Epistemic status: this feels like it’s been helpful for me to allocate my time better, but I have very scarce concrete support for that. Reasoning feels clean from the inside though.
A lot of the problems I face day-to-day can be boiled down to figuring out how to spend some finite pool of resources to maximize some function. When deciding what course I want to take on this kind of problem, I find it quite helpful to think of my options in two categories – ratchets and springs.
Ratchets are options that make you pay a cost once, and then you’ve secured the benefit forever. Once you’ve done the work to get the ratchet to a certain position, it stays there and never slips backwards. You don’t have to do any more – you’re free to let go and move on to other things. Examples:
- Learning to ride a bike
- Passive income
- Installing good epistemic hygiene norms
Springs, on the other hand, require an upkeep cost to maintain their benefits. Even after you’ve done the work to get the spring to certain position, you have to keep applying a force for as long as you want to keep it there. It keeps you hand occupied fighting its natural tendency to slip back to some default position. Examples:
- Staying up-to-date about politics
- Working a salaried job
- Monitoring your thoughts for biases
When considering the amount of resources you’re willing to pay for a given amount of expected utility, it’s helpful to keep in mind that the cost of a spring is multiplied by the time you expect to use it for. A workout that takes 1000 hours but keeps you fit for the rest of your life may seem like a really high cost to pay, but exercising for just one hour a week for your whole life will cost you 3640 hours if you live for 70 years. Assessing the cost of springs involves multiplying by really large numbers, which humans are very bad at. In other words, consider very carefully before you decide to take an option that requires constant upkeep – the costs can be much higher than they seem.
Another big difference between ratchets and springs is that ratchets are highly stackable, and springs are not. For example, it would be totally fine for me to take nootropics, upgrade my ergonomics, get full-spectrum lighting, and have any number of other small ratchet benefits running at the same time. Meanwhile, it is obviously not practical to stay in shape, keep my predictions properly calibrated, stay up to date on news, work a full time job, and stack a bunch of other spring effects, all at the same time. Ratchets are like permanent buffs that you can stack and compound, springs are like powerful items that fill limited slots. You can always add another ratchet, but be very careful when choosing the springs for your ideal build. (this is not really a new property, just a consequence of the fact that springs’ total costs tend to be very high, meaning you’ll burn through your total resource budget much more quickly than you would with low-cost ratchets.)
Some examples of how I’ve applied this heuristic to my own life so far:
- In high school I was really focused on practicing and maintaining all sorts of skills I thought were valuable. I carefully blocked out time to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally get rusty and lose any of them. This eventually led to me spending many hours each week playing the saxophone, rehearsing martial arts techniques, etc. If they had been ratchets, I would’ve loved to keep these things, since I think they are definitely valuable. But they’re springs, and keeping them was just clogging up my precious limited slots.
- Nowadays I devote a consistent effort to finding new ratchets. This was largely inspired by a podcast episode about constantly doing “life experiments”. The experiment I’m currently running is a randomized controlled trial testing the nootropic effects of L-theanine. If it turns out to be measurably beneficial, then I’ve basically ratcheted up and permanently acquired the ability to temporarily boost my cognition by taking a pretty cheap pill. As soon as the trial is over, I can pick a different ratchet to experiment with, and accumulate boosts as I go.
Of course, all this is a just a heuristic I think is useful. It certainly shouldn’t be treated as an ironclad rule. It’s crucial to remember that at the end of the day, it all boils down to expected utility. All of this behavior is just because calculating the costs of springs requires multiplying by large numbers. Furthermore, there are plenty of important caveats to mention. First, the essence of the heuristic is not “ratchets good, springs bad”. Trading two dollars for one dollar is a ratchet, and getting enough sleep is a spring. Ratchets might not be worth it, and springs sometimes are. Second, this is a leaky abstraction. Not everything is clearly classifiable as a ratchet or a spring. Daily habits are ratchets on effort, but springs on time. Third, if you do try to farm ratchets and stack as many as you can, pay attention to your Black Swan exposure and make sure it stays pointed in the right direction.
Hopefully this idea is as useful to you as it is to me. Happy optimizing!