I agree that being punctual is usually a good thing and a good practice for calibration, but the second half of this post feels too strongly worded and typical mind fallacying.
I have a public transport commute that occasionally has a fair bit of variance, so being punctual isn't necessarily cheap in the sense that I'd have to trade-off being really early on most days just to handle the rare occasions when the extra time is actually needed.
Even with a car, there are cases where traffic and/or finding a parking spot can cause huge variance. It really depends on the type of meeting / circumstances of the other people whether it's worth completely minimizing the risk of being late at the expense of potentially wasting a lot of your own time.
E.g., when I visit somebody at their home, then it will likely be bearable for them to welcome me 10 minutes later. Whereas if we meet at some public space, it may be very annoying for the person to stand around on their own (particularly if the person has social anxiety and gets serious disutility from the experience).
That all being said, probably the majority of minutes that people are late to things are self-inflicted, and I agree with OP it makes sense in general to reduce that part (and more generally striving to be a reliable person).
The nerd in me wants to start keeping a spreadsheet and track that variance and get a 95% confidence interval. The rationalist in me knows to gently put that urge aside, haha.
I like this idea. As I tried to be more organized and less late to things, I implicitly did something like this, and this is a nice framing of that process.
I do think the asymmetry of the consequences distorts the updates I make a little though – since I am trying hard not to be late, I sometimes leave an unreasonable amount of buffer. I was once 45 minutes early to an appointment because I was taking public transport to an unfamiliar part of the city. I find it harder to make an update based on being early, because I don't know the variance – if I'm late (and I was trying hard not to be), then I clearly underestimated the worst case, but if I'm early then I could have just got lucky.
I don't think being a punctual person is much of a feat of epistemic rationality, unlike performance in prediction markets. I think it is more related to personality, similar to conscientiousness.
Another thing you need to calibrate on is context.
There are different cultural approaches to punctuality that can be divided into "Cold Climate" and "Warm Climate" categories, or roughly, being more oriented toward time and efficiency, or toward relationships and going with the flow. "Meet me at 10" might mean showing up at 10, or it might mean you start getting ready to go at 10, and if you meet a friend along the way, you might be later.
Even in our "Cold Climate" time-oriented culture, there are different definitions of "on time".
If you are calibrated in your expected transit time, but not calibrated with the context, you might show up at the time you predicted, but still be early or late.
The second half will definitely see some spirited debate, but I do want to point out how good that idea in the first half is - travel time is definitely one of the most easily trackable things to update on, could be good rationality practice to track it more even if you don't have much of a problem with it. That would also let you be wrong in a guilt-free environment.
Even if you are chronically late, it is still a pure rationality error to constantly predict you'll be on time. The first mission is to understand your lateness. The second, if you choose to accept it, is to accurately communicate it to others - don't promise what you know you won't deliver. The third, if you can achieve it, is to actually be on time.
People have a lot more justifiable reason to be upset at me for failing to own up to my shortcomings than for having them.
See also Duncan Sabien's Prophets vs Kings.
I suspect there are a few genres of late. Most people have the Sudden Realization variety; I suffer from Lucid Coma tardiness. This horrific disease means I'm fully aware of the right time to leave and how it reflects on me, I just... don't. Psychoanalysis might reveal some sort of ego conflict or latent aggression towards the world for imposing a schedule on me, but all of this is to say I think this model needs to add another dimension for agency.
Perhaps we can make a 2x2: calibration x execution reliability.
Being 5 minutes early costs you almost nothing (read your phone). Being 5 minutes late costs social capital.
surely both of these cannot simultaneously be true.
(i don't mind at all when someone is late! they probably had reasons. i'm curious to hear the story!)
There's a wide range of different social contexts for this. I personally share the opinion expressed in your quote, but I also have been in environments where such an approach was actively socially or otherwise counterproductive.
is this a fair summary of how you feel?
is this mostly for business/other high-efficiency contexts? to me, this seems so entirely opposed to what we might call the "spirit of friendship" as to be hard to understand.
i can recognize that there are contexts where efficiency is prioritized. (the way the original essay presented the situation made it seem not to be such a context, though.)
i guess i can imagine a friendly situation where the stakes are high enough that something like this is at play: "bilbo is late again, and now we missed the tour bus!" even then, though -- "the real destination was the friends we made all along," innit?
if you have the time, i would appreciate help understanding!
No, I don't think that is an accurate summary, but that's on me for leaving out the key piece: I apply very different standards to myself vs others. If I am late, I know all the things I counterfactually could have done to instead be on time but didn't. When I tell others the story of why I'm late, it usually feels like an excuse I don't quite believe. When others are (occasionally) late, I too am curious to hear their stories.
When someone (in a friendship context) is chronically late, you learn to expect it and route around it, whether they have a story or not, and whether the story is entertaining or believable or not. It's not a big deal because you've established that expectation. But I'm never going to ask that friend to drive me to the airport.
When someone (in a casual or friendly context) is actively talking about planning and time, and you know they're being unrealistically optimistic but they don't want to hear it, then from then on you know not to believe their stories on why they're late. They're late because they're not interested in planning to be on time. The story is not evidence of the real 'why'. Whether or not this is fine is entirely dependent on context. In some cultures, it's expected to be late to things, sometimes even hours late, and being on time could actually be a problem because everyone else won't be ready. In others, being early is fine but being late is unacceptable - a lot of structured social activities, like team sports or many kinds of classes, are like this. In some cases both are seen as bad - I've known a few people (all of German descent, TINACBNIEAC) who would literally drive to the corner and wait in their cars, ideally just out of sight, until 1-2 minutes before they were 'supposed' to arrive, so as to get to the door pretty much literally as the clock changed to the 'right' time.
When someone (in a business context) is chronically or unapologetically late, it's potentially but not unambiguously some combination of rude, disrespectful, counterproductive, and wasteful. If it's because they had back to back meetings and one ran over, or they needed to use the bathroom in between, or they're having technical difficulties, or some urgent personal matter came up, no problem! But you're supposed to take 10 seconds to send a message letting people know, and if you can but don't, that's a problem. If it's some sort of (even inadvertent) power move, because they don't care about your time, that might be something you just have to deal with from your boss or a client, but it is always frustrating.
It also varies by culture -- e.g. in central and southern Italy it is considered socially acceptable to be a bit late at a meeting, but everybody knows that so if they want to meet you at 11:30 they will tell you to meet at 11:15, or 11:00, depending the level of formality of the meeting. If they were somewhere where being even slightly late is considered rude, they'd tell you to meet at 11:30.
I like this idea insofar as it aids the idea of someone who is truly rational being competent in all aspects of life, because there isn't a reason a highly intelligent individual should be particularly bad at many things. Also, it's so easy to not be late that doing so consistently signals extreme issues (severe lack of care, or very unintelligent), and I think a rational individual understands how small actions can effect others emotionally and therefore is very careful about their actions. However, I think people being late is only a result of poor prediction skills in unusually low intelligent people, it seems like usually its just a result of procrastination & short sighted preferences which probably come from lifestyle as a whole.
To be well-calibrated is to be able to predict the world with appropriate confidence. We know that calibration can be improved through practice. Accurate calibration of our beliefs and expectations is a foundational element of epistemic rationality.
Others have written in detail how to approach life with a Superforecaster mentality.
I suggest a more modest practice: Always be punctual.
You likely have many distinct opportunities to be on time almost every day. Each of these opportunities to be on time is an opportunity to make predictions:
How long will it take me to...
If you have never really made it a priority to be punctual, you will likely learn many things very quickly. First of all, your basic estimates of timing are likely textbook Planning Fallacy examples, in the sense that they are all best-case scenario estimates with no allowance for traffic, computer trouble, bad directions, child tantrums, or slow elevators. Gradually, in your attempts to be predictably punctual, you will learn to predict more and more of the mundane details of the world around you. You will not only get an increasingly accurate sense of how long it takes to do tasks or to drive between places, but you'll even gain a sense of the traffic patterns in your locale, and as you extend this practice over years, perhaps even the best times of day to book plane flights to avoid long lines.
The feedback loop is immediate and unambiguous. You predicted 8:55 arrival; you arrived at 9:13. No ambiguity, no wiggle room, no 'well it depends how you define it.' This is unusually clean epistemic feedback.
Every time you confidently predict that you'll be on time, and then you're late, you have an opportunity for a calibration update. In fact, after you've been doing this for a while, you can even glean an update from being too early!
Coda, and Possible Infohazard for Chronically Late People
There are other good reasons to try to never be late.
Being late is one of those psychological things that is always annoying when other people do it, but somehow it's okay when you do it, because you have reasons. It's a sort of Reverse Fundamental Attribution Error.
If you pause and reflect on this, you will realize that it is in fact not okay when you do it at all, and you would be annoyed if someone did this to you. Lateness communicates disrespect for others, and also personal disorganization. Being chronically late reflects very poorly on you and makes everyone respect you less.
If you find that you are chronically late, and everyone else you know is also chronically late, you should consider that this is because your own persistent disrespect for their time has trained them to expect you to be late. This may not be them communicating that they are okay with your behavior, but that they have simply factored it in when dealing with you.
"What's the big deal? It's just a couple of minutes!" Exactly. Being 5 minutes early costs you almost nothing (read your phone). Being 5 minutes late costs social capital. Calibration training here teaches you to weight outcomes by their consequences, not just their probabilities.
If you find yourself in this position, there is a silver lining: you have a lot of work to do to repair your reputation, but also, if you reverse this behavior today, you can transform your life and the way others see you very quickly and cheaply, relative to most other available actions. And doing so is consonant with a rationalist practice you should probably be doing anyway.