Sunday Snippets #7
money is the unit of caring; using your phone is speedrunning life; comet relationships
Money: The Unit of Caring, Eliezer Yudkowsky:
There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen.
The whole reason why we have money is to realize the tremendous gains possible from each of us doing what we do best.
This is what grownups do. This is what you do when you want something to actually get done. You use money to employ full-time specialists.
"Volunteering" just one hour of legal work, constantly delayed, spread across three weeks in casual minutes between other jobs? This is not the way something gets done when anyone actually cares about it, or to state it near-equivalently, when money is involved.
Written before effective altruism was really a thing, and probably the passage that first turned me on to the idea of comparative advantage and earning to give.
Most Phone Use is a Tragic Loss of Life, David Cain:
About twenty years later — last week — I found myself sitting at my kitchen table, mechanically upvoting and downvoting hot takes on Reddit when I realized I had been aimlessly thumbing my phone for at least twenty minutes. I was vaguely aware that I had not yet done the thing that caused me to reach for my phone in the first place, and could no longer remember what it was.
Even though I get caught up like that all the time, the nihilism of that particular twenty minutes really got to me. It was such a nothing thing to do. I said aloud what I was thinking: “That… was a total loss.”
Basically I had just aged myself by twenty minutes. Two virtual cigarettes, and not even a fading buzz to show for it.
So much phone use is really just speedrunning life.
The joy of comet relationships, Sophia Graham:
Comet relationships are with people that are important to me and with whom I retain an emotional bond and often a romantic bond irrespective of the distance between us, but we have no financial or practical enmeshment.
When they come closely into my orbit (or I come into theirs), and we get time together either in person or by some sort of online method, our connection is deep and intense and wonderful. There is a beauty that comes with the knowledge that these moments of deep connection will last a relatively short time, and then we will return to being further apart.
We spend most of our time much more distant from each other. Going on with our lives, other relationships, friendships and activities. This spaciousness does not diminish the importance of these relationships… Whilst there isn’t constant contact or communication, there remains a continuity within them – of affection, attraction, interest and desire.