"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. "
I was somewhat surprised that you thought Galbraith did not have a general theory into which this observation fits. I would have thought The Affluent Society is exactly that. It really just updates up on ideas that had already been developed by Veblen (and what makes them both institutionalizes).
The basic idea is that we have moved the same psychology/sociology that drove production (at work) to consumption (leisure). The result being we work just as hard at consumption as we do at production except consumption is an "hedonic treadmill" because you are destroying the "product" (recreation) in the pursuit of it (like a cat chasing its tail), and then have to work even harder at work to afford "working" at consumption outside of work.
This already came to mind when you noted that club med, by doing away with the cash nexus, also did away with class differences and "keeping up with the joneses" (to some extent anyway).
I think the same point underlies Keynes' bepuzzlement in "Prospects for our Grandchildren." Despite societal wealth going ahead by leaps and bounds since 1870, we seem to use very little of this is in expanding non-working hours.
Over the last 18 months of various engagements with organisations, I've been haunted by the idea that right now we have no general concept that "this is how many decisions/this is how much information" (and dare I say, "this is how many meetings") an average manager can endure without burning out. I think we operate (silently) under something like the 10x coder notion, but for managers. This has two key effects: (1) People have spent very little effort thinking about/researching/trying out new and better ways of dividing up managerial jobs. (2) Organisations have (through years of corporate restructuring) pushed more and more of their roles into the space where they are effectively treating the occupants as disposable - to be used up and replaced in a couple of years.
Yes that's a great point - I did try looking to see anyone had done work on quantifying this extremely important quantity, but I didn't even find any sorts of "rule of thumb in a 1920s military training manual" things. (Which is why I ended up just writing "you know overload when you see it or experience it"). Not to say that the literature isn't out there - I only heard about Christopher Hood's "the blame game" this year - but I found nothing so far.
Damn, I've looked fairly extensively (although not to the point that I'd claim for sure there's nothing) - and I was really hoping you had come across something.
If it's any help (it isn't) there is a paper out there proving that the human brain can process ten bits of information (not even bytes let alone kB) per second. Which is useful perspective on how different the Shannon/Wiener concept of information is from the ordinary language meaning but doesn't really advance the ball
This is no help, and a bit tangential, but an interesting piece touching on the impact of technology on the ground. Particularly I like the author's discovery that in automating notetaking they accidentally automated a process where they previously managed the information flow from the patient. https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter
I don't know if it helps, but the human computer interaction (HCI) discipline does draw on cognitive load in the narrower case of interacting with software systems and it has different methods for measuring it. Though I can't claim they're any good!
I need to dig through the HCI literature more. A lot of the things I have seen are good, but very short-term (i.e. cognitive load in the moment) which is useful, but not the whole story.
Tescos with its 20 varieties of baked beans, or Lidl with one (two max)?
The European model where having someone make these decisions for you (kids go to the one {quite good} local school, universal health care is provided etc.) is simply quite nice. If the quid pro quo for higher taxes is less thinking/decision making that enables people to enjoy more of their lives, is it any wonder Nordies are happy?
Conversely the US system with its endless choice and decisions – which private school to send your kids, which private healthcare, which private pension? The cherry on top is you can kiss all this goodbye if you lose your job (Walter White?). How are stressed Americans currently reacting?
And choosing a health insurance plan is a particularly unpleasant kind of choice. To seriously consider it, you're considering things like, "how likely am I to get seriously ill", and "if I get cancer will it bankrupt me", and "is [medication I need to live] going to be covered", and "how likely are my claims to get denied even if they're theoretically covered", so it's already unpleasant to even think about. You know that if you pick the wrong one, it could kill you! And yet in the best case scenario where you never use it, you are throwing money into a hole. And it's very expensive and you're locked in for a year at a time. So it's high stakes and it's based on future information you can only make your best guess at and even if you manage to make the optimal choice you're only reducing future pain, not increasing enjoyment.
See also: Costco. For any given variety of product, they sell one name brand version and possibly one store-brand version. You have a high degree of confidence that someone has gone out of their way to get the best possible price on the branded version, and that the quality of the store-brand alternative will be acceptable. An iron-clad no-questions-asked returns policy undergirds it all. Do people find this service useful enough to make the stores wildly profitable when in most cases the _goods_ are being sold often at a loss-leader price to their membership fees? To the tune of $18 earnings per diluted share, and on a personal note I would commit actual violence if you proposed to take my membership from me.
Costco's "Kirkland" brand is a fascinating case study. Costco takes someone's product, redesigns it to be better, and then goes to the manufacturer and has a short run made when the manufacturer has idle capacity. Pushing capacity utilization as close to 100% as it will go has all kinds of glorious knock-on effects for the manufacturer, so they jump on the offer. Costco then sells the product at a discount, an even greater discount because they don't spend anything on marketing. The result isn't an "adequate" substitute--it's superior quality and cheaper. It's also not available forever, incentivizing members to seek these products out and buy them. (LPT: any price ending in 7, like "9.97", means it's a last-chance offer.)
I wouldn't dream of living without my membership either. Est'd. 2001
I remember making this point when electricity was opened up to retail competition. People don't want exciting offers, they want the lights to turn on when they flick a switch.
This is less true today, with smart meters and solar power than it was when the electricity came from an always-on coal plant, but it's still true for most.
I found a new poster child for cognition overload: an air traffic controller who last week was trying to choreograph the approaches for TEN different jets, and TWO airports, all the same time. Result: a plane full of passengers just missed a cargo jet landing at an intersecting runway by 300 feet thanks to a last-minute go around:
That was the actual real-time audio; NOT edited or sped up! Meanwhile a few days later over at LaGuardia another overworked controller accidentally sent a jetliner and a fire truck to the same runway at the same time, killing 2 pilots.
I think we have overdone the mindless "efficiency" of cutting working people's jobs to enhance the billionaire's riches.
I went to an all-inclusive recently, but it was nestled among plentiful outside, independent cafes and bars.
The hotel's food and drinks were fine, and yes, it was nice not to think about price. But they weren't brilliant.
The outside stuff was much better, and competitively priced too. But this may be because they had to be in order to entice us out of the hotel (which as the holiday went on, we increasingly did).
In this way it's like the UK media market, which punches above its weight. We have our all inclusive option, the BBC, but we also have other channels, but they need to be both good quality and not saturated with too many ads, otherwise we'll just go back to the comfort of our all inclusive.
Gerd Gigerenzer's work makes a compelling argument that "cognition overload" has been going on since the Pleistocene--and the brain's response has been to evolve toward the use of fast and frugal heuristics, better known as "rule of thumb" or "close enough." It's the neurological foundation for "choice overload," one of the brain's is-it-a-feature-or-a-bug things. This may also explain why higher-fidelity decision-making is possible but quite difficult...and is almost never someone's first try. Bounded Rationality is a fascinating book, if anyone's interested in more.
Yep, absolutely - I think the latter of those two is an under appreciated role of regulation. The purpose of a lot of paperwork and certification is to make sure that the eventual decision maker is dealing with a case that has been standardized to the maximum extent possible
Why do you think the cognitive load problem is solvable? There is always going to be unknowable information, for example, about future events. Game theory suggests a mixed strategy, but sometimes the choice is A or B. One can defer the decision and gather more information, but that is a decision in and of itself. There may still be A or B lurking.
I think a lot of work had to be done to establish sufficient delusion in the American military establishment to get them to support the Iraq war but I see your point
Data architecture for business units or enterprises should treat "cognitive load limits" as a key constraint, if it's any good. Upper, mean and lower at least. One reliable way to do that is to distribute it cleanly through an ecosystem, from data collection and organization, to visualization to explanation, to action and back to data collection.
Knowing where you're incurring and/or paying semantic debt through that cycle helps you identify the points where different semantic schema - different data models - need to be integrated. Do you do that integration task informally all at once, in spreadsheets on a Sunday night before the CEOs Monday morning call? Or at the point where the decision is made? Or more of that upstream? Etc.
Practically speaking there's also always a missing proof architecture. Building that is identical work to what an Intro Logic TA does when they help a kid translate sentences into CFOL. Also an integration problem, and best done all at once and by professionals.
In The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin observed that digitization has made the problem of cognitive overload much worse. When the internet first came along, it seemed like a great benefit to do one’s banking online, make one’s own travel arrangements, shop for all and sundry, etc. But this means that we are performing many tasks that we used to pay others to do, while spending yet more time maintaining the devices that enable us to do them, and putting innumerable bank tellers, travel agents, shop clerks and many others out of work in the process. It is a peculiar notion of convenience that entails more work and more decisions, not less.
This gibes with complaints about tourism in places like Cairo where tourists report problems dealing with the numerous touts and souvenir salesmen one encounters when trying to enjoy the attractions. High end tours usually have someone to deter these free market actors, and those who can afford them pay for them willingly. The wealthy don't have to deal with the constant decision making because they have money and because they can hire assistants and engage concierge services. If you can fly by private jet, you don't need to study airline schedules.
It also gibes with the feminist complaint that women get stuck with having to manage the home and raising of children. Even when they have a helpful partner, women find themselves swamped with having to keep track of schedules and events, decide when things need cleaning or replacement, manage household logistics and so on, all the while also having to hold down a full time job. They're complaining not just about the work but about the cognitive load.
No it's not a euphemism! We did actually have more or less the perfect situation I describe when I was spending a month homeschooling my kids in Bali. There was a gang of teenage vendors, they bothered us exactly twice a day, we made friends, they taught my daughter to arm wrestle. Being a beach hawker is a tough life, I respect it even if I don't always enjoy the customer experience
Oh, that's good. I haven't taken a vacation trip in a long time so I don't have experiences of this sort of thing. Knowing you are a mensch, it doesn't surprise me you were able to make friends. I appreciate that you get and respect the hard life of the hawkers. Didn't realize they were that young. In that case, I am for them. They are just doing what they have to do.
ERRATUM: bloody France Today, that's the last time I use them for research. Blitz wasn't an Olympic swimmer, that was his father
Reminds me of that Alfred North Whitehead quote:
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. "
That is a fantastic quote which I am going to steal for the epigraph to the chapter this appears in!
I've always liked it. It's from his mathematics primer of all things, but it seems so generally applicable.
I was somewhat surprised that you thought Galbraith did not have a general theory into which this observation fits. I would have thought The Affluent Society is exactly that. It really just updates up on ideas that had already been developed by Veblen (and what makes them both institutionalizes).
The basic idea is that we have moved the same psychology/sociology that drove production (at work) to consumption (leisure). The result being we work just as hard at consumption as we do at production except consumption is an "hedonic treadmill" because you are destroying the "product" (recreation) in the pursuit of it (like a cat chasing its tail), and then have to work even harder at work to afford "working" at consumption outside of work.
This already came to mind when you noted that club med, by doing away with the cash nexus, also did away with class differences and "keeping up with the joneses" (to some extent anyway).
I think the same point underlies Keynes' bepuzzlement in "Prospects for our Grandchildren." Despite societal wealth going ahead by leaps and bounds since 1870, we seem to use very little of this is in expanding non-working hours.
Over the last 18 months of various engagements with organisations, I've been haunted by the idea that right now we have no general concept that "this is how many decisions/this is how much information" (and dare I say, "this is how many meetings") an average manager can endure without burning out. I think we operate (silently) under something like the 10x coder notion, but for managers. This has two key effects: (1) People have spent very little effort thinking about/researching/trying out new and better ways of dividing up managerial jobs. (2) Organisations have (through years of corporate restructuring) pushed more and more of their roles into the space where they are effectively treating the occupants as disposable - to be used up and replaced in a couple of years.
Yes that's a great point - I did try looking to see anyone had done work on quantifying this extremely important quantity, but I didn't even find any sorts of "rule of thumb in a 1920s military training manual" things. (Which is why I ended up just writing "you know overload when you see it or experience it"). Not to say that the literature isn't out there - I only heard about Christopher Hood's "the blame game" this year - but I found nothing so far.
Damn, I've looked fairly extensively (although not to the point that I'd claim for sure there's nothing) - and I was really hoping you had come across something.
If it's any help (it isn't) there is a paper out there proving that the human brain can process ten bits of information (not even bytes let alone kB) per second. Which is useful perspective on how different the Shannon/Wiener concept of information is from the ordinary language meaning but doesn't really advance the ball
This is no help, and a bit tangential, but an interesting piece touching on the impact of technology on the ground. Particularly I like the author's discovery that in automating notetaking they accidentally automated a process where they previously managed the information flow from the patient. https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter
I don't know if it helps, but the human computer interaction (HCI) discipline does draw on cognitive load in the narrower case of interacting with software systems and it has different methods for measuring it. Though I can't claim they're any good!
I need to dig through the HCI literature more. A lot of the things I have seen are good, but very short-term (i.e. cognitive load in the moment) which is useful, but not the whole story.
Tescos with its 20 varieties of baked beans, or Lidl with one (two max)?
The European model where having someone make these decisions for you (kids go to the one {quite good} local school, universal health care is provided etc.) is simply quite nice. If the quid pro quo for higher taxes is less thinking/decision making that enables people to enjoy more of their lives, is it any wonder Nordies are happy?
Conversely the US system with its endless choice and decisions – which private school to send your kids, which private healthcare, which private pension? The cherry on top is you can kiss all this goodbye if you lose your job (Walter White?). How are stressed Americans currently reacting?
And choosing a health insurance plan is a particularly unpleasant kind of choice. To seriously consider it, you're considering things like, "how likely am I to get seriously ill", and "if I get cancer will it bankrupt me", and "is [medication I need to live] going to be covered", and "how likely are my claims to get denied even if they're theoretically covered", so it's already unpleasant to even think about. You know that if you pick the wrong one, it could kill you! And yet in the best case scenario where you never use it, you are throwing money into a hole. And it's very expensive and you're locked in for a year at a time. So it's high stakes and it's based on future information you can only make your best guess at and even if you manage to make the optimal choice you're only reducing future pain, not increasing enjoyment.
See also: Costco. For any given variety of product, they sell one name brand version and possibly one store-brand version. You have a high degree of confidence that someone has gone out of their way to get the best possible price on the branded version, and that the quality of the store-brand alternative will be acceptable. An iron-clad no-questions-asked returns policy undergirds it all. Do people find this service useful enough to make the stores wildly profitable when in most cases the _goods_ are being sold often at a loss-leader price to their membership fees? To the tune of $18 earnings per diluted share, and on a personal note I would commit actual violence if you proposed to take my membership from me.
Costco's "Kirkland" brand is a fascinating case study. Costco takes someone's product, redesigns it to be better, and then goes to the manufacturer and has a short run made when the manufacturer has idle capacity. Pushing capacity utilization as close to 100% as it will go has all kinds of glorious knock-on effects for the manufacturer, so they jump on the offer. Costco then sells the product at a discount, an even greater discount because they don't spend anything on marketing. The result isn't an "adequate" substitute--it's superior quality and cheaper. It's also not available forever, incentivizing members to seek these products out and buy them. (LPT: any price ending in 7, like "9.97", means it's a last-chance offer.)
I wouldn't dream of living without my membership either. Est'd. 2001
And one of the rare good places to work.
Also, it sounds like a virtuous cycle in action. Better for so many parties! Today we usually see the opposite: domination, and extraction.
Maybe you are telling us why prosperous Americans are unhappy
I remember making this point when electricity was opened up to retail competition. People don't want exciting offers, they want the lights to turn on when they flick a switch.
This is less true today, with smart meters and solar power than it was when the electricity came from an always-on coal plant, but it's still true for most.
I found a new poster child for cognition overload: an air traffic controller who last week was trying to choreograph the approaches for TEN different jets, and TWO airports, all the same time. Result: a plane full of passengers just missed a cargo jet landing at an intersecting runway by 300 feet thanks to a last-minute go around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjBCEubtBI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqqc7rHmsbg
That was the actual real-time audio; NOT edited or sped up! Meanwhile a few days later over at LaGuardia another overworked controller accidentally sent a jetliner and a fire truck to the same runway at the same time, killing 2 pilots.
I think we have overdone the mindless "efficiency" of cutting working people's jobs to enhance the billionaire's riches.
Could a model where both exist be the best bet?
I went to an all-inclusive recently, but it was nestled among plentiful outside, independent cafes and bars.
The hotel's food and drinks were fine, and yes, it was nice not to think about price. But they weren't brilliant.
The outside stuff was much better, and competitively priced too. But this may be because they had to be in order to entice us out of the hotel (which as the holiday went on, we increasingly did).
In this way it's like the UK media market, which punches above its weight. We have our all inclusive option, the BBC, but we also have other channels, but they need to be both good quality and not saturated with too many ads, otherwise we'll just go back to the comfort of our all inclusive.
Gerd Gigerenzer's work makes a compelling argument that "cognition overload" has been going on since the Pleistocene--and the brain's response has been to evolve toward the use of fast and frugal heuristics, better known as "rule of thumb" or "close enough." It's the neurological foundation for "choice overload," one of the brain's is-it-a-feature-or-a-bug things. This may also explain why higher-fidelity decision-making is possible but quite difficult...and is almost never someone's first try. Bounded Rationality is a fascinating book, if anyone's interested in more.
Increasing information-processing capacity and/or decreasing the amount of information that needs to be reacted to by a given person.
Yep, absolutely - I think the latter of those two is an under appreciated role of regulation. The purpose of a lot of paperwork and certification is to make sure that the eventual decision maker is dealing with a case that has been standardized to the maximum extent possible
Why do you think the cognitive load problem is solvable? There is always going to be unknowable information, for example, about future events. Game theory suggests a mixed strategy, but sometimes the choice is A or B. One can defer the decision and gather more information, but that is a decision in and of itself. There may still be A or B lurking.
It's solvable by having enough spare capacity?
Substitute "money" for "capacity" and you'll have at least a partial solution.
I can't see why cognitive load creates a bias against action. It might support a bias for mindless action--e.g., the Iran War.
I think a lot of work had to be done to establish sufficient delusion in the American military establishment to get them to support the Iraq war but I see your point
Data architecture for business units or enterprises should treat "cognitive load limits" as a key constraint, if it's any good. Upper, mean and lower at least. One reliable way to do that is to distribute it cleanly through an ecosystem, from data collection and organization, to visualization to explanation, to action and back to data collection.
Knowing where you're incurring and/or paying semantic debt through that cycle helps you identify the points where different semantic schema - different data models - need to be integrated. Do you do that integration task informally all at once, in spreadsheets on a Sunday night before the CEOs Monday morning call? Or at the point where the decision is made? Or more of that upstream? Etc.
Practically speaking there's also always a missing proof architecture. Building that is identical work to what an Intro Logic TA does when they help a kid translate sentences into CFOL. Also an integration problem, and best done all at once and by professionals.
In The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin observed that digitization has made the problem of cognitive overload much worse. When the internet first came along, it seemed like a great benefit to do one’s banking online, make one’s own travel arrangements, shop for all and sundry, etc. But this means that we are performing many tasks that we used to pay others to do, while spending yet more time maintaining the devices that enable us to do them, and putting innumerable bank tellers, travel agents, shop clerks and many others out of work in the process. It is a peculiar notion of convenience that entails more work and more decisions, not less.
This gibes with complaints about tourism in places like Cairo where tourists report problems dealing with the numerous touts and souvenir salesmen one encounters when trying to enjoy the attractions. High end tours usually have someone to deter these free market actors, and those who can afford them pay for them willingly. The wealthy don't have to deal with the constant decision making because they have money and because they can hire assistants and engage concierge services. If you can fly by private jet, you don't need to study airline schedules.
It also gibes with the feminist complaint that women get stuck with having to manage the home and raising of children. Even when they have a helpful partner, women find themselves swamped with having to keep track of schedules and events, decide when things need cleaning or replacement, manage household logistics and so on, all the while also having to hold down a full time job. They're complaining not just about the work but about the cognitive load.
Liked your euphemistic/sarcastic term "free market actors."
They are merely taking advantage of o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-i-e-s to make money as they see fit. So what if their money making = your spoiled vacation?
They probably prefer the term "entrepreneurs."
There will never be a shortage of euphemisms as long as there is a need for them. The market will create them!
No it's not a euphemism! We did actually have more or less the perfect situation I describe when I was spending a month homeschooling my kids in Bali. There was a gang of teenage vendors, they bothered us exactly twice a day, we made friends, they taught my daughter to arm wrestle. Being a beach hawker is a tough life, I respect it even if I don't always enjoy the customer experience
Oh, that's good. I haven't taken a vacation trip in a long time so I don't have experiences of this sort of thing. Knowing you are a mensch, it doesn't surprise me you were able to make friends. I appreciate that you get and respect the hard life of the hawkers. Didn't realize they were that young. In that case, I am for them. They are just doing what they have to do.
Good Product, Good managment team, good sales. Any alternative may be described as blitskreig!