Life hacking, economics-style

Erik Torenberg asked for my thoughts on his post about behavioral economics called The Prescriptive Science. I’m posting them here, too.

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Although I could sit comfortably at the feet of Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and listen to them rehash the amazing stupidity of humans all day long, I think standard economics has some useful things to say about the useful applicability of behavioral economics to our lives—namely, that there aren’t (m)any free lunches, and that unintended consequences have a nasty way of effing things up.

Boy that sounded like a nice intro sentence, but I’m not actually going to say anything else about free lunches or unintended consequences. Sorry.

One of the many ways in which we are stupid (in a way that behavioral economists and psychologists love to tell us about) is believing that we are conscious actors who are evaluating the information around us, deliberating internally, and then acting according to expected-value optimization (or something). A better description of reality, I submit, is that our bodies are processing a whole bunch of information we didn’t even know it was processing, then a minor electric disturbance takes place in our skulls based on some mysterious but frighteningly simple rules which ultimately cause us to feel a certain way, and then we act, almost always based on the perceived pleasantness of the feeling.

In short: The part of you that you think is doing the driving? That frontal lobe? Yeah, it’s not. The absolute best it can do is holler out some preferences from the back seat.

“Excuse me, body, I’d really like it if we could turn toward 9 o’clock, in the direction of that rather attractive lady, instead of retreating for the comfort of our keyboard for the twelfthtieth time today, as you are doing right n—well, shit.”

The hope of behavioral economics, maybe, is that we can identify some of the frighteningly simple rules that cause us to act (≈ feel) a certain way such that our frontal lobes can take some steps in a moment of emotional coolness to either do some harm-reduction by limiting our exposure to those rules or otherwise use our knowledge of those rules to our (skanky) benefit. (The latter is what marketers and salespeople and politicians do for a living.)

So, yes, although it makes me cringe to say it, there seems to be some merit to the idea that “lives” can be “hacked” using behavioral economic principles.

Your point, I take it, is that the next big intellectual revolution might well come from somebody who figures out how to take the lessons from Kahneman (and other beh econ gurus) and turn them into applicable Lifehacking action steps.

Maybe. But if we are going to speculate about coming revolutions then I think we need to be more science-fiction about it. Behavioral economics-style lifehacking just seems so… analogue. Let’s be more ambitious: Maybe genomic advances will allow us to change the lifechemistry of our offspring such that humans are bigger, faster, stronger, prettier, and less dumb. That’s what I call Progress. Or maybe smartphones will develop new technologies that allow us to plug them into our skulls and let the magnets and silicon do the thinking for us. No more problems approaching hot chicks!

There’s no real use in speculating about whether or not these things would be “good,” because things don’t happen conditional on whether we think they’re “good.” But it’s perhaps useful to ask whether we ought to be taking some behavioral economics steps to hack our lives, today, right now.

The only way I know how to answer that is by asking, again, What Do We Care About? Sorry to be the guy who keeps asking, “What’s the point?,” but, hey, I didn’t make you read this blog.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might recall that I used to be rather life hacky and personal development-y, and then I kind of stopped. Something changed. I’m not saying the change was “right” or “good” in any way (or even that it’s permanent), I’m merely going to describe what I think that change in perspective was/is: I think I’ve become less interested in achieving or improving and more interested in just experiencing and being present in this giant effing mess.