Umeshisms
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
Sometimes its good justification: if you have never failed you don't take enough risks. Fair enough.
But i'm sure an alcoholic would say something like: if you've never been fired for being too wasted to work, you don't know how to have fun (maybe they would be a bit more subtle, but you get the point).
I think its better to just be honest with yourself, drop the implied moral criticism. Instead of saying "if you never miss a plane you spend too much time in an airport", just say, "For me personally, i find it acceptable to miss a plane every now and then if it means i don't have to go to the airport 2 hours in advance" You're making explicit the trade off, and you're not going on some high horse that there is something wrong with people who make a different trade off or have different priorities.
All the caveats are implied, people always speak from a personal perspective, all you're doing is weakening your rhetoric to no effect.
The general form of the Umeshism calls attention to situations where errors of commission are invisibly expensive, and errors of omission are dramatic but not necessarily more expensive. Waiting in an airport lounge is wasted time, and it doesn't matter if you're waiting for the flight you have a ticket for, or whatever they put you on; if the objective is to minimize time in the waiting lounge, as why would it not be, it's just the total hours which matter.
The opposite of an Umeshism is an easy riposte when they're being abused: "no, if you've ever been fired for being too wasted to work, you're not having fun, you're an alcoholic".
One can spend the 30 minutes exactly the same as if they were in their office.
I never want to experience this again and I now make sure I'm at the airport well in time.
You know like normal rich people do. \s
Unfortunately no strangers helped me with that part.
Don't get me wrong, i could afford it, and at the end of the day, its just a funny story, no real harm done. But i still would have preferred to not have that happen.
These days, most airlines want to charge you some very hefty fee if you miss your flight.
While probably true in general, there are some cases where it's obviously not true (like the parachute example - if you haven't hit the ground, you're opening your chute too early).
The more interesting question is then: how do you know whether you're in a parachute case or a frantically locking doors case?
> While probably true in general, there are some cases where it's obviously not true (like the parachute example - if you haven't hit the ground, you're opening your chute too early).
Yeah, it depends on the size of the downside in the risk.
I should nick myself shaving once in a while? Ok, fine.
I should miss a flight once in a while? You must be joking. No way, pal.
A person who travels for business twice a week on the company expense should miss a flight once in a while? Yeah ... ok, that might just work for them.
If the number of samples is very low then the saying wouldn't apply yet. If you do self-fund a lot of flights then yes way, pal. Wasted unpleasantly-spent time is money too, if there's enough of it.
Let's make it a direct tradeoff. How many extra hours in an airport is worse than missing a flight? I'm sure there's a number for that. I bet the vast majority of people would answer within an order of magnitude of 100 (so between 10 and 1000 hours).
For the purpose of the direct trade-off, pick a median flight.
For most people their 'median' flight is taking them to their special vacation they've been saving up for and planning for years.
If you'd trade x hundred hours for a missed flight, and cutting that close would have only saved you 15 airport hours in your entire life, then you're doing fine!
> For most people their 'median' flight is taking them to their special vacation they've been saving up for and planning for years.
If you go on at least one flight a year, you can name a number of hours. It'll just be higher than business guy.
If you don't even fly that much, then you're exempt from question.
Ah, but with access to a good airport lounge, the extra time there is quite pleasantly spent. And YMMV, but for me, time spent stressed about being late for a flight is extremely unpleasantly spent.
There's a huge amount of literature about people underestimating negative risk to problems, so the assertion seems to be scientifically incorrect. But there is definitely a strain of this in lots of successful business ventures (for better or for worse), so it's probably good advice if you want to make a lot of money!
Bonus points for being able to navigate the negative social consequences for being the person with this risk calibration without feeling too guilty about it.
Isn't it obvious most of the time? Just consider what the risk would be, and then consider if you're OK with that risk actually happening. Most people probably wouldn't be OK with a parachute failure or a robbery, but they'd probably be okay with missing a single flight or getting a speeding ticket.
I guess the really interesting question is what happens if you actually aren't even aware of what the risk you're taking is. It's hard for me to think of examples of that case, though.
Details really do matter, far more than people realize. The ones who chase down every ball (Djokovic, Nadal) are the ones who win tournaments year over year.
Once the goal is defined, focusing on the details is how the goal comes to fruition. In research, as long as the problem is unsolved, interesting, and has nuance, something good will come of investigating it, even if no one else in the world cares about it.
However if I try to keep every detail about everything then effectively I am gonna miss important details about important thing while keep holding trivial detail based on superficial interpretation of details matter.
Like -- some people will say, why risk it, it will potentially cost XX$ to fix this, I'll have to waste hours in an airport which I value at YY$, I might lose my bags, I'll be late for my important thing.
And then some other people will say: oh, I might have to take a later flight, which is cheap if I'm willing to abide some discomfort, and I'll be late but it'll be in adventure, and I'll be stuck in an airport and have to find something to do and maybe make some friends.
I'm biased because I'm in the second group. But I tend to think that a lot of things that feel like rationality really are starting from emotional beliefs and 'working backwards' to the arguments that support them. If you're scared of uncertainty or messing up, you see lots of reasons why missing flights is a disaster. If you're relaxed about it, you see lots of ways that it's fine. And somehow a missed flight ends up costing you a lot less, too -- maybe you don't check as many bags (travel light! more leeway for adjustments); you're more willing to abide discomfort and tardiness so you can take less optimal flights or fly standby; you don't mind napping in the airport instead of feeling forced to pay for a hotel; you make sport of finding the cheapest airport food instead of complaining about how the food you were forced to eat was so expensive.
Just saying. I think it's a better way to live. I've missed a few flights over the years, and it always worked out fine. It cost a bit of money, but not much, and curiously all three times it happened I ended up having amazing conversations with strangers either in the airport or on my replacement flight.
Sure, if you end up missing the flight because of unforeseen circumstances, and you can afford to burn a few hundred bucks without it affecting your budget, there's no sense in feeling particularly bad about it.
But I see no sense in deliberately putting oneself at risk of that situation, unless your time really is that valuable or you have a massive aversion to being organised that outweighs the rest.
(I don't count 'having ADHD or otherwise being a very disorganized person' as 'deliberate', for what it's worth: if that's the case then maybe adopting the viewpoint above really is a good idea?)
[edit] Ah, noticed further down that you were taking domestic flights where rebooking cost you around $100, where presumably that's in the range that it doesn't hurt you too much to spend. You should probably note that everybody you're responding to has had to pay way more for their rebookings, so really you're looking at a completely different trade-off from them.
If Umesh can wear the cost of missed flights, well done.
> > If Umesh can wear the cost of missed flights, well done.
Well, he might be balancing it against the time saved, no? Over 20 flights, missing one is a $4k cost, but being early for 20 flights is also a cost.
Assuming you're 30m early for each flight, you "lose" 10 hours by being early.
Comes down to personal trade-offs too (maybe missing a flight means you miss christmas with the family, in which case the $4k is irrelevant anyway).
My personal method is, the more important the journey, the more safety margin I assign it in terms of time.
Going on a 60m flight for in-office days to a destination with frequent flights throughout the day? If I miss it then no problem, I'll take the one 30m later.
Going to a destination with two flights per day, and it's for a court appearance? Cannot miss it unless i want a warrant of arrest issued against me.
You can be late for some things with small consequences as a result. Being late for other things might be a life-changing moment.
But as I'm out of APAC and was working for people in EU, all my flights were very bad ones to miss, as in, the next available flight will be tomorrow, if you're lucky.
For my $4K example, I missed an Emirates flight (due to a calendar fuck up, entirely my fault, got timezone differences wrong) that ended up in my home city via Sydney, usually took about 19 - 21 hours, depending on delays in Dubai and Sydney.
The cheapest next available was an Etihad flight that involved a very long layover in their very badly designed airport in Abu Dhabi - there's bugger all space to sit and wait, so people just sit along the halls leading to terminals, but worst of all, it's shaped like a giant hamburger, and so are the terminals, and the dome ceilings amplify noise amazingly, at one point I thought people were going to lynch the parents of a 4 year old who wouldn't stop screaming, just because the terminal's design amplified the screams so damn much.
And then it was followed by a long layover in Brisbane (I think? I was somewhat in a fugue state by then, all I wanted was a shower, and I had no towel, Australian airports provide showers, but not towels, unlike Changi or München Airport do), so by the time I got home, it had been 36 hours since leaving Munich.
So, anyway, long rant done, I can conclude two things: 1) Umesh is privileged to have enough wealth or earnings that rebooking a flight isn't a significant cost for him, unlike the majority of air travellers, and 2) Umesh isn't flying half way around the world.
I'm not big on taking life advice from people who are more privileged than the general population, because well, life advice implicitly predicated on privilege isn't really applicable to the general population.
[0]: https://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-ii...
Why did he stop at flights though, surely there are other things you do more frequently you can save time (and therefore money) on? Why did he not say "If you’ve never shit yourself, you’re spending too much time walking to the toilet"
And you're spot on, why isn't there a Umeshism for "if you haven't shat in a bush..."
Professors tend to fly the way I was flying, between major cities and frequently. Miss a flight, fine, but that extra 45 minutes of sleeping every business trip can't be made up at the gate, and they really add up.
I don't know about squash, but this:
> The squash player who runs back and forth to attempt every shot...
doesn't appear to be true of tennis. Rafael Nadal in particular is famous for trying to catch each ball and save each and every shot. Lesser players give up more easily.
Rafa had to start somewhere, and he definitely did not hit every shot when he was a young boy.
Tying this back to the OP - my criticism of the 'Umeshisms' described are that they're absurd when applied to a system where your strategy has fixed outcome probabilities. If you could improve your ability to get through airports quickly with practice, then it would be self evident that missing the odd flight is a consequence of improving your skill at the optimum rate.
Or maybe I just don't understand the frame of reference of the OP.
I actually enjoying sitting at the McDonalds or a lounge with my laptop quietly working with similar if not more focus than in the office. My mind is calm and not stressed about missing flight.
Missing a flight means your mind now needs to figure out how to get on the next flight, which is actually time and mentally consuming.
This delineates the cases where we would like to follow this rule vs the cases where we do not want to. If the payoff is convex, like in "if you've never failed, you don't take enough risks" then the advice is wise. If the payoff is concave like "if you've never broken every bone in your body you haven't gone bungee jumping enough" then it is less so.
In any case, here's the follow-up with the winners: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=42
Though I do have to say:
> If you’ve never hit the ground while skydiving, you’re opening your parachute too early.
If you've never hit the ground while skydiving, you're:
- in orbit
- travelling interstellar
- the pioneer of a new era of steampunk airship video games come to life
if you've never [hit the ground while skydiving]
and
if you've never [hit the ground] while skydiving
are covered by: if you've never hit the ground while skydiving.
In all seriousness though, it seems that we're starting to follow this philosophy too far and applying it closer and closer to the territory of black-marbles / unsurvivable-black-swans. Or maybe it's just politicians that know they have the risks externalized from themselves so are more inclined to play lethal force games.
But, even beyond this, there's great advantage in fully excluding a certain risk, because then you can totally stop thinking about contingency plans for it, and you gain mind-space that can be used for something else... Eg. if you're missing flights 10% of the time, then you need to dedicate mind space for knowing how to book a flight from the airport, or how to re-arrange your schedule to accomodate not arriving on time somewhere etc. etc. And these "contingency plans" add up and swell. Or you don't make them, but with a 1-10% failure rate of things you're living in constant stress and anxiety because things actually do fail/ break for you... Lower stress and freed mind-space may be worth it a lot, and this is way people do things over-conservatively and pay for non-crucial insurance etc.
> If you've not used a throwaway, you are afraid of unemployment
> If you've never been shadowbanned, you are not risking enough
> If you don't risk being downvoted, your comments are boring
> If you complain about downvoting, your comments are boring
> If you have never been labelled a bot or a propagandist, you are being too politically correct
> If you never submit articles, you are not contributing enough
some quick and rough ones, perhaps there are better worded and more accurate ones?
Risking downvotes or being labeled a propagandist, that works well enough.
The other two are true but don't fit the pattern.
>If you've never used a throwaway, you are not working for an interesting company
> If you’ve never been robbed, you’re spending too much time locking doors.
The time my home was broken into was a traumatic and violating experience. It caused me to increase security rather than reduce it.
If you haven't lost business over price, you aren't charging enough.
In fact, if you can measure it, you should usually aim for ~25% of your lost business to be attributable to price (as an individual service provider in a field like graphic design). The reason being that no matter how little you charge, about 10% of lost business will seemingly be attributable to price (it's a reflexive default answer for some folks when they didn't really want to spend anything at all or be bothered making the purchase).
Note that the phenomenon isn't symmetrical: you can easily lose business because your prices are too low, but it usually won't show up attributed in that way, instead you'll get other reasons like lack of professionalism or reference customers.
The core message I took away was like an old Hunter S. Thompson quote:
If you've never crossed the line, you don't really know where the line is.
I can think of very few things in my life that need to be optimized to the point of being within microns of the line (peak performance?). I've been down that road before and it never made me any happier or richer, but then again, maybe that's why I'm not a Formula 1 driver.
https://sarahmjamieson.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/true-focus-l...
Had read this above linked post long time ago, on the topic.
International maybe not. I don't think I've ever found an international flight that actually leaves from SFO, for some reason they're always much more expensive than the one that goes to LAX first.
It sounds like Umesh needs to adopt some new perspectives, so maybe "If you have all sorts of problems it means your perspective is overly rigid."
So the general principle should be clarified as: _concentrate on the high-order bits, *iff the low-order bits don't matter*_. This is arguably the case for the examples given by the blog post, as missing a flight isn't really the end of the world. Still, it's a huge waste of time _on a single trip_, so you benefit from not caring about it only if you travel often enough. This shows than even in case where low-order bits aren't dramatic, they still need to be taken into account into a cost-benefit analysis.
Everyone hits the ground while skydiving, just at different speeds...
Unless the objective is something other than winning, this is by definition incorrect.
If you’ve never missed your kid’s birthday, you’re too focused on family.
I've always been fairly indifferent when my own money or time was on the line but when choices affect family or other people in general I tend to be more conservative.