I had lots of exposure to The Outdoors, much of it on school trips, much of it involved being an unfit kid having to keep up with a group of fitter kids or grownups, and one or two grownups who'd subtly chide me for not trying hard enough. I was in fact pushing my body through substantial fatigue.

Then after college I decided that I was a grownup and no one could make me go see nature if I didn't want to. I was a city boy and that was it. No trees or hills or dirt or bugs or lakes or anything. Just cities and bookstores and coffee shops and offices and apartments and museums and restaurants and subways. (One note of discord I might could have noticed earlier - I was always pretty happy when visiting California, to see the hills and trees and stuff, or whenever I was somewhere I could see mountains.)

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I'm a planner. I don't cope well with travel where I have to make major decisions every day. I like to look up in advance what the major points of interest are, which ones are close to each other, and plan out efficient days based on this. I also care about actually enjoying the local food when traveling, so I use Chowhound and Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide (as well as the recs in guidebooks like lonely planet, recommendations from locals, and even Yelp if need be.)

I think this is related to my mood regulation - I can get excited about planning a vacation, and then about going and following the plan - but if I wake up in the morning and ask myself, "What do I want to do today?", I'm going to sit in my room bored and hungry and annoyed at myself for wasting time until something like 1PM.

While this is my native mode of travel, two alterations have made vacations much better for me:

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Here are the things I've seen work well from both sides of the hiring process, and from talking with a bunch of people about career choice.

If you are thinking of going to school for a couple of years to qualify you for a job, apply for that job today to find out whether you actually have a skill gap. If you don't know exactly what job it is you want, figure out what the fastest way to find this out is - it probably isn't going to school for years.

If you don't get job interviews (or even if you do), ask people for informational interviews. Ask your friends or acquaintances for introductions to the most relevant people you can find. Ask those people for a 30 minute phone call or coffee meeting. Ask them all the questions you're actually curious about.  "Based on my experience, does it look like I'd be qualified? If not, what would I have to do to be a good candidate?" Ask for feedback on your resumé. If you're not sure you want to work in this field, make a list of all the things that would persuade you one way or the other if you found out about them, and ask those questions. At the end of the interview, ask, "whom else should I talk to?" If they're doing X and you want to do related thing Y, ask whom they know who does or knows about Y. Finally, if you think you want a job in their field, ask, "Who do you know who's hiring?"

If you're trying to decide whether a company/job is a good fit for you, that's what the job application process is for. Make it clear what you're looking for in your cover letter. If not having X is a dealbreaker for you, mention that you're looking for X. This way you waste less of your and their time, and if it is the perfect job for you, they have some evidence that you're an unusually good fit. Go into the interview with a list of all your actual, genuine reservations about the job; that's what you should ask in the "any questions for me?" part.

To illustrate, here's the cover letter I sent to GiveWell:

Hi there!

I want to do the best thing to help the world, but need to be able to judge competing claims to even know which interventions do the most good, and which skills I need to contribute to them. GiveWell and GiveWell Labs are doing that kind of work - I want to get practice with this.

I don't know if the best thing is for me to work for GiveWell, volunteer, or something else, but I'd like to start the conversation.

Personally Working With GiveWell

I currently manage an analytics team at Fannie Mae, I've built predictive models, and done empirical research to identify credit and collateral value risk. I've presented work to senior management a few times, so I have experience communicating quantitative results in clear plain language too.

I haven't done much work on closely related problems to the ones GiveWell works on, but here's my first public attempt to get a handle on comparing the magnitude of existential risk with other problems one might want to solve.

My resume is attached.

DC EA Involvement

On a related note, Matt Dahlhausen, a member of the DC Effective Altruists group and an organizer of the Effective Altruism group at the University of Maryland, has expressed interest in a group project doing research for GiveWell.

I don't know if GiveWell has gone in for this sort of thing before, but it seems like it has two possible advantages. Free labor (disadvantage: possibly poor coordination and QC), but maybe more importantly, building connections with effective altruists in DC. I think a strong active group of DC effective altruists might be able to do a tremendous amount of good, and having a real project to work on would help with group cohesion. Please let me know if you're interested in pursuing this.

I'm in the San Francisco area over the next few days (leaving on the 16th)--I'd love to meet if this is convenient for you.

Ben Hoffman

The Art is like having a well-ordered ship. You need sailors who can row or adjust the sails, you need strong oars or sails, you need a captain who can direct the ship, a navigator who can orient yourself by the stars, a plan to get to your destination, and a sound hull.

If you lack any of these things, it will make it hard to get to your destination. So if trying to get somewhere can often look like trying to have an awesome ship.

If you just care about having an awesome ship, you might not get anywhere interesting. You might decide that it's cold night and your sails can be better used as extra bedsheets, and cut them up - or build a second story with the oars. You might decide that it's more fun to party than to row. You might even light the mast on fire so you can see better at night, for a bit. But in the end, you'll still be adrift at sea.

And yet, if you just focus on the destination, you may not do much either. If there's a leak in the hull, or the captain is too cruel or too lazy to command the sailors well, or the sailors don't do their work, or the sails are loose, or the navigator is ignored, or your maps are wrong, then just doing the same things harder to get to the destination faster won't work very well either. If you have a leak and you're miles from shore, don't just row faster or keep staring at the stars to figure out which way to go - repair the leak immediately!

The Art is to have a well-ordered ship because that's how you get to your destination. To understand how the order of your ship promotes this goal. To teach your navigator about the stars and correct your maps, to keep discipline among the crew, to tend to the body of the ship - and yet, to know that these things, and not others, are what makes a well-ordered ship, makes much more sense if you know what the ship is for.

This is partly stolen from Plato's Republic (archived here), partly inspired by a conversation with Brienne.

I used to believe that it was good to be smart, and the smart people were the ones who had great ideas. So I came up with some ideas, and then decided to believe in them very strongly, so that they would be great.

Later, I learned that believing strongly in big, bold ideas isn't so great when they're wrong. I noticed that the smartest people often considered and rejected many appealing ideas, and could explain why they were wrong. So I learned how to be very, very skeptical of ideas. I didn't have any big ones of my own, but I was sure that when I did, if it survived my own skepticism, it would be great.

Then I realized that in order to have great ideas, I needed to have any ideas - and that I could only make an idea better, if I knew what it was. My skepticism had taught me to throw away my ideas before they entered consciousness. So I learned how to entertain an idea before believing it, play with it, ask what about it wasn't quite right - and then try to mend its flaws instead of throwing it away.

It’s helpful to know why I’m procrastinating. Sometimes the reason for procrastinating can be easily corrected. Probably the most well known version of this is not knowing what the next action is.

Here are some other things that I’ve noticed cause me to put off tasks I intended to do.

1) An inessential aspect of the task is aversive.

The Tale of the Egg Sandwich

One morning at work I had a craving for an egg sandwich from the fast food restaurant around the corner. I didn’t want to go get the sandwich because it would predictably cost me half an hour - maybe a lot more more if I started reading something there and didn’t feel like going back into the office which seemed likely based on the outside view. So I tried to diagnose what was wrong by dialoguing with the part of myself that wanted the sandwich.

Am I hungry? If I ate some peanuts, would it feel good to go back to work?
No, I still want to go get the egg sandwich.
Imagine that I snap my fingers, and magically, the egg sandwich appears in my hands. Would it feel good to go back to work after I ate it?
No, I want to GO GET the egg sandwich.
Huh, is that because it feels bad to stay here and work?
Yes.
Would it feel good to do something else in the office, like look at Facebook, or write a blog post?
No.
Would it feel good to read a book?
No.
Huh, that’s surprising. I usually want to read a book. Would it feel good to go elsewhere and read a book?
Yes.
Oh… So it feels bad to be in the office?
Yes.
Why?
Because there are people around who might interrupt me and distract me.
Huh. Maybe getting out of the office is sufficient. If I walked over to the Ferry Building, bought a coffee, and sat at the table near Peet’s, would it feel good to work there?
Yeah.
OK, let’s go.

And I did, and got a three-hour work block done.

The Tale of the Shoes and the Headband

I used to procrastinate a lot in the mornings, before getting out of my apartment. I did a few mindful walkthrough of my morning routine, paying attention to the urge to do something other than get ready, and being curious about why. I realized that there were some concrete and avoidable things that I was flinching from. First, I didn’t want to shower. Part of that is unavoidable - I have to take off my glasses and hearing aids. But another thing I dislike is that after the shower, I get the floor wet, and water’s dripping down my face from my hair, which is a sensation I hate. So I resolved to towel myself off before walking onto the tile floor, and to get an athletic headband to catch water before it reached my face.

The other thing I hated was putting on my shoes, because it would remind me that a bunch of my shoes needed to be properly put away, and maybe even needed polishing. I organized the floor of my closet, and then it wasn’t painful to go get my shoes anymore.

2) My reward gradient is wrong

Even after I’d taken the little problems out of my morning, I found that it was sometimes unmotivating to get out of the apartment, just to get into the office and start doing some solitary work - or join a meeting that wasn’t going to be very fun. But what did sound like it might be good was meeting a friend for breakfast. So I asked a few friends whether they’d like to meet for breakfast before work. Some said yes, and I found that on the mornings when I had a breakfast scheduled, I’d not only be faster in getting out of the apartment, but go to sleep faster the night before so I wouldn’t oversleep and miss the appointment.

3) I do not know exactly what I am trying to do

Sometimes, when procrastinating on a writing task, I ask myself, “What does this have to communicate?”, and list out the things I need to say. Then once I have that list, I can just write sentences that do the bare minimum of saying what I want to say. Then it’s mostly written.

4) I am applying an inappropriate standard

I was procrastinating on writing an important email. I looked at the flinch and noticed that I was flinching from the possibility of sending an email that said the wrong thing, and damaging my relationship with the recipient in some way. So I decided that the task was not to write and send an email, but just to write it. I’d worry about whether it was OK to send after I’d written something. Framed this way, the action of writing the email no longer seemed likely to cause damage if I made a mistake, since I could just not sent it.
Then I wrote the email.
Then I looked at it.
It looked pretty good.
So I sent it.

I’ve also noticed myself reluctant to start writing fiction.

“Why don’t I want to write this?”
“Because it won’t be good.”
“I’m not asking you to write a good short story. I’m just asking you to write a short story at all.”
“Oh, I can do that!”

Then I put together the bare minimum that tells the story I want to tell, not worrying about how good it is - and get practice, and become better.

5) I am trying to do too many mutually exclusive things

When I was in DC trying to build up the Effective Altruism meetup group there, I had a bunch of plans for things to try - and noticed my motivation flagging after an initial burst of enthusiasm. When I turned my focus inwards and asked why, I got a clear unambiguous answer, straight from the gut:

“Because I can’t actually do all this.”
“How will these plans fail?"
“There’s not enough room in the day.”

So I prioritized, and instead of doing three projects with the DC EA group, I decided to prioritize one project and meetups - and actually executed my plans.

6) I believe that my plan will fail

I noticed that I was putting off completing this section because it overlapped strongly with another thing I'm writing, so I decided to publish this post without it.

Let's say Starbucks is having a bad quarter, and wants to make more money. They decide that to do that, they will simply charge ten times as much per drink - for example, instead of charging about $2 for a simple cup of coffee, they charge about $20. Should you expect them to have ten times as much revenue?

No - people will buy less. They make buying decisions based, in part, on price. In economics this is measured as "the price elasticity of demand".

People will buy less if you raise prices for a couple of reasons:

The Substitution Effect

People like more than one thing. I like wine, and I like lemonade. Sometimes I strongly prefer wine, and sometimes I strongly prefer lemonade. But if wine cost $1,000 a bottle, then I'd sometimes prefer buying lemonade to buying wine; wine's not that much better, even with a nice dinner that goes better with wine. This is called the substitution effect.

The Income Effect

Let's take an extreme case and consider someone who is an absolute Starbucks fanatic. They drink coffee every day, and would prefer spending $20 on a Starbucks coffee to spending $2 on some other coffee and $18 on anything else. But even fanatically loyal customers aren't made of money. If someone's discretionary income after the necessities of life (pretending for a moment that coffee is not in this category) is $500 a month, and coffee costs $2, they can easily afford their Starbucks-a-day habit. If Starbucks coffee costs $20, then they can only buy 25 coffees a month, not enough to sustain their daily consumption. So even with perfectly loyal customers, after a point Starbucks isn't making any extra revenue, though they may make the same money on fewer coffees. This is called the income effect.

How Big Is This Effect?

Economics uses the term "elasticity" to describe how responsive one quantity is to changes in another quantity. So for example, the price elasticity of demand describes how much the amount people buy changes, for a given change in price.

Since there's no intrinsic meaning to the units you use to measure something - 100 centimeters is the same as one meter is the same as three feet (approximately) is the same as one yard - elasticity is measured in relative quantities. A good approximation of this is percentages. If you raise the price by 10%, by what percentage does demand go down?

Interpreting Elasticity

If elasticity is less than 1, that means that changes in demand are less than enough to offset changes in price - so if you raise prices, revenues go up. For example, last month a Starbucks branch was selling coffee for $2, and selling 1,000 coffees a day, for $2,000 in revenue. This month it raises prices by 10%, to $2.20 per coffee. If the price elasticity of demand is -0.5, that means that each 10% increase in price causes about a 5% decrease in the number of coffees bought, so people only buy 950 coffees, and this Starbucks gets $2,090 in revenue.  This is good news if you are trying to make more money by raising prices.

On the other hand, if elasticity is greater than 1, that means that you can't generate more revenue by raising prices - people will buy more than enough to offset the revenue loss. In the example above, let's say that the elasticity of demand is -1.5. That means that a 10% increase in price causes about a 15% decrease in the number of coffees bought, so people only bought 850 coffees, for total revenue of $1,870.

(Note: Raising prices can be profitable even with elasticity greater than 1, in cases where your per-unit costs are very high relative to the price. For example, if Starbucks were selling coffee for 1 cent, which is probably less than the cost of the materials, then it would benefit from raising prices at least until it was charging more than the cost of making an extra cup of coffee.)

Interpreting Elasticity

It turns out that it's easy to find websites telling people how to calculate elasticity, which is mainly useful for economics students doing their homework. But it's hard to find websites telling people how to use elasticity to make predictions. So I'll do that now. But to do that I need to define elasticity in a more mathematically precise way.

Let's say that you believe some good has a constant price elasticity of demand, so that the same percentage change in price always produces the same percentage change in quantity. Here, the "percentage" language is a little tricky. Let's look at the coffee example again, and say that economists have measured consumer behavior and determined that price elasticity is -0.5. If you hear that price has gone up by 10% to $2.20, you might think that demand would fall by 5%, to 950 coffees a day. And if price only went up by 1%, to $2.02, you might think that demand would fall by 0.5% to 995 coffees per day. So far, it's clear.

But let's say price goes up by 1%, ten times. How much does demand fall? One way to calculate this is to say that price increases to 101%^10=1.1046, about 10.46% higher than it was before, for a final price of $2.21, so demand should decrease by 5.23% to about 948 coffees. Another way to calculate it is to say that demand falls about 0.5% each time, so the final demand is 99.5%^10=95.11% of the original quantity, about a 4.89% reduction to a total quantity of 951 coffees. Why are these numbers different?

These numbers are slight different because we're just using a linear approximation, which is good for small numbers, but gets worse when we use bigger numbers.

Once More, With Calculus

We can write the percentage definition of elasticity like this:

E=((Q2-Q1)/Q1)/((P2-P1)/P1). If we call the difference in prices DP and the difference in quantities DQ, we can say, E=(DQ/Q)/(DP/P).

As DP gets bigger, E gets harder to measure - depending on what differences you take, in what directions, you get answers that diverge more and more, like in the example above. But as DP gets closer to 0, E gets easier to measure, becomes more consistent, and eventually converges on a single value. Here's how we'd express that in calculus:

E=(dQ/Q)/(dP/P)

We can rewrite this as:

E*P^-1dP=Q^-1dQ

And then integrate both sides to get:

E*ln(P)=C+ln(Q), where C is an additive constant. The next trick is to take the exponential function of both sides, to get

exp[E*ln(P)]=exp[C+ln(Q)]

(exp[ln(P)])^E=exp[C]*exp[ln(Q)]

P^E=K*Q, where K is just a scaling constant. So if you want to calculate the ratio of quantities produced by a change in prices, you can take the equation for the first and second price-quantity pair:

P1^E=K*Q1

P2^E=K*Q2

And divide the second equation by the first to get:

P2^E/P1^E=K/K*Q2/Q1

(P2/P1)^E=Q2/Q1

quantity_ratio=price_ratio^E

So, for example, with elasticity of -0.5, if you double price, you get about 2^-0.5=.707 times the demand, a 29.3% reduction. This works on any scale you want, even for very big changes in price.

Provided, of course, that your elasticity figure is correct, and that your assumption that elasticity is constant is also correct. Which it may not be.

I just realized I never wrote about this on my personal blog. A month ago, the EA Society of DC did an independent cost-benefit analysis of a proposed regulation. I wrote up an estimate of its value in advance here.

Now we have an after-the-fact summary of what happened.