sound, or rather disagree with this being in any way similar to the IVT example. With the exception of kbear, for who it appears to be the former.

Just in case this wasn't clear, by "comparable" I don't mean they're similar, but that you can put them on a scale where the difference seems quantitative rather than qualitative. Perhaps a possible sequence would be:

1. a loved one dies
2. a loved one who lived far away and you saw relatively rarely dies
3. a family member dies who was a meaningful part of your life once but you grew distant from
4. an acquaintance dies
5. a celebrity you were fond of dies
6. a celebrity you were fond of has an accident and has to stop performing
7. a celebrity you were fond of decides to end their career

To me, all two consecutive pairs of this chain seem to be within something like an order of magnitude of badness (solely from the isolated perspective as me being the person experiencing this from the outside and being emotionally affected by it). If this is true, and this is transitive, then a celebrity ending their career should be (per individual affected) ~upper-bounded by being 10^-6 as intense as a loved one dying. So, if someone has millions of fans, this could be in the same ballpark of badness as someone dying (and I'd argue that for many of these steps in the chain, the badness ratio is much smaller than 10). 

I agree! Based on the title, I also kind of expected the article to cover that, but I guess it did so rather implicitly. :)

Personally though, I always thought of unknown knowns more like ~latent knowledge, so things you know without being entirely aware of them, or things you never thought of but that you immediately get when thinking about them (e.g. once somebody raises the question, you know the answer, but you never thought about that answer before and hence it wasn't really part of your world model until then), or things you could figure out by piecing together other things you know easily, but you never tried.