Gift Giving

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In the spirit of Christmas, we’re going to talk about gifts (Look at me, using “we” outside of a math paper, where it’s the norm for whatever reason).

I like to give (and receive) gifts that are things that the recipient wouldn’t have thought of by themselves, but would appreciate in retrospect.

A perfect example is a pair of skydiving tickets for someone who had never thought of skydiving before. After some persuasion, they ended up actually using them and really enjoyed it.

This is one of the few times that giving something other than cash is better as far as maximizing the recipient’s happiness goes. The gift receiver presumably knows their own interests better than you know them, or at least you’d hope, so giving them something you know they like rather than cash (and the freedom associated with it) is just saving them a trivial amount of time, plus it locks in their choices.

Properly done (in my view), gift giving is an opportunity to use that lock-in to (politely) force someone to try something that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

As far as their preferences go, this is the one area you can actually make a difference in. If you know they would enjoy some activity but they’ve never shown any interest in it before, make them do it by giving it to them for free. Unless they really hate it, few people can resist “free”.

One Person’s Trivial Is Another Person’s Life Work

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Running the following command in Haskell gives the natural log of the integers 1-1000. It runs in about a millisecond.

map (logBase 10) [1..1000]

The same result, published by John Napier and Henry Briggs in 1617 as Logarithmorum Chilias Prima (“The First Thousand Logarithms”), took at least 2 years.

Over the next 200 years, logarithms of the integers 1-200,000 were computed. Calculating a logarithm to 7 decimal places (or in some of the more ambitious cases, up to 24) takes about an hour (that’s a wild guess. It could be much longer or shorter for all I know). That works out to 200,000 hours, or almost 23 years of nonstop work. At an 8 hour work day every day (no breaks in this business), that’s about 69 years, a few decades past someone’s working lifetime.

And now some procrastinating college student took less than a second to do the same thing. Really makes me wonder what’ll be considered trivial in 2 centuries that’s intractable now.

Why Paying for Things Is a Better Idea as You Get Better Off

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Why Paying for Things Is a Better Idea as You Get Better Off

Recently, I was forced to go to the post office in person to pick up a package. Reading that last sentence out loud is a bit of a tongue twister. Anyway, the lady in front of me in the line needed to send out a package but had forgotten to tape it, so the post office employee asked her if she would like to buy some tape for 3 dollars.

She did not like that idea at all. However, her response surprised me somehow. She thought that it was better to go back to her house (a 15 minute drive away), get some tape from her drawer, drive back, pay for parking, and then stand in line for half an hour, all to save 3 dollars.

I presume that if she has a job, it pays at least minimum wage ($11 in the city of Berkeley). going back to her house would take at least an hour total. So she would spend $11 worth of time (at the bare minimum), all to “save” 3 dollars. That’s a bad idea.

Really, this shouldn’t surprise me. A lot of people never seem to grasp the basic idea that as you grow older and (hopefully) gain skills and experience, your time becomes more valuable, and therefore more expensive.

This is one reason people who have rather valuable time pay for their news, rather than just reading free articles all the time. If we assume that the news in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist is high-quality, then the time saved in not having to go look for news and and not having to read ads makes it worth the cost.

Although money is an imperfect proxy for the value of time, it is a good heuristic for realizing whether doing something is worth it or not. For example, a 15 minute time waster that happens every day is a lot less tolerable when you realize that’s almost 1% of your time, and therefore your life. And for the people I know, that’s about $15 wasted, or almost $5,500 a year.

The take away from this is that it makes sense to trade money to save time if your time is relatively valuable. People whose time is less valuable, such as college students with few connections to wealthy people, are rational when they do things like drive two hours to meet their old boss. Until they gain the skills to make the time more valuable, it’s all they can do.

In either case, don’t waste time. Time is much more than money, because you can’t make more of it or get it back.

The Brave New World of Newlines

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If you’re writing online, for God’s sake use a newline to break a paragraph rather than indent.

The space you save with indents is trivial and the whole point of paragraphs is to keep ideas that are logically separate physically separate as well. Newlines help to reinforce the separation.

It’s not like space is such a premium on a computer anyway when most viewing is still on some sort of electronic device.

So do the world a favor and stop using indents.