I know a guy who used to make his living as an eBay reseller. That is, he’d find something on eBay that he thought was underpriced so long as the auction didn’t go above X dollars, buy it, then resell it for more than he paid for it Classic imports-exports, really, a digital junk shop. Eventually he got to the point where, with some items, he didn’t ever have physical possession of them; he had figured out a way to get them directly from whoever he bought an item from to the person he had sold the item to, while still collecting his bit of arbitrage along the way. This buying and selling of items on eBay, looking for deals, was sufficient to be his full-time job and pay for a mortgage. But the last time I saw him, a few years ago, he had gotten an ordinary office job. He told me that it had become too difficult to find value; potential sellers and buyers alike had access to too many tools that could reveal the “real” price of an item, and there was little delta to eke out. He’s not alone. If you
I inadvertently deleted my comment while trying to add a link to a tweet about Colorado Dems blocking a bill to prevent landlords from using an algorithm to set rent prices. Oh well.
The concept of "newsjacking" (and several other or strategies) fit well within this model - it started as an industry insider trick, then someone wrote a book about it, now regular schmoes everywhere are cleverly using current events to give their pitches and posts apparent relevance.
This really happens to almost any strategy that people outline in a book. I'm reminded of how political activists across the spectrum have ground Saul Alinsky's ideas into the dirt with repetition.
>Such behavior may very well benefit the particular person looking to optimize their (I mean, let’s be real, his) chances. But it has negative effects on his potential matches, who will usually prefer not to be treated as a puzzle to crack, and on men on the site who don’t engage that way and would prefer to maintain an authentic approach.
It really gives voice to that feeling we all have in so many areas of our life: We can clearly see that our experiences are being degraded, and we are contributing to it, but we also feel compelled to make the logical choice.
I think over-optimization and too accessible are two important and often intertwined concepts, but they're worth teasing out some. Travel is ultimately fine, it's just less exclusive. In line with the Yglesias argument ( https://www.slowboring.com/p/restaurants-should-charge-more-forabout ) just charging people for dinner reservations, Hawaii should really have a tourist tax that's reinvested in the a range of local concerns with special attention to the native Hawaiian population.
This supply-demand mismatch is a classic problem for markets to solve. I think the trouble with efficient markets is that it becomes harder to substitute time and care for money. I think that's a problem worth thinking about, especially for things like cultural experiences where the care is part of what makes experience valuable. But travel becoming more accessible writ large is a good thing in a way the breakdown of traditional media business models is not.
Separately, your friend was making an honest living on ebay, arbitrage is part of markets clearing and all that, but it's not even a small crime that less savvy users now have a sense of the actual value of their stuff. Stores, media companies, and guidebooks add value because there's more to life than just price. They are taste makers and can help match people with the content that is a good fit for what they need or that would benefit from context and not just the content they think they want. Optimization is bad when, as in the sports case, it privileges a single goal (victory) over the larger point (fun competition).
So I think your point on the plight of too much information makes sense, but it's a few distinct problems, and, in some cases, just what greater equality looks like to those who once [benefited] from exclusivity.
"This supply-demand mismatch is a classic problem for markets to solve. I think the trouble with efficient markets is that it becomes harder to substitute time and care for money."
Yes, I don't think his friend being replaced by a more sophisticated system was a bad thing. The system was able to replace him because it did the same job, but kept less money for itself. This is positive! The rent seeker made less, and everyone else benefits.
Yeah, opening the essay with that example was a bad choice. This was the rare example of an essay where I initially agreed with the headline, but agreed with it less after reading the text.
I think you're right. There's a big difference between optimization that disempowers middle-men, like better Ebay price discovery, and optimization that empowers middlemen, like Ticketmaster scalping its own product.
And the problem of overoptimization removing diversity from sports and games is a third thing.
I think it's generally better for more people when a free(-ish) market becomes more efficient. But I don't want to see everything on Earth transformed into an efficient free(-ish) market.
A strong argument for the necessity of finding something in life not subject to optimization. Modern publishing may be a shitshow, but literature is always there. Digital streaming may get ridiculous but records and CD are always there. Cooking doesn’t require mastery of reservation apps. There are no crowds in the backyard garden.
Sure, but you are capped at the pre-overoptimization moment even for some of these, because their production is subject to the same trends. I mean, Balzac was to some level optimizing for his public in the mid-1800s France, we just do not notice because we are not in that moment and we perceive his works' qualities that are less connected to that context. But literature written today could potentially be as overoptimized for your individual taste as anything.
Moreover, you described situations that are exercises in soliptude. Optimization comes from the necessity of winning a social game. To the extent you need other human beings you are going to be exposed to those trends.
Fair point. But there is an admittedly retro social way to avoid the worst of the optimization trends. Start joining things again. Softball / bowling leagues. Rotary / Kiwanis clubs. Church if it’s your thing. Community choruses.
It may be getting impossible to earn a living without avoiding the online optimization culture. But it’s possible to live a life that’s not overwhelmed by it.
I think there are lots of ways to leave the house without suffering the full weight of the modern online optimization culture if you’re willing and able to disengage from another cultural curse of the very online - life as performance content / status affirmation.
Thanks for holding fast to that message of yours. I’ve lived most of my life in low-profile places. Somehow I got the impression early on that the inner life I was walking around with could be relatively free of gratuitous pressures from sources I didn’t like much anyway. Haven’t seen much to alter that since.
The way I see this is we have been doing this throughout human history, trying to game the social systems that orient and organize our lives. But now we are finding out that some systems are somewhat easy to game and we just did not have enough information, or we just could not organize it analytically because we were missing the smarts or brute force A/B testing.
When you think it like this, it is really dreadful. Because there is no regulation that will solve it -- this genie is not getting back in the bottle. Even the most complex systems present in society seem prone to optimization (e.g. electoral politics becoming a polarization nightmare was optimizing around Duverger's Law and tribal tendencies all along) and it speaks to our relative simplicity that even such socially emergent features are gamifiable.
I think the only way out is to actually come out the wormhole the other way. But before that we will probably face a stage of complete algorithmic tyranny, followed by a truly chaotic era where the rebellious, algorithmically-illegible individuals can ascend by sheer power of their uniqueness and unpredictableness.
I agree with a lot of this, but I will say, I think there's a conflict between the complaints of paywalls amounting to enshittification and the complaint about overoptimization resulting in excess accessibility.
Now, the fairest way to limit access (generally, to physical locations, things like dating are obviously very different) would be some sort of lottery (though I think that still fails, as a secondary market is going to exist), but the easiest way, especially for anything being managed online where a lottery is extremely vulnerable to botting, is payment. Not generally on the level of 'only Elon Musk can afford this,' but on the 'this is a special, once every few years (for travel), or few months (for restaurants) treat.'
This isn't a complaint about the piece, I think you touch on this conflict somewhat, but this is, on one level, a good problem to have, just like it's better to have a too active tourist economy than be so poor/dangerous that no one wants to visit...I'm reminded of the old 'first world problems' meme, which never understood that despite their less than life-threatening nature, they were, as the name suggested, problems, which should be solved (to the extent problems like this can be solved).
I'm sold on the problem being real but what do you call people who consciously try to reject Overoptimization in their personal lives? "Neo-luddite" doesn't quite fit and also sounds clunky (really anything with "Neo" in the title is cringe).
The myth that we’ll all be better off with the latest iteration of stuff that long ago reached its peak has been the object of subliminal smuggling efforts by marketeers for generations now. The raging forest fire they’ve lit thanks to the internet is an obvious threat to sanity, thus best handled with healthy skepticism about…almost everything, especially stuff you have to buy. My bff and I go back a long way. Not long ago he told me about a younger guy he knows who has a good job as an engineer with a Big 3 automaker. He works in a unit that is entirely devoted to crafting products that are optimized…for planned obsolescence.
This post was inadvertently rolled back to a prior draft before the last round of copyediting. The correct version has been restored.
“https://x.com/moreperfectus/status/1786412789176979462?s=46
I inadvertently deleted my comment while trying to add a link to a tweet about Colorado Dems blocking a bill to prevent landlords from using an algorithm to set rent prices. Oh well.
our nature nutures us
The concept of "newsjacking" (and several other or strategies) fit well within this model - it started as an industry insider trick, then someone wrote a book about it, now regular schmoes everywhere are cleverly using current events to give their pitches and posts apparent relevance.
This really happens to almost any strategy that people outline in a book. I'm reminded of how political activists across the spectrum have ground Saul Alinsky's ideas into the dirt with repetition.
I miss Lonely Planet for travel info. I found a lot of good off beat places through it.
>Such behavior may very well benefit the particular person looking to optimize their (I mean, let’s be real, his) chances. But it has negative effects on his potential matches, who will usually prefer not to be treated as a puzzle to crack, and on men on the site who don’t engage that way and would prefer to maintain an authentic approach.
Once Moloch is explained to you, you notice the pattern everywhere you look. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Might be even older than that; feels much like Weber's Rationalization to me.
This is reminiscent of Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch", which had similar themes of optimization driving out value(s): https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Incredible essay.
It really gives voice to that feeling we all have in so many areas of our life: We can clearly see that our experiences are being degraded, and we are contributing to it, but we also feel compelled to make the logical choice.
I think over-optimization and too accessible are two important and often intertwined concepts, but they're worth teasing out some. Travel is ultimately fine, it's just less exclusive. In line with the Yglesias argument ( https://www.slowboring.com/p/restaurants-should-charge-more-forabout ) just charging people for dinner reservations, Hawaii should really have a tourist tax that's reinvested in the a range of local concerns with special attention to the native Hawaiian population.
This supply-demand mismatch is a classic problem for markets to solve. I think the trouble with efficient markets is that it becomes harder to substitute time and care for money. I think that's a problem worth thinking about, especially for things like cultural experiences where the care is part of what makes experience valuable. But travel becoming more accessible writ large is a good thing in a way the breakdown of traditional media business models is not.
Separately, your friend was making an honest living on ebay, arbitrage is part of markets clearing and all that, but it's not even a small crime that less savvy users now have a sense of the actual value of their stuff. Stores, media companies, and guidebooks add value because there's more to life than just price. They are taste makers and can help match people with the content that is a good fit for what they need or that would benefit from context and not just the content they think they want. Optimization is bad when, as in the sports case, it privileges a single goal (victory) over the larger point (fun competition).
So I think your point on the plight of too much information makes sense, but it's a few distinct problems, and, in some cases, just what greater equality looks like to those who once [benefited] from exclusivity.
"This supply-demand mismatch is a classic problem for markets to solve. I think the trouble with efficient markets is that it becomes harder to substitute time and care for money."
Really astute observation.
Yes, I don't think his friend being replaced by a more sophisticated system was a bad thing. The system was able to replace him because it did the same job, but kept less money for itself. This is positive! The rent seeker made less, and everyone else benefits.
Yeah, opening the essay with that example was a bad choice. This was the rare example of an essay where I initially agreed with the headline, but agreed with it less after reading the text.
I think you're right. There's a big difference between optimization that disempowers middle-men, like better Ebay price discovery, and optimization that empowers middlemen, like Ticketmaster scalping its own product.
And the problem of overoptimization removing diversity from sports and games is a third thing.
I think it's generally better for more people when a free(-ish) market becomes more efficient. But I don't want to see everything on Earth transformed into an efficient free(-ish) market.
A strong argument for the necessity of finding something in life not subject to optimization. Modern publishing may be a shitshow, but literature is always there. Digital streaming may get ridiculous but records and CD are always there. Cooking doesn’t require mastery of reservation apps. There are no crowds in the backyard garden.
Sure, but you are capped at the pre-overoptimization moment even for some of these, because their production is subject to the same trends. I mean, Balzac was to some level optimizing for his public in the mid-1800s France, we just do not notice because we are not in that moment and we perceive his works' qualities that are less connected to that context. But literature written today could potentially be as overoptimized for your individual taste as anything.
Moreover, you described situations that are exercises in soliptude. Optimization comes from the necessity of winning a social game. To the extent you need other human beings you are going to be exposed to those trends.
Fair point. But there is an admittedly retro social way to avoid the worst of the optimization trends. Start joining things again. Softball / bowling leagues. Rotary / Kiwanis clubs. Church if it’s your thing. Community choruses.
It may be getting impossible to earn a living without avoiding the online optimization culture. But it’s possible to live a life that’s not overwhelmed by it.
This is very well said.
This is something I promote daily. Many who listen later realize how much life was actually just passing them by.
Cooking and gardening needn't be solitary.
Sure but I still like to leave the house occasionally.
I think there are lots of ways to leave the house without suffering the full weight of the modern online optimization culture if you’re willing and able to disengage from another cultural curse of the very online - life as performance content / status affirmation.
Thanks for holding fast to that message of yours. I’ve lived most of my life in low-profile places. Somehow I got the impression early on that the inner life I was walking around with could be relatively free of gratuitous pressures from sources I didn’t like much anyway. Haven’t seen much to alter that since.
The way I see this is we have been doing this throughout human history, trying to game the social systems that orient and organize our lives. But now we are finding out that some systems are somewhat easy to game and we just did not have enough information, or we just could not organize it analytically because we were missing the smarts or brute force A/B testing.
When you think it like this, it is really dreadful. Because there is no regulation that will solve it -- this genie is not getting back in the bottle. Even the most complex systems present in society seem prone to optimization (e.g. electoral politics becoming a polarization nightmare was optimizing around Duverger's Law and tribal tendencies all along) and it speaks to our relative simplicity that even such socially emergent features are gamifiable.
I think the only way out is to actually come out the wormhole the other way. But before that we will probably face a stage of complete algorithmic tyranny, followed by a truly chaotic era where the rebellious, algorithmically-illegible individuals can ascend by sheer power of their uniqueness and unpredictableness.
Outstanding piece!
Unpredictability, as with base-stealing in baseball, is what makes Freddie much more fun to read than almost any other writer.
Brilliant piece. Thanks!
Music, too, has been hugely over-optimised for streaming now. People are literally writing songs to fit the Spotify algorithm.
Sad. It's been the same way with movies for a long time now.
I agree with a lot of this, but I will say, I think there's a conflict between the complaints of paywalls amounting to enshittification and the complaint about overoptimization resulting in excess accessibility.
Now, the fairest way to limit access (generally, to physical locations, things like dating are obviously very different) would be some sort of lottery (though I think that still fails, as a secondary market is going to exist), but the easiest way, especially for anything being managed online where a lottery is extremely vulnerable to botting, is payment. Not generally on the level of 'only Elon Musk can afford this,' but on the 'this is a special, once every few years (for travel), or few months (for restaurants) treat.'
This isn't a complaint about the piece, I think you touch on this conflict somewhat, but this is, on one level, a good problem to have, just like it's better to have a too active tourist economy than be so poor/dangerous that no one wants to visit...I'm reminded of the old 'first world problems' meme, which never understood that despite their less than life-threatening nature, they were, as the name suggested, problems, which should be solved (to the extent problems like this can be solved).
I'm sold on the problem being real but what do you call people who consciously try to reject Overoptimization in their personal lives? "Neo-luddite" doesn't quite fit and also sounds clunky (really anything with "Neo" in the title is cringe).
The myth that we’ll all be better off with the latest iteration of stuff that long ago reached its peak has been the object of subliminal smuggling efforts by marketeers for generations now. The raging forest fire they’ve lit thanks to the internet is an obvious threat to sanity, thus best handled with healthy skepticism about…almost everything, especially stuff you have to buy. My bff and I go back a long way. Not long ago he told me about a younger guy he knows who has a good job as an engineer with a Big 3 automaker. He works in a unit that is entirely devoted to crafting products that are optimized…for planned obsolescence.