This is a very simple communication habit I’ve found pretty useful. The short version is, you should ask and say not just what you want, but how much you want it.

I. The Abilene Paradox

Sometimes groups are dumber than individuals.

The Abilene Paradox is a term coined by Jerry Harvey in 1974, and describes how groups can come to agreement on something where each member disagrees. 

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a 50-mile (80-km) trip to Abilene for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time."

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, "I wasn't delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you." The wife says, "I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that." The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip that none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

The version in the anecdote is actually not too bad. You see, they eventually figure out they made a silly mistake, instead of each continuing to say it was great because they think others liked it. If you did that, the problem would only get worse each iteration. Perhaps it could become a family tradition to drive for an hour every Sunday to eat food nobody particularly wanted.

This has more than a little in common with the Keynesian Beauty Contest, where judges are rewarded for choosing the contestant that most other judges also chose. In such a contest, the judges might each individually think that one contestant is second-rate, but that every other judge will mistakenly believe that contestant is amazing. That public perception can get set in stone oddly quick. If you are a new beauty judge in the fifth year of the International Miss Keynesian Beauty, a popular show about picking the most attractive contestant, you might look at past years and see what kind of person wins.

II. Your Money or Your Life

The Unit of Caring is one of those gifts that keep on giving. In short summary (though it’s really worth reading the full post) you want some things more than other things, and you can spend money on what you want.

To a first approximation, money is the unit of caring up to a positive scalar factor—the unit of relative caring.  Some people are frugal and spend less money on everything; but if you would, in fact, spend $5 on a burrito, then whatever you will not spend $5 on, you care about less than you care about the burrito.  If you don't spend two months salary on a diamond ring, it doesn't mean you don't love your Significant Other.  ("De Beers: It's Just A Rock.")  But conversely, if you're always reluctant to spend any money on your SO, and yet seem to have no emotional problems with spending $1000 on a flat-screen TV, then yes, this does say something about your relative values.

-Money: The Unit of Caring

A useful side point here is that you spend more money on some things than other things, and this is correct. I care more about my partner than I care about the latest fantasy novel, which is why I’m willing to buy plane tickets to visit her family for Christmas but am not willing to spend plane ticket money buying whatever Brandon Sanderson’s cooked up lately. 

This is true up to and including my whole life. If I was sick, and a doctor said it was going to be fatal unless I bought the cure, I’d be willing to spend an awful lot on that cure. I wouldn’t quite be willing to put my whole family into debt for it though. My life has value, but it has value for the time I get to spend.

Look at that phrase. “Time I get to spend.” It’s a fairly standard idiom, but this reveals that we do give up our time in order to get things we want. Earlier this year I spent four hours in a car in order to get a morning hanging out with an acquaintance and splash around in a beautiful river. I wanted the river and the company enough I thought this was worth it.

I wasn’t driving to Abilene because I thought the group wanted it. Each of us was the kind of person who could communicate that we wanted something, and whether it was worth what we’d pay. My acquaintance wouldn’t have driven four hours to visit me at a coffee shop, I wouldn’t have driven a dozen hours for the river. How did we reach this understanding? Being the kind of people who’d say “nah, not worth it to me at that price- but nothing lost, and we can do something else if there’s one we both want enough to make it happen.”

III. Weights and Words

Here’s what I’ve been doing to fight the Abilene Paradox.

I distinguish not just what I want, but how much I want it. For most use cases I want something quick to say and quick to understand. Since I want it to work reasonable well even with people I haven’t explained the concept to before, I want it to be intuitive by normal English.

The terms I use are Minor, Mild, Medium, Major, and Massive. Loosely, each is a couple orders of magnitude apart.

Minor preferences are for things I think it’d be worth fixing with a couple cents or a couple seconds. I have minor preferences between different pens, between the fonts some websites use for text, about Wendy’s vs Burger King. If someone is offering me a free T-shirt with options for different colours, I’ll usually grab a blue or green one if I can, but won’t look very hard for blue or green if that’s not present.

Mild preferences are for stuff I’d be willing to pay a few minutes or a few bucks to change. It’s the difference between a random t-shirt and my favourite t-shirt, or how I like to dice veggies unusually small when making a stir fry. Mild preferences tend to be the threshold where it’s worth communicating about them at all; below here I don’t actually care enough to have a conversation about it.

Medium preferences are for cases where I’d be willing to pay several hours or a few hundred dollars to change. It’s the realm of the easy home improvement project, or my nice ergonomic desk setup. For me, avoiding layovers or having reasonable flight times in airplane travel is just on the cusp of a medium preference, where sometimes I’ll do it and sometimes I won't.

Major preferences are for the kind of thing I’d pay a couple months or tens of thousands of dollars to change. This is the place where you find the successful and large home improvement projects, and it’s about what I’ve put (via time, money, and other tradeoffs) into having the romantic relationships I really like. My career decisions are generally Major, and certainly the field I’m in is a Major preference.

Massive preferences are where I’d pay - well, the exact numbers get weird here at the top of the scale, but usually it’s more money than I actually have and more time than I expect to get. A massive preference for me is where if it took most of my career and giving up most of my earning potential, I might still do it, and endorse doing it, because I thought I was getting a good deal at the price. This seems to be where people commonly rate having children, or spearheading political change.

Importantly, my preference weighting isn’t about whether that’s how much work it would actually be. That’s only related insofar as I might actually try and get my preference satisfied, which often I don’t, and even more often I can get at a bargain. Consider that while I have a Major preference to eat food more than once a week, Taco Bell will cheerfully give me a week of food for less than a hundred dollars. (Though if I eat a week straight of Taco Bell, I will have new and predictable preferences.) I have lots of preferences that are wild mismatches with how much effort they take, and you probably do too.

A typical use case goes something like this:

Me: Want to go to the movies next week? I think the sequel to that anime you liked is out.

Them: Oh, that sounds fun. Want to do Friday?

Me: Sounds good- I’ve got a minor preference to do Sunday instead but Friday’s fine.

Them: Mhm, mild preference to stick with Friday, I don’t want to be out late Sunday night.

Me: See you Friday!

Don’t go to Abilene by mistake. Communicate what you want. 

IV. Three Things To Beware

Here's a few ways someone could use this system wrong.

A. Beware False Precision

Some of my readers talk to me directly from time to time. If you are reading this and thinking back with surprise on some conversation with me, that's not unexpected. Some of that is because there's still a lot of range. Somewhere between five bucks and five hundred bucks I'll swap from mild to medium, but I'm not especially precise about the line. If I was going to use precision, I'd swap to using real numbers.

I do practice that precision sometimes, but even with practice I find my values are imprecise or badly sorted more often than I'm happy with. This system is built to be useful at conversational speed, and to degrade gracefully. People who have never read this essay will still understand the idea of doing what the medium preference wants over a mild preference. Don't try to make it a ten point or a twenty point scale thinking that makes it better.

B. Beware The Utility Monster

This is not designed for use with people who aren't basically on your side.

Someone can just say they have a massive preference to have Taco Bell over Burger King. It'll be hard to argue with them, since preferences are internal, but they can claim it. This is a communication tool, akin to Non-Violent Communication or story points in a software sprint. 

C. Beware Overempathy

You should report the preferences for yourself. If you're trying to give the weights for other people, say that. 

"I've got a minor preference, I think you've got a medium?"

That's fine.

I'll talk about this more later, but the core way you get into the Abilene Paradox is by trying to take other people's preferences as your own. I claim it is just totally fine for you to say you have a mild preference to drive on your own, someone else to have a genuine major preference to get to ride shotgun with you, and for you to shrug and say it's your car you're going to do what you want.

V. The Most Important Step Is Asking For What You Want

Does giving your preferences weights actually fix the Abilene Paradox?

No. Or, rather, not directly. I'm doing a bit of slight of hand here.

The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time."

The problem wasn't that they didn't give information on their preferences. The problem is that the information was full of falsehoods. Some weird signalling game happened, and people said things that were not true, and then people wound up with an outcome nobody wanted.

What I am doing is trying to create a social script that makes disagreeing easier.

I don't know if this will work, to be clear. Maybe it'll only be useful in situations where nobody was going to go to Abilene in the first place, because they would already have said "nah, driving to Abilene doesn't sound that great to me." 

But hopefully the cascade looks like "I'd minorly like to go to Abilene, and I'd mildly like to stay here." "Oh, I'd mildly like to stay here too, lets do that" and so on instead.

In my life this little affordance has made it easier to express that I might still enjoy your company on a hot and dusty drive, but I would enjoy your company more here on the porch, in the shade, with our game of dominos. I hope you find it useful too.