Here’s another graph where the benefit of other people caps out at 50% of them going outside. The situation is much better! Your couch can be pretty great before the activity starts seriously dying off. But again, just like before, once it reaches that critical threshold, average happiness gets worse for a bit before it gets better again in the world of only shut-ins.
[Insert Graph that looks barely at all like the first one]
So the moral of the story is, to avoid isolation and depression, move to a big city, pick popular hobbies, and if someone asks you to go caroling this Christmas, go even if you don’t want to, because it will make the experience better for everyone else.
I was with you up until this conclusion. How on Earth do you look at that second graph and draw that moral from it. The existence of a tiny window where happiness is a decreasing function while being increasing in the vast majority of space suggests that the moral for the second set of parameters is "we should prioritize making indoor activities more fun because in almost all cases it increases happiness. Also we shouldn't pressure introverts to participate in social activities because they're clearly enjoying themselves more via their revealed preferences."
We get very different conclusions for the first and second set of parameters if we're being honest instead of using motivated reasoning based on a pre-supposed moral. The actual moral for the overall model should probably be something like "this deadweight loss phenomenon appears under some model parameters but not others, so the applicability of this to the real world depends a lot on the circumstances and we need to measure and investigate further to determine which world we live in, but it's an interesting possibility especially in less crowded spaces such as rural areas."
Yeah I think that's fair. I spelled out the situations I think it's realistic for in the middle a bit, though probably should have made that more front and center instead of presenting it as a totalizing view of society.
For now assume that this is a niche interest or a small community where the number of people doing it still has incremental returns, things like “Are there kids playing in the local park” or “Does your block have a block party” or “Do my friends of friends host house parties that I’m invited to.” This also models things that require a very large amount of effort to organize that few people are willing to do, so you need a large amount of people choosing to invest in your community to get just a few willing to put in the hours, things like “Does your grade school have an active cub scout troop” or “Are there community choirs nearby.” At minimum, the density of people willing to do the thing determines how far you have to drive to do the thing, and how much of a pain it is to do.
Sure. But then the second graph demonstrates the sensitivity of the model to this assumption. This turns out to be a critical assumption that heavily influences the results, at least the part of the results we care about. Therefore any conclusions/morals/takeaways need to emphasize this caveat.
I mean I think the assumption that the phone and couch are actually more fun than anything one could do is a bit suspect. My belief is that screens are a sort of hyperstimulous— that the version of whatever you happen to be doing on that screen is more immediately stimulating than the same version of that activity off the screen. But I don’t think that’s fun. I don’t think that the average person derives more entertainment and value from those versions than they would from the screenless version. They wouldn’t necessarily choose freely to sit on the couch and socialize on X over going out with friends for a coffee or something. They wouldn’t necessarily find playing some basketball game on Xbox over going to the gym with a couple of friends and a ball better and more entertaining. Instead, the screen is something that provides the high points of the experience without the things that make it less accessible.
As the couch experience improves, marginally introverted people drop out of the community, which reduces the value of the community to everyone else
I don't really buy this. You started the model at 100% participation, and at that level there are a lot of people who are undesirable to the community. I suppose this depends on what community you're talking about, but I'd say in general it's not the 'marginally introverted' who leave first, it's the 'marginally invested' or the 'socially marginal' whose loss is not as important. If I can get the weird guy who shows up but isn't friends with anyone to stay home on his phone, everyone wins.
The bigger issue with the model, I think, is that it doesn't factor in how social activity (and alone time) are limited nees. As in, for a person to be happy, they need a minimum amount of social activity (different per person) and then after that it's diminishing returns. Even if alone-fun approaches infinity it shouldn't override the social need. People don't have fun at social events because more people makes it more fun, they have fun because they are meeting a social interaction quota that can't be met otherwise.
Also, do you prefer comments here or on the blog itself?
Comments either place are fine. It would be interesting to model with diminishing returns for each activity for each agent, I would like to see what that produces. My guess would be that it has overall similar character, where more of the variance in activity comes from where on the marginal returns curve each agent is than the variance in overall extroversion. I do think it would be much less likely to bottom out at 0, but I don't really know. Try it! :D
Submission statement: This post was the outcome of a long debate on BlueSky about whether social isolation and the decay of in-person communities should be considered to be revealed preference or not. I decided that rather than continue to talk, I should just write the code and specify the model, which thankfully Gemini lowered the activation energy of to zero. This is a toy model that I'm intending to demonstrate that entertainment can have deadweight loss, especially in small communities.
Well, I would certainly be the last person to tell you not to contribute more. I was surprised to see that it was stuck in the filter, but you got unlucky and had one of us scrutinize it in the small gap between post and explainer.
On Reddit, that would be a death sentence, but this forum is set up such that the front page evolves rather slowly. Very few potential eyeballs lost - no harm, no foul.
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Notes -
One piece of evidence in favor of a model something like this is that active users of many social media platforms wish that they didn't exist. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231468
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[Insert Graph that looks barely at all like the first one]
I was with you up until this conclusion. How on Earth do you look at that second graph and draw that moral from it. The existence of a tiny window where happiness is a decreasing function while being increasing in the vast majority of space suggests that the moral for the second set of parameters is "we should prioritize making indoor activities more fun because in almost all cases it increases happiness. Also we shouldn't pressure introverts to participate in social activities because they're clearly enjoying themselves more via their revealed preferences."
We get very different conclusions for the first and second set of parameters if we're being honest instead of using motivated reasoning based on a pre-supposed moral. The actual moral for the overall model should probably be something like "this deadweight loss phenomenon appears under some model parameters but not others, so the applicability of this to the real world depends a lot on the circumstances and we need to measure and investigate further to determine which world we live in, but it's an interesting possibility especially in less crowded spaces such as rural areas."
Yeah I think that's fair. I spelled out the situations I think it's realistic for in the middle a bit, though probably should have made that more front and center instead of presenting it as a totalizing view of society.
Sure. But then the second graph demonstrates the sensitivity of the model to this assumption. This turns out to be a critical assumption that heavily influences the results, at least the part of the results we care about. Therefore any conclusions/morals/takeaways need to emphasize this caveat.
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I mean I think the assumption that the phone and couch are actually more fun than anything one could do is a bit suspect. My belief is that screens are a sort of hyperstimulous— that the version of whatever you happen to be doing on that screen is more immediately stimulating than the same version of that activity off the screen. But I don’t think that’s fun. I don’t think that the average person derives more entertainment and value from those versions than they would from the screenless version. They wouldn’t necessarily choose freely to sit on the couch and socialize on X over going out with friends for a coffee or something. They wouldn’t necessarily find playing some basketball game on Xbox over going to the gym with a couple of friends and a ball better and more entertaining. Instead, the screen is something that provides the high points of the experience without the things that make it less accessible.
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I don't really buy this. You started the model at 100% participation, and at that level there are a lot of people who are undesirable to the community. I suppose this depends on what community you're talking about, but I'd say in general it's not the 'marginally introverted' who leave first, it's the 'marginally invested' or the 'socially marginal' whose loss is not as important. If I can get the weird guy who shows up but isn't friends with anyone to stay home on his phone, everyone wins.
The bigger issue with the model, I think, is that it doesn't factor in how social activity (and alone time) are limited nees. As in, for a person to be happy, they need a minimum amount of social activity (different per person) and then after that it's diminishing returns. Even if alone-fun approaches infinity it shouldn't override the social need. People don't have fun at social events because more people makes it more fun, they have fun because they are meeting a social interaction quota that can't be met otherwise.
Also, do you prefer comments here or on the blog itself?
Comments either place are fine. It would be interesting to model with diminishing returns for each activity for each agent, I would like to see what that produces. My guess would be that it has overall similar character, where more of the variance in activity comes from where on the marginal returns curve each agent is than the variance in overall extroversion. I do think it would be much less likely to bottom out at 0, but I don't really know. Try it! :D
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Submission statement: This post was the outcome of a long debate on BlueSky about whether social isolation and the decay of in-person communities should be considered to be revealed preference or not. I decided that rather than continue to talk, I should just write the code and specify the model, which thankfully Gemini lowered the activation energy of to zero. This is a toy model that I'm intending to demonstrate that entertainment can have deadweight loss, especially in small communities.
Apologies, this got stuck in the queue as other mods less familiar with your work assumed this was blogspam. I've let it through now!
You can tell that moderator that I sympathize as a former active reddit moderator myself. I probably deleted many posts that looked just like this.
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Especially since there a lengthy gap between the post and the submission statement. I can understand that the others pattern matched in a bad way.
In the future, if you run into issues, please DM. I'll try and sort it out, since I value your presence here.
Sorry! I should have posted it at the time. Also serves me right for not posting enough here, and not writing frequently enough.
Well, I would certainly be the last person to tell you not to contribute more. I was surprised to see that it was stuck in the filter, but you got unlucky and had one of us scrutinize it in the small gap between post and explainer.
On Reddit, that would be a death sentence, but this forum is set up such that the front page evolves rather slowly. Very few potential eyeballs lost - no harm, no foul.
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