I think I agree with this. I think if I look historically at my mistakes in spending money, there was very likely substantially more utility lost from spending too little money rather than spending too much money.
To be more precise, most of my historical mistakes do not come from consciously thinking about time-money tradeoffs and choosing money instead of time (“oh I can Uber or take the bus to this event but Uber is expensive so I should take the bus instead”) but from some money-expensive options not being in my explicit option set to prioritize in the first place (“oh taking the bus will take four hours total so I probably shouldn’t attend the event”) .
As I get in the habit of explicitly valuing my time often and trying to consider ways to buy time, I notice more and more options that my younger (and poorer) self would not even consider to be in the option set (e.g. international flights to conferences, cleaners, ordering food, paying money to alleviate bureaucracy hurdles, etc). Admittedly this coincided with the EA movement generally being much more spendthrift (and also there being far more resources now on time-money tradeoffs for people in my reference class) so it’s plausible younger EAs don’t have to go through the same mental evolutions to get the same effect.
I’m going through this right now. There have just clearly been times both as a group organiser and in my personal life when I should have just spent/taken money and in hindsight clearly had higher impact, e.g buying uni textbooks so I study with less friction to get better grades.
I think I agree with this. I think if I look historically at my mistakes in spending money, there was very likely substantially more utility lost from spending too little money rather than spending too much money.
To be more precise, most of my historical mistakes do not come from consciously thinking about time-money tradeoffs and choosing money instead of time (“oh I can Uber or take the bus to this event but Uber is expensive so I should take the bus instead”) but from some money-expensive options not being in my explicit option set to prioritize in the first place (“oh taking the bus will take four hours total so I probably shouldn’t attend the event”) .
As I get in the habit of explicitly valuing my time often and trying to consider ways to buy time, I notice more and more options that my younger (and poorer) self would not even consider to be in the option set (e.g. international flights to conferences, cleaners, ordering food, paying money to alleviate bureaucracy hurdles, etc). Admittedly this coincided with the EA movement generally being much more spendthrift (and also there being far more resources now on time-money tradeoffs for people in my reference class) so it’s plausible younger EAs don’t have to go through the same mental evolutions to get the same effect.
I’m going through this right now. There have just clearly been times both as a group organiser and in my personal life when I should have just spent/taken money and in hindsight clearly had higher impact, e.g buying uni textbooks so I study with less friction to get better grades.