Month: April 2024

Everyone includes your mother and Los Angeles

PNRJ cognitive science, computer science, core principles, current events, ethics, futurism, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy , , , , , ,

Apr 28 JDN 2460430

What are the chances that artificial intelligence will destroy human civilization?

A bunch of experts were surveyed on that question and similar questions, and half of respondents gave a probability of 5% or more; some gave probabilities as high as 99%.

This is incredibly bizarre.

Most AI experts are people who work in AI. They are actively participating in developing this technology. And yet more than half of them think that the technology they are working on right now has a more than 5% chance of destroying human civilization!?

It feels to me like they honestly don’t understand what they’re saying. They can’t really grasp at an intuitive level just what a 5% or 10% chance of global annihilation means—let alone a 99% chance.

If something has a 5% chance of killing everyone, we should consider that at least as bad asthan something that is guaranteed to kill 5% of people.

Probably worse, in fact, because you can recover from losing 5% of the population (we have, several times throughout history). But you cannot recover from losing everyone. So really, it’s like losing 5% of all future people who will ever live—which could be a very large number indeed.

But let’s be a little conservative here, and just count people who already, currently exist, and use 5% of that number.

5% of 8 billion people is 400 million people.

So anyone who is working on AI and also says that AI has a 5% chance of causing human extinction is basically saying: “In expectation, I’m supporting 20 Holocausts.”

If you really think the odds are that high, why aren’t you demanding that any work on AI be tried as a crime against humanity? Why aren’t you out there throwing Molotov cocktails at data centers?

(To be fair, Eliezer Yudkowsky is actually calling for a global ban on AI that would be enforced by military action. That’s the kind of thing you should be doing if indeed you believe the odds are that high. But most AI doomsayers don’t call for such drastic measures, and many of them even continue working in AI as if nothing is wrong.)

I think this must be scope neglect—or something even worse.

If you thought a drug had a 99% chance of killing your mother, you would never let her take the drug, and you would probably sue the company for making it.

If you thought a technology had a 99% chance of destroying Los Angeles, you would never even consider working on that technology, and you would want that technology immediately and permanently banned.

So I would like to remind anyone who says they believe the danger is this great and yet continues working in the industry:

Everyone includes your mother and Los Angeles.

If AI destroys human civilization, that means AI destroys Los Angeles. However shocked and horrified you would be if a nuclear weapon were detonated in the middle of Hollywood, you should be at least that shocked and horrified by anyone working on advancing AI, if indeed you truly believe that there is at least a 5% chance of AI destroying human civilization.

But people just don’t seem to think this way. Their minds seem to take on a totally different attitude toward “everyone” than they would take toward any particular person or even any particular city. The notion of total human annihilation is just so remote, so abstract, they can’t even be afraid of it the way they are afraid of losing their loved ones.

This despite the fact that everyone includes all your loved ones.

If a drug had a 5% chance of killing your mother, you might let her take it—but only if that drug was the best way to treat some very serious disease. Chemotherapy can be about that risky—but you don’t go on chemo unless you have cancer.

If a technology had a 5% chance of destroying Los Angeles, I’m honestly having trouble thinking of scenarios in which we would be willing to take that risk. But the closest I can come to it is the Manhattan Project. If you’re currently fighting a global war against fascist imperialists, and they are also working on making an atomic bomb, then being the first to make an atomic bomb may in fact be the best option, even if you know that it carries a serious risk of utter catastrophe.

In any case, I think one thing is clear: You don’t take that kind of serious risk unless there is some very large benefit. You don’t take chemotherapy on a whim. You don’t invent atomic bombs just out of curiosity.

Where’s the huge benefit of AI that would justify taking such a huge risk?

Some forms of automation are clearly beneficial, but so far AI per se seems to have largely made our society worse. ChatGPT lies to us. Robocalls inundate us. Deepfakes endanger journalism. What’s the upside here? It makes a ton of money for tech companies, I guess?

Now, fortunately, I think 5% is too high an estimate.

(Scientific American agrees.)

My own estimate is that, over the next two centuries, there is about a 1% chance that AI destroys human civilization, and only a 0.1% chance that it results in human extinction.

This is still really high.

People seem to have trouble with that too.

“Oh, there’s a 99.9% chance we won’t all die; everything is fine, then?” No. There are plenty of other scenarios that would also be very bad, and a total extinction scenario is so terrible that even a 0.1% chance is not something we can simply ignore.

0.1% of people is still 8 million people.

I find myself in a very odd position: On the one hand, I think the probabilities that doomsayers are giving are far too high. On the other hand, I think the actions that are being taken—even by those same doomsayers—are far too small.

Most of them don’t seem to consider a 5% chance to be worthy of drastic action, while I consider a 0.1% chance to be well worthy of it. I would support a complete ban on all AI research immediately, just from that 0.1%.

The only research we should be doing that is in any way related to AI should involve how to make AI safer—absolutely no one should be trying to make it more powerful or apply it to make money. (Yet in reality, almost the opposite is the case.)

Because 8 million people is still a lot of people.

Is it fair to treat a 0.1% chance of killing everyone as equivalent to killing 0.1% of people?

Well, first of all, we have to consider the uncertainty. The difference between a 0.05% chance and a 0.015% chance is millions of people, but there’s probably no way we can actually measure it that precisely.

But it seems to me that something expected to kill between 4 million and 12 million people would still generally be considered very bad.

More importantly, there’s also a chance that AI will save people, or have similarly large benefits. We need to factor that in as well. Something that will kill 4-12 million people but also save 15-30 million people is probably still worth doing (but we should also be trying to find ways to minimize the harm and maximize the benefit).

The biggest problem is that we are deeply uncertain about both the upsides and the downsides. There are a vast number of possible outcomes from inventing AI. Many of those outcomes are relatively mundane; some are moderately good, others are moderately bad. But the moral question seems to be dominated by the big outcomes: With some small but non-negligible probability, AI could lead to either a utopian future or an utter disaster.

The way we are leaping directly into applying AI without even being anywhere close to understanding AI seems to me especially likely to lean toward disaster. No other technology has ever become so immediately widespread while also being so poorly understood.

So far, I’ve yet to see any convincing arguments that the benefits of AI are anywhere near large enough to justify this kind of existential risk. In the near term, AI really only promises economic disruption that will largely be harmful. Maybe one day AI could lead us into a glorious utopia of automated luxury communism, but we really have no way of knowing that will happen—and it seems pretty clear that Google is not going to do that.

Artificial intelligence technology is moving too fast. Even if it doesn’t become powerful enough to threaten our survival for another 50 years (which I suspect it won’t), if we continue on our current path of “make money now, ask questions never”, it’s still not clear that we would actually understand it well enough to protect ourselves by then—and in the meantime it is already causing us significant harm for little apparent benefit.

Why are we even doing this? Why does halting AI research feel like stopping a freight train?

I dare say it’s because we have handed over so much power to corporations.

The paperclippers are already here.

Surviving in an ad-supported world

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Apr 21 JDN 2460423

Advertising is as old as money—perhaps even older. Scams have likewise been a part of human society since time immemorial.

But I think it’s fair to say that recently, since the dawn of the Internet at least, both advertising and scams have been proliferating, far beyond what they used to be.

We live in an ad-supported world.

News sites are full of ads. Search engines are full of ads. Even shopping sites are full of ads now; we literally came here planning to buy something, but that wasn’t good enough for you; you want us to also buy something else. Most of the ads are for legitimate products; but some are for scams. (And then there’s multi-level marketing, which is somewhere in between: technically not a scam.)

We’re so accustomed to getting spam emails, phone calls, and texts full of ads and scams that we just accept it as a part of our lives. But these are not something people had to live with even 50 years ago. This is a new, fresh Hell we have wrought for ourselves as a civilization.

AI promises to make this problem even worse. AI still isn’t very good at doing anything particularly useful; you can’t actually trust it to drive a truck or diagnose an X-ray. (There are people working on this sort of thing, but they haven’t yet succeeded.) But it’s already pretty good at making spam texts and phone calls. It’s already pretty good at catfishing people. AI isn’t smart enough to really help us, but it is smart enough to hurt us, especially those of us who are most vulnerable.

I think that this causes a great deal more damage to our society than is commonly understood.

It’s not just that ads are annoying (though they are), or that they undermine our attention span (though they do), or that they exploit the vulnerable (though they do).

I believe that an ad-supported world is a world where trust goes to die.

When the vast majority of your interactions with other people involve those people trying to get your money, some of them by outright fraud—but none of them really honestly—you have no choice but to ratchet down your sense of trust. It begins to feel as this financial transactions are the only form of interaction there is in the world.

But in fact most people can be trusted, and should be trusted—you are missing out on a great deal of what makes life worth living if you do not know how to trust.

The question is whom you trust. You should trust people you know, people you interact with personally and directly. Even strangers are more trustworthy than any corporation will ever be. And never are corporations more dishonest than when they are sending out ads.


The more the world fills with ads, the less room it has for trust.

Is there any way to stem this tide? Or are we simply doomed to live in the cyberpunk dystopia our forebears warned about, where everything is for sale and all available real estate is used for advertising?

Ads and scams only exist because they are profitable; so our goal should be to make them no longer profitable.

Here is one very simple piece of financial advice that will help protect you. Indeed, I believe it can protect so well, that if everyone followed it consistently, we would stem the tide.

Only give money to people you have sought out yourself.

Only buy things you already knew you wanted.

Yes, of course you must buy things. We live in a capitalist society. You can’t survive without buying things. But this is how buying things should work:

You check your fridge and see you are out of milk. So you put “milk” on your grocery list, you go to the grocery store, you find some milk that looks good, and you buy it.

Or, your car is getting old and expensive to maintain, and you decide you need a new one. You run the numbers on your income and expenses, and come up with a budget for a new car. You go to the dealership, they help you pick out a car that fits your needs and your budget, and you buy it.

Your tennis shoes are getting frayed, and it’s time to replace them. You go online and search for “tennis shoes”, looking up sizes and styles until you find a pair that suits you. You order that pair.

You should be the one to decide that you need a thing, and then you should go out looking for it.

It’s okay to get help searching, or even listen to some sales pitches, as long as the whole thing was your idea from the start.

But if someone calls you, texts you, or emails you, asking for your money for something?

Don’t give them a cent.

Just don’t. Don’t do it. Even if it sounds like a good product. Even if it is a good product. If the product they are selling sounds so great that you decide you actually want to buy it, go look for it on your own. Shop around. If you can, go out of your way to buy it from a competing company.

Your attention is valuable. Don’t reward them for stealing it.

This applies to donations, too. Donation asks aren’t as awful as ads, let alone scams, but they are pretty obnoxious, and they only send those things out because people respond to them. If we all stopped responding, they’d stop sending.

Yes, you absolutely should give money to charity. But you should seek out the charities to donate to. You should use trusted sources (like GiveWell and Charity Navigator) to vet them for their reliability, transparency, and cost-effectiveness.

If you just receive junk mail asking you for donations, feel free to take out any little gifts they gave you (it’s often return address labels, for some reason), and then recycle the rest.

Don’t give to the ones who ask for it. Give to the ones who will use it the best.

Reward the charities that do good, not the charities that advertise well.

This is the rule to follow:

If someone contacts you—if they initiate the contact—refuse to give them any money. Ever.

Does this rule seem too strict? It is quite strict, in fact. It requires you to pass up many seemingly-appealing opportunities, and the more ads there are, the more opportunities you’ll need to pass up.

There may even be a few exceptions; no great harm befalls us if we buy Girl Scout cookies or donate to the ASPCA because the former knocked on our doors and the latter showed us TV ads. (Then again, you could just donate to feminist and animal rights charities without any ads or sales pitches.)

But in general, we live in a society that is absolutely inundated with people accosting us and trying to take our money, and they’re only ever going to stop trying to get our money if we stop giving it to them. They will not stop it out of the goodness of their hearts—no, not even the charities, who at least do have some goodness in their hearts. (And certainly not the scammers, who have none.)

They will only stop if it stops working.

So we need to make it stop working. We need to draw this line.

Trust the people around you, who have earned it. Do not trust anyone who seeks you out asking for money.

Telemarketing calls? Hang up. Spam emails? Delete. Junk mail? Recycle. TV ads? Mute and ignore.

And then, perhaps, future generations won’t have to live in an ad-supported world.

How is the economy doing this well?

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, macroeconomics, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 14 JDN 2460416

We are living in a very weird time, economically. The COVID pandemic created huge disruptions throughout our economy, from retail shops closing to shortages in shipping containers. The result was a severe recession with the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.

Now, a few years later, we have fully recovered.

Here’s a graph from FRED showing our unemployment and inflation rates since 1990 [technical note: I’m using the urban CPI; there are a few other inflation measures you could use instead, but they look much the same]:

Inflation fluctuates pretty quickly, while unemployment moves much slower.

There are a lot of things we can learn from this graph:

  1. Before COVID, we had pretty low inflation; from 1990 to 2019, inflation averaged about 2.4%, just over the Fed’s 2% target.
  2. Before COVID, we had moderate to high unemployment; it rarely went below 5% and and for several years after the 2008 crash it was over 7%—which is why we called it the Great Recession.
  3. The only times we actually had negative inflation—deflation—were during recessions, and coincided with high unemployment; so, no, we really don’t want prices to come down.
  4. During COVID, we had a massive spike in unemployment up to almost 15%, but then it came back down much more rapidly than it had in the Great Recession.
  5. After COVID, there was a surge in inflation, peaking at almost 10%.
  6. That inflation surge was short-lived; by the end of 2022 inflation was back down to 4%.
  7. Unemployment now stands at 3.8% while inflation is at 2.7%.

What I really want to emphasize right now is point 7, so let me repeat it:

Unemployment now stands at 3.8% while inflation is at 2.7%.

Yes, technically, 2.7% is above our inflation target. But honestly, I’m not sure it should be. I don’t see any particular reason to think that 2% is optimal, and based on what we’ve learned from the Great Recession, I actually think 3% or even 4% would be perfectly reasonable inflation targets. No, we don’t want to be going into double-digits (and we certainly don’t want true hyperinflation); but 4% inflation really isn’t a disaster, and we should stop treating it like it is.

2.7% inflation is actually pretty close to the 2.4% inflation we’d been averaging from 1990 to 2019. So I think it’s fair to say that inflation is back to normal.

But the really wild thing is that unemployment isn’t back to normal: It’s much better than that.

To get some more perspective on this, let’s extend our graph backward all the way to 1950:

Inflation has been much higher than it is now. In the late 1970s, it was consistently as high as it got during the post-COVID surge. But it has never been substantially lower than it is now; a little above the 2% target really seems to be what stable, normal inflation looks like in the United States.

On the other hand, unemployment is almost never this low. It was for a few years in the early 1950s and the late 1960s; but otherwise, it has always been higher—and sometimes much higher. It did not dip below 5% for the entire period from 1971 to 1994.

They hammer into us in our intro macroeconomics courses the Phillips Curve, which supposedly says that unemployment is inversely related to inflation, so that it’s impossible to have both low inflation and low unemployment.

But we’re looking at it, right now. It’s here, right in front of us. What wasn’t supposed to be possible has now been achieved. E pur si muove.

There was supposed to be this terrible trade-off between inflation and unemployment, leaving our government with the stark dilemma of either letting prices surge or letting millions remain out of work. I had always been on the “inflation” side: I thought that rising prices were far less of a problem than poeple out of work.

But we just learned that the entire premise was wrong.

You can have both. You don’t have to choose.

Right here, right now, we have both. All we need to do is keep doing whatever we’re doing.

One response might be: what if we can’t? What if this is unsustainable? (Then again, conservatives never seemed terribly concerned about sustainability before….)

It’s worth considering. One thing that doesn’t look so great now is the federal deficit. It got extremely high during COVID, and it’s still pretty high now. But as a proportion of GDP, it isn’t anywhere near as high as it was during WW2, and we certainly made it through that all right:

So, yeah, we should probably see if we can bring the budget back to balanced—probably by raising taxes. But this isn’t an urgent problem. We have time to sort it out. 15% unemployment was an urgent problem—and we fixed it.

In fact in some ways the economy is even doing better now than it looks. Unemployment for Black people has never been this low, since we’ve been keeping track of it:

Black people had basically learned to live with 8% or 9% unemployment as if it were normal; but now, for the first time ever—ever—their unemployment rate is down to only 5%.

This isn’t because people are dropping out of the labor force. Broad unemployment, which includes people marginally attached to the labor force, people employed part-time not by choice, and people who gave up looking for work, is also at historic lows, despite surging to almost 23% during COVID:

In fact, overall employment among people 25-54 years old (considered “prime age”—old enough to not be students, young enough to not be retired) is nearly the highest it has ever been, and radically higher than it was before the 1980s (because women entered the workforce):

So this is not an illusion: More Americans really are working now. And employment has become more inclusive of women and minorities.

I really don’t understand why President Biden isn’t more popular. Biden inherited the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and turned it around into an economic situation so good that most economists thought it was impossible. A 39% approval rating does not seem consistent with that kind of staggering economic improvement.

And yes, there are a lot of other factors involved aside from the President; but for once I think he really does deserve a lot of the credit here. Programs he enacted to respond to COVID brought us back to work quicker than many thought possible. Then, the Inflation Reduction Act made historic progress at fighting climate change—and also, lo and behold, reduced inflation.

He’s not a particularly charismatic figure. He is getting pretty old for this job (or any job, really). But Biden’s economic policy has been amazing, and deserves more credit for that.

What does “can” mean, anyway?

PNRJ cognitive science, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 7 JDN 2460409

I don’t remember where, but I believe I once heard a “philosopher” defined as someone who asks the sort of question everyone knows the answer to, and doesn’t know the answer.

By that definition, I’m feeling very much a philosopher today.

“can” is one of the most common words in the English language; the Oxford English Corpus lists it as the 53rd most common word. Similar words are found in essentially every language, and nearly always rank among their most common.

Yet when I try to precisely define what we mean by this word, it’s surprisingly hard.

Why, you might even say I can’t.

The very concept of “capability” is surprisingly slippery—just what is someone capable of?

My goal in this post is basically to make you as confused about the concept as I am.

I think that experiencing disabilities that include executive dysfunction has made me especially aware of just how complicated the concept of ability really is. This also relates back to my previous post questioning the idea of “doing your best”.

Here are some things that “can” might mean, or even sometimes seems to mean:

1. The laws of physics do not explicitly prevent it.

This seems far too broad. By this definition, you “can” do almost anything—as long as you don’t make free energy, reduce entropy, or exceed the speed of light.

2. The task is something that other human beings have performed in the past.

This is surely a lot better; it doesn’t say that I “can” fly to Mars or turn into a tree. But by this definition, I “can” sprint as fast as Usain Bolt and swim as long as Michael Phelps—which certainly doesn’t seem right. Indeed, not only would I say I can’t do that; I’d say I couldn’t do that, no matter how hard I tried.

3. The task is something that human beings in similar physical condition to my own have performed in the past.

Okay, we’re getting warmer. But just what do we mean, “similar condition”? No one else in the world is in exactly the same condition I am.

And even if those other people are in the same physical condition, their mental condition could be radically different. Maybe they’re smarter than I am, or more creative—or maybe they just speak Swahili. It doesn’t seem right to say that I can speak Swahili. Maybe I could speak Swahili, if I spent a lot of time and effort learning it. But at present, I can’t.

4. The task is something that human beings in similar physical and mental condition to my own have performed in the past.

Better still. This seems to solve the most obvious problems. It says that I can write blog posts (check), and I can’t speak Swahili (also check).

But it’s still not specific enough. For, even if we can clearly define what constitutes “people like me” (can we?), there are many different circumstances in which people like me have been in, and what they did has varied quite a bit, depending on those circumstances.

People in extreme emergencies have performed astonishingly feats of strength, such as lifting cars. Maybe I could do something like that, should the circumstance arise? But it certainly doesn’t seem right to say that I can lift cars.

5. The task is something that human beings in similar physical and mental condition to my own have performed in the past, in circumstances similar to my own.

That solves the above problems (provided we can sufficiently define “similar” for both people and circumstances). But it actually raises a different problem: If the circumstances were so similar, shouldn’t their behavior and mine be the same?

By that metric, it seems like the only way to know if I can do something is to actually do it. If I haven’t actually done it—in that mental state, in those circumstances—then I can’t really say I could have done it. At that point, “can” becomes a really funny way of saying “do”.

So it seems we may have narrowed down a little too much here.

And what about the idea that I could speak Swahili, if I studied hard? That seems to be something broader; maybe it’s this:

6. The task is something that human beings who are in physical or mental condition that is attainable from my own condition have performed in the past.

But now we have to ask, what do we mean by “attainable”? We come right back to asking about capability again: What kind of effort can I make in order to learn Swahili, train as a pilot, or learn to SCUBA dive?

Maybe I could lift a car, if I had to do it to save my life or the life of a loved one. But without the adrenaline rush of such emergency, I might be completely unable to do it, and even with that adrenaline rush, I’m sure the task would injure me severely. Thus, I don’t think it’s fair to say I can lift cars.

So how much can I lift? I have found that I can, as part of a normal workout, bench-press about 80 pounds. But I don’t think is the limit of what I can lift; it’s more like what I can lift safely and comfortably for multiple sets of multiple reps without causing myself undue pain. For a single rep, I could probably do considerably more—though how much more is quite hard to say. 100 pounds? 120? (There are online calculators that supposedly will convert your multi-rep weight to a single-rep max, but for some reason, they don’t seem to be able to account for multiple sets for some reason. If I do 4 sets of 10 reps, is that 10 reps, or 40 reps? This is the difference between my one-rep max being 106 and it being 186. The former seems closer to the truth, but is probably still too low.)

If I absolutely had to—say, something that heavy has fallen on me and lifting it is the only way to escape—could I bench-press my own weight of about 215 pounds? I think so. But I’m sure it would hurt like hell, and I’d probably be sore for days afterward.

Now, consider tasks that require figuring something out, something I don’t currently know but could conceivably learn or figure out. It doesn’t seem right to say that I can solve the P/NP problem or the Riemann Hypothesis. But it does seem right to say that I can at least work on those problems—I know enough about them that I can at least get started, if perhaps not make much real progress. Whereas most people, while they could theoretically read enough books about mathematics to one day know enough that they could do this, are not currently in a state where they could even begin to do that.

Here’s another question for you to ponder:

Can I write a bestselling novel?

Maybe that’s no fair. Making it a bestseller depends on all sorts of features of the market that aren’t entirely under my control. So let’s make it easier:

Can I write a novel?

I have written novels. So at first glance it seems obvious that I can write a novel.

But there are many days, especially lately, on which I procrastinate my writing and struggle to get any writing done. On such a day, can I write a novel? If someone held a gun to my head and demanded that I write the novel, could I get it done?

I honestly don’t know.

Maybe there’s some amount of pressure that would in fact compel me, even on the days of my very worst depression, to write the novel. Or maybe if you put that gun to my head, I’d just die. I don’t know.

But I do know one thing for sure: It would hurt.

Writing a novel on my worst days would require enormous effort and psychological pain—and honestly, I think it wouldn’t feel all that different from trying to lift 200 pounds.

Now we are coming to the real heart of the matter:

How much cost am I expected to pay, for it to still count as within my ability?

There are many things that I can do easily, that don’t really require much effort. But this varies too.

On most days, brushing my teeth is something I just can do—I remember to do it, I choose to do it, it happens; I don’t feel like I have exerted a great deal of effort or paid any substantial cost.

But there are days when even brushing my teeth is hard. Generally I do make it happen, so evidently I can do it—but it is no longer free and effortless the way it usually is.

There are other things which require effort, but are generally feasible, such as working out. Working out isn’t easy (essentially by design), but if I put in the effort, I can make it happen.

But again, some days are much harder than others.

Then there are things which require so much effort they feel impossible, even if they theoretically aren’t.

Right now, that’s where I’m at with trying to submit my work to journals or publishers. Each individual action is certainly something I should be physically able to take. I know the process of what to do—I’m not trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis here. I have even done it before.

But right now, today, I don’t feel like I can do it. There may be some sense in which I “can”, but it doesn’t feel relevant.

And I felt the same way yesterday, and the day before, and pretty much every day for at least the past year.

I’m not even sure if there is an amount of pressure that could compel me to do it—e.g. if I had a gun to my head. Maybe there is. But I honestly don’t know for sure—and if it did work, once again, it would definitely hurt.

Others in the disability community have a way of describing this experience, which probably sounds strange if you haven’t heard it before:

“Do you have enough spoons?”

(For D&D fans, I’ve also heard others substitute “spell slots”.)

The idea is this: Suppose you are endowed with a certain number of spoons, which you can consume as a resource in order to achieve various tasks. The only way to replenish your spoons is rest.

Some tasks are cheap, requiring only 1 or 2 spoons. Others may be very costly, requiring 10, or 20, or perhaps even 50 or 100 spoons.

But the number of spoons you start with each morning may not always be the same. If you start with 200, then a task that requires 2 will seem trivial. But if you only started with 5, even those 2 will feel like a lot.

As you deplete your available spoons, you will find you need to ration which tasks you are able to complete; thus, on days when you wake up with fewer spoons, things that you would ordinarily do may end up not getting done.

I think submitting to a research journal is a 100-spoon task, and I simply haven’t woken up with more than 50 spoons in any given day within the last six months.

I don’t usually hear it formulated this way, but for me, I think the cost varies too.

I think that on a good day, brushing my teeth is a 0-spoon task (a “cantrip”, if you will); I could do it as many times as necessary without expending any detectable effort. But on a very bad day, it will cost me a couple of spoons just to do that. I’ll still get it done, but I’ll feel drained by it. I couldn’t keep doing it indefinitely. It will prevent me from being able to do something else, later in the day.

Writing is something that seems to vary a great deal in its spoon cost. On a really good day when I’m feeling especially inspired, I might get 5000 words written and feel like I’ve only spent 20 spoons; while on a really bad day, that same 20 spoons won’t even get me a single paragraph.

It may occur to you to ask:

What is the actual resource being depleted here?

Just what are the spoons, anyway?

That, I really can’t say.

I don’t think it’s as simple as brain glucose, though there were a few studies that seemed to support such a view. If it were, drinking something sugary ought to fix it, and generally that doesn’t work (and if you do that too often, it’s bad for your health). Even weirder is that, for some people, just tasting sugar seems to help with self-control. My own guess is that if your particular problem is hypoglycemia, drinking sugar works, and otherwise, not so much.

There could be literally some sort of neurotransmitter reserves that get depleted, or receptors that get overloaded; but I suspect it’s not even that simple either. These are the models we use because they’re the best we have—but the brain is in reality far more complicated than any of our models.

I’ve heard people say “I ran out of serotonin today”, but I’m fairly sure they didn’t actually get their cerebrospinal fluid tested first. (And since most of your serotonin is actually in your gut, if they really ran out they should be having severe gastrointestinal symptoms.) (I had my cerebrospinal fluid tested once; most agonizing pain of my life. To say that I don’t recommend the experience is such an understatement, it’s rather like saying Hell sounds like a bad vacation spot. Indeed, if I believed in Hell, I would have to imagine it feels like getting a spinal tap every day for eternity.)

So for now, the best I can say is, I really don’t know what spoons are. And I still don’t entirely know what “can” means. But at least maybe now you’re as confused as I am.