An Update on Faith, and the Emotional Overlay on Utility Value

My last post was about faith. I'm no closer to having faith, but I'm more comfortable with the idea.

I think that normal people simply see the world in a much more subjective emotional way than I do. They believe in things because it feels right. And that's all there is to it.

That's not a bad thing. John Maynard Keynes wrote about how most business ventures are negative expected value from the get-go, and it requires an irrational belief in the prospects of success (that he called animal spirits) for anything to get started in the first place.

On to utility value. It's a term that basically means how good you think something is. For example a piece of cake has a utility value that's different for everyone, depending on how much you like cake. There's no hard and fast method for determining utility value, but often you can make statements about when something has a higher utility value than something else; for example, we'd all like $200 more than $100.

I've been noticing of late that when people go after stuff, the way they pick what they want involves not only how good the thing is for them, but also the emotional high or low that comes along with getting it. For instance, I really like to save money. I recently saved $5/month on car insurance by increasing our deductible. That's a good thing to do, but it's not great. It's just $5 and isn't going to make me that much happier. I'm happy out of proportion of the true utility value of $5/month (which probably amounts to something extra at the grocery store that I won't really notice). And the same is true for me and others, in lots of different areas in which we judge value: there's this "emotional overlay" on the perceived utility value of stuff that makes us go after stuff that might not be sensible or worth the effort.

I've been applying this by trying to be less anal about stuff. I get happier than I should about keeping my behaviour in a box (bed time, exercise, etc...), so I figure I can optimize my life further by ignoring the urge to panic at 9:50pm when we're not in bed yet.

P.S. Another example of emotional overlay on something that's good but not that good. I'm reading a chess book now that has 607 different examples, divided into various sections. I want to work through this book on a best-effort basis... I want to be able to go through 50 positions and stop. So I wrote a script that randomized the numbers 1 though 607 so I can go in "order" and hop around the book and sample the various sections more or less equally. I seem to have an irrational desire to be in a box.