Today, another one from Gwern, about a lighter (but still important!) topic: socks, or the lack thereof.
In particular, he is writing about the curious fact that among his (generally wealthy and diligent) Twitter followers, and later among a random survey sample, a significant portion of both groups don’t own enough socks.
In the case of socks, there is never a ‘Socknik moment’. There is only a slippery-slope/sorites—there’s no hard and fast line between enough and too-few socks, socks slowly wear out or lose mates, and if you have 20 and now have 19, well, that’s not a big deal, and then when you are down to 18, that’s not a big deal either why go shopping, and soon you’ll be down to 17… And if you don’t buy socks regularly as part of a clothes shopping trip, when will you? Eventually you’re wearing uncomfortable socks or being cold or being forced to do laundry runs early, without there ever being a clear ‘I need to buy some socks!’ trigger point. Even a habit like buying replacement socks once a year as part of spring cleaning would be enough, but one still needs to instill a habit.
Some might object that this is overthinking socks, and one should never think about socks at all. This is short-sighted. If we were all perfectly rational and omniscient and possessed of infinite computing power, all our problems would already be solved and we would buy socks at the exact optimal moment as part of the grand plan; but we are not. Dealing with our bounded rationality is the central concern of all discussions of rationality & optimizing & biases.
It may not seem important to think about socks at any particular moment, and socks are probably not the most pressing thing at this instant for me either, compared to tasks like ‘write an essay’ or ‘exercise’ or ‘answer emails’. But if it is better to wear socks than not, and one does not wish to go barefoot for the rest of one’s life, then it must be optimal at some moment to think about socks. Perhaps a few months from now when one’s ‘sockpile’ has worn down, during downtime, but there must be one.
Similarly, one could scoff at all of the necessities of life like getting groceries, or filing a tax return, or getting life insurance: surely at that instant there is always something more important one could be working on doing, like getting a college degree or founding a startup? But this argument must have some flaw or by induction you would never do them and so you would starve to death while being audited by the IRS and your heirs are rendered homeless. For example, the value of these tasks increases over time: you don’t really need to do your taxes early before the deadline, but you do want to get it done by the deadline. With groceries, as long as you have enough to eat, it’s not much of a problem to be low on food—perhaps it reduces your variety a bit, but it’s not like you’ll starve, except if you run out of food in which case you will. And failure to get life insurance incurs a small loss each and every day (because of the risk of you dying that day and failing to provide for whatever you wanted life insurance for).
What do we do about responsibilities that don’t have clear triggers-to-action? Gwern suggests strategic application of our system two thinking with external tools: checklists, scheduled reviews, reminder emails, and so on. And not just for socks, but for all sorts of ambiguous responsibilities and chores and things we’ve been forever meaning to get around to.
I’ll forever have affinities to “external brain” note-taking and life management systems. Humans simply aren’t adapted to the many responsibilities of modern life, but with the right tools, we can outsmart ourselves.