I don't really believe in the high/low time-preference thing, anymore.

We actually don't know why anyone did anything.


Sounds like something a high time preference person would say


I want to say: seems like buzzwords to me lately. I'm not sure I've had a convo on nostr without it being used in a reply.


“opportunity cost” rebranded by saifedean …?


bitcoin indoctrination AKA tooo many podcasts 😅


You just said that to someone who washed down two absolutely delicious strawberry tarts with some excellent Italian 🍷

😁

I can't decide if this was high time-preference because I couldn't delay the gratification.
Or high time-preference because I'm front-running two Vikings.
Or low time-preference because I made everything from scratch and picked the 🍓 from the field nearby that I rode my bicycle to and the 🥚 came from a farmer down the road. And we bought the wine from the producer's basement.
Or high time-preference because it's not keto.
Or...


Time preference has been around for a long time, it is discussed alot with Austrian economics.

I mean It can be a buzzword I suppose. But buzzwords imo always seem to try and create hype and explain away complicated things with simple one or two word saying.

Blockchain was the buzzword in 2017/18. Everyone who incorporated a 'blockchain' was suddenly hip and new.

If you ask me. I see similarities of how random companies would use Blockchain for anything in 2018, is how companies like Logitech are selling people AI mice.
Like wtf.

AI is the buzzword of 2023/2024.

Unpopular opinion. But we will check back in a few years and see.

Why does my mouse need AI.

Cause it sell products. Cause us dumb humans go 'oh AI, this thing I think I understand,but really don't, is gonna make this product so much better than it was previously'


Said can't take credit for time preference. Pretty sure the idea had been associated with Austrian economics long before saif


Basically.

But Thomas of Aquinas thought that opportunity cost was something bankers thought up to justify charging interest, rather than a real thing.

You can't effectively price the cost of something that never happened. You can only estimate it. In fact, you don't know if it ever would have happened.

It can be an illusion if choice.
"If I had done this, that, and the other, then I would now have X," is a presumption. You actually have no idea.


correct.

pretty sure most 2018 onward bitcoiners learnt it from him though 😆


For instance, bankers will claim that they need to be "made right" for all of their imaginary losses for not buying Treasury bonds, instead. But, if they all stopped lending private people money, what would happen to their *actual* returns on bonds?

Schrödingers Returns


bitcoiners:
https://m.primal.net/IsDA.jpg


This


High time preference just means you prefer the present at the expense of the future. Is your future damaged significantly from this activity? Nothing wrong with having fun but someone that engages in unprotected sex with strangers is high time preference because they are putting their future at risk (e.g. STDs, unwanted babies). You don’t have to be low time preference all the time but you should be most of the time.


Like vegan water. It's a real thing.


I don't know if I agree to this. It seems incredibly arbitrary. 🤔 Also, humans will tend to post-rationalize everything.

The woman getting pregnant by a stranger got pregnant, after all. How many women follow the Contraception Rules their whole life and end up run-through, but barren?

Similarly, being foolhardy looks idiotic... unless you triumph. Then you're courageous.


Also, Austrian economists are not omnipotent.


ALL YOUR AUSTRIAN MODELS DESTROYED.


The point flew right over your head lmao nvm


Fr, tho. 😂

My logistics professor reminded us that models aren't the real world. They're an abstraction of the world. Therefore, they will never align 100% with the world and their predictive power will waver, over time, as factors come into play that were unknown or inadequately accounted for. Like the Corona lockdowns and border controls destroying all logistics planning for years.

We are actually running into the issue of "informed stupidity", where the models become so stuffed full of information and so universally applied, that the benefit of contrary plays is increasing.

You can now have a massive impact upon society with small, simple acts, for instance. The power of individual people to change the course of history is going parabolic.


FR FR

My work GM pre covid: no WFH!

now: 2 days WFH

😆


No, I'm just not presuming that the person not having unprotected sex is preferring the future, or vice-versa. We don't actually know that.

Perhaps they are simply timid, unattractive, dor have a low libido.


Haha vegan water. That's a new one to me!


That's the point. It's a preference. If you can be content to forgo immediate luxury, you can invest in quality which may bring more comfort longer term.

I'm not sure what you don't believe.

It doesn't mean that always forgoing pleasure is always wise. You can live a boring life and die with all the plans you worked towards wasted.


Fair point.


I like dinosaur water, tyvm


oh god yes.  that prof is gold.


I don't believe that I can simply look at the choice someone has made and determine what their thoughts were, while they were making them.

I also don't believe that knowing what their thoughts were would even help me, definitively, as humans and their environment are too complex for that.

I also don't think humans always know what actually motivated to make a decision, as it's often hindbrain stuff that they aren't consciously aware of.

We can only analyze trends and tendencies, and those often turn out to be wrong, or don't hold true indefinitely.


Yes, he is.


It doesn’t matter what they prefer or what they think. You can consider it a spectrum and even say that it can fluctuate but those behaviors are still high time preference. The reason I don’t do fentanyl is because I know it can ruin my life in the future. It won’t ruin it in the present. The present would be a great experience on fentanyl and if I didn’t care about my future I would do it.

And fixing those issues requires a lower time preference because it takes hard work. Going to the gym, practicing social skills, and improving libido require a low time preference because the rewards of all those activities are not recognized in the present. The fruits of that work are recognized in the future IF the person can consistently do that work.


I would prefer the vegan water, but I don't know if it contains real vegans.


it might tho

then you would be a cannibal!


but that avoids eating cows, sheep and goats and chickens and turkeys and ducks and prawns and sheep and fish and crabs

so technically cannibalism is vegan


It goes up, just not when *we* want it


For instance: 10 years ago, I would have said people who take out a loan and go to college, finish, and get a great job are low time-preference.

The guy who was like, "this is stupid, gonna just buy Bitcoin", is looking like a genius, now.

Was the person who went to college low time-preference? Maybe they just went because their friends were going.

Was the person who "bet everything on crypto" prescient or just a gambler?

We don't know.


intellectualization of reality is a disease.  people are not numbers a d neither is the world.


Bitcoin is a black hole that will absorb everything in it's proximity


Agree with this. Seven years ago some guys I know were buying bitcoin like crazy, yet couldn’t explain really *why* they were doing it except it seemed like a good gamble, not that it could become some sort of actually currency that wasn’t inflatable. I asked many times, and never got an economic or coherent rational reason back then. Has there been one, I would have learned earlier, but instead I didn’t even hear of Austrian economics until just a few years ago. May have something do with my job of being a sailor for almost twenty years now; at sea you kinda have a single mindset.


The thing about gambling is some win, some lose.


Think about what you can do with your Bitcoin and how you can make the world a better place in small ways to close around you. But be balanced and not so fanatical like Roger Ver.


You can always do stupid things in stupid places with stupid people & test the results yourself... 😂


Changing course may be difficult after though...


I can buy that


And then you have people like Marc Friedrich, who is a macro-economist and was introduced to Bitcoin over the whitepaper and immediately started writing articles and books about it because he was like OMG this is so awesome. 🤣


Yes, but the thing we've been seeing, the last few decades, is that everyone is placing bets. We don't know what the future holds and we can only extrapolate out from the past or guess. Every action carries some risk and reward, often in inverse correlation to each other.


To people who aren't me and don't know me well, I look like the absolute kween of high time-preference behavior. My whole life has just been a series of seemingly crazy decisions, that had everyone staring in mute horror, but that I was making very deliberately and that always worked out well.

I simply have an abnormally high risk-tolerance and I don't dither. I just decide and execute. Decide and execute. Decide and execute.
I'm like my dad: Shit or get off the pot, bro.

But maybe that really is extremely high time-preference behavior, so they're actually right about me. I think strategically (future-oriented), but I execute like my hair is on fire (high time-preference).


Sounds like me.
Future oriented, act fast, course correct faster.


Can confirm wife is decisive and I’m the analysis paralysis guy 🙋🏽♂💀


got you a winner


yeah, i'm similar... i'll sit there with something on my mind for days on end and then suddenly do it all at once


Fail fast, fail safe, move on. Resilience and investigative rigor, rather than timidity.

In God I trust, everything else must face periodic review.


To me, time preference is about the timing of unpleasantness/sacrifice. A high time preference decision is one that defers unpleasantness to a later date, with a pleasant outcome right now. A low time preference decision accepts unpleasantness in the immediate/short term, with the outlook of pleasantness later on. We all make both types of decisions (both large and small), but some people are more prone to one type.


I've noticed that this drives a lot of people nuts because I'll seem really confident that I've made the right choice about something (like Bitcoin, LOL) and then suddenly waver or sound like a skeptic.

I just have this complex mental flowchart for every decision I make, so if someone points out that I forgot a logic gate or an external input three levels up, I'm immediately like, hold up... let's go back and review this from START, again. 🤔
The algorithm is dead. Long live the algorithm.


Not believing your own bullshit / checking yourself or the process is the way!


Yeah. Sudden flurry of activity, like a flock of birds taking flight. Once I've made a decision, it has to be executed immediately or I feel trapped.
Drives absolutely everyone around me nuts because it looks like inactivity and then they get hit by a train.
Someone less high time-preference would be wealthier and more successful, on average, but have less potential to the upside because they'll eschew risk. And they'll feel less like they have true agency.

It's a classic CEO trait, I suppose, and something typical for military officers or inventors: "moving boldly and swiftly" or "acting quickly on asymmetric information".


if ya gotta jump into the cold water no point in going slow

once you've done this sort of thing a few times you learn that hesitation is death, always every time you get flutters as you leap you fall


And then, if it works out, they tell you that you "got lucky".

No, I just have bigger balls than you do and I'm more inquisitive than you are. You could have made the same choice, but you didn't. The End.


yeah, and i got plenty of stories of landing on my face, one time nearly killed me


Yes, but I execute immediately because I find inertia incredibly unpleasant. That's why I think I'm a 50/50 mix, at best, rather than someone low time-preference, who focuses on some distant goal and plods toward it, diligently.


Same. 🤝

Well, oh well. No risk, no fun, and YOLO.


It's true. Marriages who manage to successfully unite those two personality types seem to work very well and the spouses do better together than either would, apart.

Those who can't get the mix right, dramatically implode. 😬


you dont have to tell me twice. hahaha


yeah, Robert Greene's book The 48 Laws of Power has one that goes:

Audacity can always fix the errors caused by audacity.


Some folks are deliberate & patient; others are more impulsive.  Anyone with 2 kids or more can likely attest.  I'm not sure the spectrum is a matter of belief unless you're in an extremely thick bubble of human isolation! 🤣


I meant more that it can be difficult to tell if a particular choice/decision is a "high time-preference" thing or not, but our little Bitcoin bubble has grown to label acts we approve of as "low time-preference".

For instance:
Is getting married high or low time-preference? Well, that depends. What were the alternatives and was it a good match?


Any answer about time preference can really only come from within, eg. Only the ones who were married can answer.  But you're right, bitcoiners do tend to misuse it as a kind of synthetic "I'm more zoomed out than you" argument 🙄


strategically low time preference, tactically high time preference


Here's why: AI uses 17x more electricity than bitcoin hashing. So when the bitcoin price increases by 17x, the excesses left behind by the AI boom/bust will come over to us (new nuclear sites, safer and lower waste thorium molten salt reactors, etc...)


What will vegans do when the zombie virus takes over? Eat grass fed humans!


I'm not sure I'm that far off. I haven't really been able to learn that about myself yet. I would say my past/current behaviors put me deep into low time preference.

> I'm like my dad: Shit or get off the pot, bro.
Mine too XD


I'm probably like that because I was raised by a military officer. Or I inherited his personality, or something.
Here are our options, we got five minutes to make the correct decision or our ass is grass. WHAT IS THE ANSWER, SOLDIER?

My ancestry is a bunch of soldiers and cops and competitive athletes, on both sides. Must rub off. 😅


my family on both sides for several generations have been nurses and orderlies, pretty much


analysts and monitors


ah yeah, and engineer/tinkerers haha... my opa built several houses, so did my father, so did my grandfather, he was also a mathematics teacher and was grumpy with me for my dad not pushing me to get into computers more (and he did eventually get a computer and i was a pig for it of course)


Almost all of the men are engineers, technicians, and electricians or farmers. People who like "things".
My father is a network engineer and my mother is a budget analyst.


I think I can say if I had not been a penis in 2017 and just bought and held bitcoin, I would be, at least, a full coiner.
sadly I'm not even Schrödinger's baller


u can still win 🤙🏽

https://satoshisperperson.com


😆
Forrest Gump scenes !


thanks Dave , I just keep my head down and stack what I can , lessons of the past have been learned lol


It's low in deuterium and heightens your sense of self-satisfaction.


But don't you think that Bitcoin brings order to chaos, and closer to a higher, more absolute truth? Closer to Tlthe constraints of the laws of physics in the real world?


not really.  this isn't a slam against BTC or anything but BTC is a construct created by people.  humans make tools (so do some other animals).  tools are needed for us to make things and concepts are tools for understanding scientifically (not bad).

analogy: I whip out a jackknife to perform a task, when I am done do I leave the jackknife tools all hanging out and walk around with the knife  screwdriver, etc as an interface to reality or do I put the tools away and experience the world with the Mind that isn't tools, doesn't have or need words and just experiences reality?

(I'm responding from having done a ton of Zazen for context since I haven't interacted with you before, so we can keep on the same page.)


I think about markets is they aren't rational or efficient. George Soros came up with the idea of reflexivity, the idea that the hype becomes the reality and the reality becomes the hype


bitcoin as a tool is like gold or silver coins or vault deposit receipts or redemption certificates, or shells, or whiskey, or tobacco, a form of money

it is just a better tool than a central bank because it is completely automatic and does not enable privileged rewriting of the record

so it's mainly an error correction in addition to the construct of central bank accounts, and global rather than national

in that respect it is removing privilege from a group who have been using their power to slowly turn our society into Sodom and Gomorrah


sure but I don't need George Soros to come up with a theory to know or understand that intuitively without the words.

i think that it's obvious and infers itself in the way things are.

that isn't to say the theory is bad or anything like that.  i personally just don't find theory interesting.

intellectualization and theory are exactly how to get ding a ling a ling from the roshi in the Dokusan (interview) room and fail your koan that time... then you sit again, let it be a question, don't try, you merge with it it and suddenly boom you can say it or do it without theory, intimately in your own way or words.

(i'm not bashing school either, it has its place.  theory is theory.  reality isn't theory because it's real.  and it doesn't stand still so theories fail as time goes along and things change.  imo)

😇