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This is Introduction to Game Theory, Part 2: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points, published by Scott Alexander.

A Nash equilibrium is an outcome in which neither player is willing to unilaterally change her strategy, and they are often applied to games in which both players move simultaneously and where decision trees are less useful.

Suppose my girlfriend and I have both lost our cell phones and cannot contact each other. Both of us would really like to spend more time at home with each other (utility 3). But both of us also have a slight preference in favor of working late and earning some overtime (utility 2). If I go home and my girlfriend's there and I can spend time with her, great. If I stay at work and make some money, that would be pretty okay too. But if I go home and my girlfriend's not there and I have to sit around alone all night, that would be the worst possible outcome (utility 1). Meanwhile, my girlfriend has the same set of preferences: she wants to spend time with me, she'd be okay with working late, but she doesn't want to sit at home alone.

This “game” has two Nash equilibria. If we both go home, neither of us regrets it: we can spend time with each other and we've both got our highest utility. If we both stay at work, again, neither of us regrets it: since my girlfriend is at work, I am glad I stayed at work instead of going home, and since I am at work, my girlfriend is glad she stayed at work instead of going home. Although we both may wish that we had both gone home, neither of us specifically regrets our own choice, given our knowledge of how the other acted.

When all players in a game are reasonable, the (apparently) rational choice will be to go for a Nash equilibrium (why would you want to make a choice you'll regret when you know what the other player chose?) And since John Nash (remember that movie A Beautiful Mind?) proved that every game has at least one, all games between well-informed rationalists (who are not also being superrational in a sense to be discussed later) should end in one of these.

What if the game seems specifically designed to thwart Nash equilibria? Suppose you are a general invading an enemy country's heartland. You can attack one of two targets, East City or West City (you declared war on them because you were offended by their uncreative toponyms). The enemy general only has enough troops to defend one of the two cities. If you attack an undefended city, you can capture it easily, but if you attack the city with the enemy army, they will successfully fight you off.

Here there is no Nash equilibrium without introducing randomness. If both you and your enemy choose to go to East City, you will regret your choice - you should have gone to West and taken it undefended. If you go to East and he goes to West, he will regret his choice - he should have gone East and stopped you in your tracks. Reverse the names, and the same is true of the branches where you go to West City. So every option has someone regretting their choice, and there is no simple Nash equilibrium. What do you do?

Here the answer should be obvious: it doesn't matter. Flip a coin. If you flip a coin, and your opponent flips a coin, neither of you will regret your choice. Here we see a "mixed Nash equilibrium", an equilibrium reached with the help of randomness.

We can formalize this further. Suppose you are attacking a different country with two new potential targets: Metropolis and Podunk. Metropolis is a rich and strategically important city (utility: 10); Podunk is an out of the way hamlet barely worth the trouble of capturing it (utility: 1).

A so-called first-level player thinks: “Well, Metropolis is a better prize, so I might as well attack that one. That way, if I win I get 10 utility instead of 1”

A second-level player thinks: “Obviously Metropolis is ...

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This is Introduction to Game Theory, Part 1: Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees, published by Scott Alexander.

Game theory is the study of how rational actors interact to pursue incentives. It starts with the same questionable premises as economics: that everyone behaves rationally, that everyone is purely self-interested1, and that desires can be exactly quantified - and uses them to investigate situations of conflict and cooperation.

Here we will begin with some fairly obvious points about decision trees, but by the end we will have the tools necessary to explain a somewhat surprising finding: that giving a US president the additional power of line-item veto may in many cases make the president less able to enact her policies. Starting at the beginning:

The basic unit of game theory is the choice. Rational agents make choices in order to maximize their utility, which is sort of like a measure of how happy they are. In a one-person game, your choices affect yourself and maybe the natural environment, but nobody else. These are pretty simple to deal with:

Here we visualize a choice as a branching tree. At each branch, we choose the option with higher utility; in this case, going to the beach. Since each outcome leads to new choices, sometimes the decision trees can be longer than this:

Here's a slightly more difficult decision, denominated in money instead of utility. If you want to make as much money as possible, then your first choice - going to college or starting a minimum wage job right Now - seems to favor the more lucrative minimum wage job. But when you take Later into account, college opens up more lucrative future choices, as measured in the gray totals on the right-hand side. This illustrates the important principle of reasoning backward over decision trees. If you reason forward, taking the best option on the first choice and so on, you end up as a low-level manager. To get the real cash, you've got to start at the end - the total on the right - and then examine what choice at each branch will take you there.

This is all about as obvious as, well, not hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, so let's move on to where it really gets interesting: two-player games.

I'm playing White, and it's my move. For simplicity I consider only two options: queen takes knight and queen takes rook. The one chess book I've read values pieces in number of pawns: a knight is worth three pawns, a rook five, a queen nine. So at first glance, it looks like my best move is to take Black's rook. As for Black, I have arbitrarily singled out pawn takes pawn as her preferred move in the current position, but if I play queen takes rook, a new option opens up for her: bishop takes queen. Let's look at the decision tree:

If I foolishly play this two player game the same way I played the one-player go-to-college game, I note that the middle branch has the highest utility for White, so I take the choice that leads there: capture the rook. And then Black plays bishop takes queen, and I am left wailing and gnashing my teeth. What did I do wrong?

I should start by assuming Black will, whenever presented with a choice, take the option with the highest Black utility. Unless Black is stupid, I can cross out any branch that requires Black to play against her own interests. So now the tree looks like this:

The two realistic options are me playing queen takes rook and ending up without a queen and -4 utility, or me playing queen takes knight and ending up with a modest gain of 2 utility.

(my apologies if I've missed some obvious strategic possibility on this particular chessboard; I'm not so good at chess but hopefully the point of the example is clear.)

This method of alternating moves in a branching tree matches both our intuitive thought processes during a chess game (“Okay, if I do this, then B...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 12: The Amish, and Strategic Norms around Technology, published by Raemon.

I was reading Legal Systems Very Different From Ours by David Friedman. The chapter on the Amish made a couple interesting claims, which changed my conception of that culture (although I'm not very confident that the Amish would endorse these claims as fair descriptions).

Strategic Norms Around Technology

The Amish relationship to technology is not "stick to technology from the 1800s", but rather "carefully think about how technology will affect your culture, and only include technology that does what you want."

So, electric heaters are fine. Central heating in a building is not. This is because if there's a space-heater in the living room, this encourages the family to congregate together. Whereas if everyone has heating in their room, they're more likely to spend time apart from each other.

Some communities allow tractors, but only if they don't have rubber tires. This makes them good for tilling fields but bad for driving around.

Cars and telephones are particularly important not to allow, because easy transportation and communication creates a slippery slope to full-connection to the outside world. And a lot of the Amish lifestyle depends on cutting themselves off from the various pressures and incentives present in the rest of the world.

Some Amish communities allow people to borrow telephones or cars from non-Amish neighbors. I might have considered this hypocritical. But in the context of "strategic norms of technology", it need not be. The important bit is to add friction to transportation and communication.

Competitive Dictatorship

Officially, most Amish congregations operate via something-like-consensus (I'm not sure I understood this). But Friedman's claim is that in practice, most people tend to go with what the local bishop says. This makes a bishop something like a dictator.

But, there are lots of Amish communities, and if you don't like the direction a bishop is pushing people in, or how they are resolving disputes, you can leave. There is a spectrum of communities ranging in how strict they are about about various rules, and they make decisions mostly independently.

So there is not only strategic norms around technology, but a fairly interesting, semi-systematic exploration of those norms.

Other Applications

I wouldn't want to be Amish-in-particular, but the setup here is very interesting to me.

I know some people who went to MAPLE, a monastery program. While there, there were limits on technology that meant, after 9pm, you basically had two choices: read, or go to bed. The choices were strongly reinforced by the social and physical environment. And this made it much easier to make choices they endorsed.

Contrast this with my current house, where a) you face basically infinite choices about to spend your time, and b) in practice, the nightly choices often end up being something like "stay up till 1am playing minecraft with housemates" or "stay up till 2am playing minecraft with housemates."

I'm interested in the question "okay, so... my goals are not the Amish goals. But, what are my goals exactly, and is there enough consensus around particular goals to make valid choices around norms and technology other than 'anything goes?'"

There are issues you face that make this hard, though:

Competition with the Outside World – The Amish system works because it cuts itself off from the outside world, and its most important technological choices directly cause that. Your business can't get outcompeted by someone else who opens up their shop on Sundays because there is nobody who opens their shop on Sundays.

You also might have goals that directly involve the outside world.

(The Amish also have good relationships with the government such that they can get away w...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 11: Guarding Slack vs Substance, published by Raemon.

Builds on concepts from:

Slack

Nobody Does the Thing They are Supposedly Doing

Summary: If you're trying to preserve your sanity (or your employees') by scaling back on the number of things you're trying to do... make sure not to accidentally scale back on things that were important-but-harder-to-see, in favor of things that aren't as important but more easily evaluated.

Epistemic Effort: Had a conversation, had some immediate instinctive reactions to it, did not especially reflect on it. Hope to flesh out how to manage these tradeoffs in the comments.

Zvi introduced the term "Slack" to the rationaljargonsphere a few months ago, and I think it's the most clearly useful new piece of jargon we've seen in a while.

Normally, when someone coins a new term, I immediately find people shoehorning it into conversations and concepts where it doesn't quite fit. (I do this myself an embarrassing amount, and the underlying motivation is clearly "I want to sound smart" which bodes ill).

By contrast, I experienced an explosion of people jargon-dropping Slack into their conversations and every single instance was valid. Lack-of-slack was a problem loads of people had been dealing with, and having a handle for it was a perfect instance of a .

This hints at something that should be alarming: "slack" is a useful term because nobody has enough of it.

In particular, it looks like many organizations I'm familiar with run at something like -10% slack, instead of the 40% slack that apparently is optimal across many domains.

Gworley noted in the comments of Zvi's post:

If you work with distributed systems, by which I mean any system that must pass information between multiple, tightly integrated subsystems, there is a well understood concept of maximum sustainable load and we know that number to be roughly 60% of maximum possible load for all systems.

The probability that one subsystem will have to wait on another increases exponentially with the total load on the system and the load level that maximizes throughput (total amount of work done by the system over some period of time) comes in just above 60%. If you do less work you are wasting capacity (in terms of throughput); if you do more work you will gum up the works and waste time waiting even if all the subsystems are always busy.

We normally deal with this in engineering contexts, but as is so often the case this property will hold for basically anything that looks sufficiently like a distributed system. Thus the "operate at 60% capacity" rule of thumb will maximize throughput in lots of scenarios: assembly lines, service-oriented architecture software, coordinated work within any organization, an individual's work (since it is normally made up of many tasks that information must be passed between with the topology being spread out over time rather than space), and perhaps most surprisingly an individual's mind-body.

"Slack" is a decent way of putting this, but we can be pretty precise and say you need ~40% slack to optimize throughput: more and you tip into being "lazy", less and you become "overworked".

I've talked with a few people people about burnout, and other ways that lack-of-slack causes problems. I had come to the conclusion that people should probably drastically-cut-back on the amount of things they're trying to do, so that they can afford to do them well, for the long term.

Oliver Habryka made a surprising case for why this might be a bad idea, at least if implemented carelessly. (The rest of this post is basically a summary of a month-ago conversation in which Oliver explained some ideas/arguments to me. I'm fairly confident I remember the key points, but if I missed something, apologies)

Veneer vs Substance

Example 1: Web Developer Mockups

(...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 10: Sacred Cash, published by Zvi.

Previously: Categories of Sacredness, Eternal, and Hearthstone Economy versus Magic Economy, Slack

Related (Compass Rose): Kidneys, Trade, Sacredness and Space Travel

Remember when money was sacred?

Thanks to The Great Transformation, there is an increasingly free market in money. We spend money continuously, and get paid continuously.

This is relatively new. Or at least, its universality is relatively new.

It wasn’t so long ago that money was sacred at the bank. They had to give you a toaster instead.

My parents grew up in a different world. They taught me money was sacred. You had a job for a fixed number of hours, paying a fixed amount. That was all the money you got. Earning more was very difficult. Side jobs were lousy and rare. You’d spend lots of time to sell unwanted items at yard or sidewalk sales, at severe discounts. Everyone kept a strict budget. The edge was never far away.

Money spent other than on necessities was a special treat, a grand honor or dire emergency.

This cultural attitude is hard to learn. It is also hard to unlearn. It is quite jarring when you first see it violated.

The Profane

When I moved out to Denver to work at Social Games on the Cyperpunk TCG, I met a group that neither had enough money, had ways to earn more money nor treated money as sacred.

They’d think nothing of paying a dollar for a Slurpee. On payday, they’d all get takeout. Far from payday, they’d (literally in one case) search their seat cushions to find change with which to gas up their motorcycle, to get to work.

Anything they had, that could have been reasonably sold, would eventually have been.

I did not understand.

In a start-up with one angel investor who lacked the ability to reinvest, and little hope of raising additional funds, they did not prepare for the inevitable cash crunch while trying to sell enough to stem the bleeding. I don’t know if we could have stabilized if given a few more months, but we had a shot only with those months. We likely fail anyway, but to see it all thrown away infuriated me.

MetaMed’s final blow was similar. My replacement as CEO increased our spend, leaving insufficient runway to do the things necessary to raise additional funds, and failed to realize (despite my repeated warnings) that this meant 0% chance of success. The plan’s timeline didn’t work. It was incoherent. Again, we probably fail anyway, but to do that which inevitably fails? Infuriating.

I did not understand.

What was wrong with these people? Money was sacred.

Sure, it wasn’t automatically sacred, but it was sacred in context. Supply was limited. Being flush today doesn’t change that.

On The Wire, a character who not a day ago was about to be killed for lack of funds burns hundred dollar bills in a bar. His explanation? “When I’m flush, I’m flush.”

In Denver I had some savings, but fully understood I had a terrible salary and acted accordingly. I rented a $400 apartment, lived on $1,000 a month, agonized over buying an occasional luxurious Quiznos sandwich or a pizza, and worked to solve the local Indian casino poker game (it had a strange unique structure for legal reasons) to pay the rent while getting paid in equity to help the company.

Later, I had to train myself out of that. I taught myself that increasingly large amounts of money weren’t sacred to me. It is still a sin (in my code) to waste money or make a bad trade, even for trivial size. I’ve kept some amount of sacredness. I think this is important in a makes-my-12-rules-for-life kind of way. Don’t lose that cringe! But ‘throw money at the problem’ is an option, and ‘buy it even if it’s expensive because you’ll enjoy it’ has its place.

Slack Tax

Money moving from sacred to non-sacred is a huge change.

When money is sacred, so are things one can buy....

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 9: Slack for your belief system, published by Unreal.

Follow-up to Zvi’s post on Slack

You can have Slack in your life. But you can also have Slack in your belief system.

Initially, this seems like it might be bad.

Won't Slack result in a lack of precision? If I give myself Slack to believe in whatever, won't I just end up with a lot of wrong beliefs? Shouldn't I always be trying to decrease the amount of Slack in my beliefs, always striving to walk the narrow, true path?

Claims:

For some things, the only way to stumble upon the Truth is to have some Slack. In other words, having no Slack in your belief system can result in getting stuck at local optima.

Having Slack allows you to use fake frameworks in a way that isn't epistemically harmful.

If you are, in fact, just correct, I guess you should have zero Slack. But—just checking—are you ALSO correct about how you come to Know Things? If your way of coming to conclusions is even a little off, giving yourself zero Slack might be dangerous. (Having zero Slack in your meta process multiplies the problem of no-Slack to all downstream beliefs.)

I'm willing to make the more unbacked, harder-to-define claim that there exists no individual human alive who should have zero Slack in their beliefs, on the meta level. (In other words, no human has a truth-seeking process that will reliably get all the right answers.)

[ I want to note that I fully believe I could be wrong about all four claims here, or thinking about this in the entirely wrong way. So fight me. ]

Now, I'm going to specifically discuss Slack in one's meta process.

So, while I can apply the concept of Slack to individual beliefs themselves (aka "holding beliefs lightly"), I am applying the concept more to the question of "How do I come to know/understand anything or or call a thing true?"

So, I'm not discussing examples of "I believe X, with more or less Slack." I'm discussing the difference between, "Doing a bunch of studies is the only way to know things" (less Slack) vs. "Doing a bunch of studies is how I currently come to know things, but I'm open to other ways" (more Slack).

The less Slack there is in your process for forming beliefs, the more constraints you have to abide before being able to claim you've come to understand something.

Examples of such constraints include:

I only buy it if it has had at least one peer-reviewed RCT.

This framework seems like it'll lead to confirmation bias, so I will ignore it.

If it involves politics or tribalism or status, it can't have any truth to it.

If it's self-contradictory / paradoxical, it has to be one way or the other.

I can't imagine this being true or useful because my gut reaction to it is negative.

I don't feel anything about it, so it must be meaningless.

This doesn't conform to my narrative or worldview. In fact it's offensive to consider, so I won't.

If I thought this, it would likely result in harm to myself or others, so I can't think it.

It's only true if I can prove it.

It's only worth considering if it's been tested empirically.

I should discard models that aren't made of gears.

Note that sometimes, it is good to have such constraints, at least for now.

Not everyone can interact with facts, claims, and beliefs without some harm to their epistemics. In fact, most people cannot, I claim. (And further, I believe this to be one of the most important problems in rationality.)

That said, I see a lot of people's orientations as:

"My belief-forming process says this thing isn't true, and in fact this entire class of thing is likely false and not worth digging into. You seem to be actively engaging with [class of thing] and claiming there is truth in it. That seems highly dubious—there is something wrong with your belief-forming process."

This is a reasonable stance to take.

After all, ...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 8: Confessions of a Slacker, published by Jacob Falkovich.

Crossposting the entire thing from Putanumonit in honor of the Slack sequence.

Go read Slack, it’s short and important.

If you’re not a slacker, that post might change your life and explain why you feel like you have no control over your own life despite doing well on almost all counts. If you are a slacker, like me, this post gives our philosophy a name and provides a definition: slack is the absence of binding constraints on behavior.

Zvi’s post is abstract on purpose. I’ll continue his mission by getting more specific and, of course, by putting a num on it. To the latter purpose, I’ll modify the definition of slack to make it quantifiable:

Slack is the distance from binding constraints on your behavior.

Keep your Distance

Slack is a function of many resources. Running out of any single vital resource is enough to constrain your behavior: make you do something you didn’t want to, or prevent you from doing something you want. Freedom requires having spare time, spare money, spare energy, spare weirdness points, available friends etc. The “slack as distance” formula looks a little something like this:

Slack disappears when the spare capacity of any single resource goes to zero, regardless of how much of everything else you have. Maintaining slack requires balancing all the important resources, making sure to shore up the scarcest resources first.

My grandma just paid to replace a pipe on her floor that was flooding the entire apartment building. The other 20 tenants were supposed to participate in the cost, but due to diffusion of responsibility and greed, they decided collectively to weasel out of contributing. A lawyer suggested that my grandma should go to court but she refused, for reasons of slack. The question isn’t whether the time in court will be worth the money gained, but whether the lack of this particular sum of money will force my grandma into something as undesirable as spending weeks litigating against her neighbors. It almost certainly wouldn’t.

At her age, my grandma’s scarcest resource is stress-free time. She’s not trading it for money.

It’s remarkable how many people fuck up by doing the opposite: concentrating on the resources that are easiest for them to obtain, and neglecting their most pressing needs.

One half of Americans have less than $400 to spare, including millions of middle-class people who make and spend tens of thousands each year. The author of this shocking article is an educated professional and a family man. He has accumulated many achievements, but he forgot to save any cash to pay the water bill. On the other side, I have friends from business school with six figures to spare in their bank account and not a single hour to relax.

Whatever resource is scarcest for people is probably the one they aren’t good at dealing with, and for this reason, thinking about it is aversive. It’s easier just to ignore it. But an ignored constraint doesn’t go away, it still binds you.

Currency Exchange

When no single resource is very scarce, you can keep it that way by figuring out the exchange rates between resources and making trade-offs based on those. Trading-off “life currencies” is a subject I discussed in detail before, but slack-based thinking offers a good way to calculate the correct exchange rates. For example: how much is an hour of free time worth to you in dollars?

The slack-based exchange rate is [spare money] / [spare time], when the definition of “spare” is derived from the definition of slack. Spare X = how much X you can lose before being forced into undesirable behavior.

Example: you make $60,000 a year, put $15,000 in retirement, save $5,000 in cash and spend the remaining $40,000. Of those, $30,000 are for necessities and $10,000 are for thi...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 7: Sabbath hard and go home, published by Benquo.

Growing up Jewish, I thought that the traditional rules around the Sabbath were silly. Then I forgot to bring a spare battery on a camping trip. Now I think that something like the traditional Jewish Sabbath is an important cultural adaptation to preserve leisure, that would otherwise be destroyed in an urbanized, technological civilization.

Sabbath as easy mode

As a child, I first learned that the Sabbath was a “day of rest,” a day on which you don’t do “work.” I was brought up by liberal Jews in a society in which “work” tends to mean either business or wage labor. Things you do for money. Things you do because someone else demands them. This is for the most part how we observed the Sabbath.

But I was also taught about the older traditions in which many categories of mundane activity are forbidden: lighting a fire, cutting or mending cloth, writing or erasing letters. This seemed to me like an arbitrary superstition based on an excessive literality. Surely I could tell for myself whether I was writing as part of a leisure activity or a desk job. Surely I could tell for myself whether I was planting seeds for my private garden, or on a commercial farm. Why avoid these activities in the privacy of one’s own home, doing things for oneself, and not working at all?

Likewise, Orthodox Jews must walk to and from their synagogue on the Sabbath, because driving would involve lighting a fire. Automobile engines run on combustion, after all. Liberal Jews often argued, if there is inclement weather, or if the synagogue is far, is it not more restful to take an easy drive than to walk?

In short, I thought that the rest of the Sabbath meant, or ought to mean, playing life on easy mode.

Unplugging as leisure

Recently, I’ve been feeling too caught up in local social momentum. When it looked like it would be difficult and take a long time to book a cabin to spend some time alone, I asked a friend to teach me how to go camping, to improve my range of options for solitude, both by directly giving me the affordance for camping, and by more generally expanding the range of living conditions I had experience coping with.

On my first solo two-night camping trip, I forgot to bring a backup battery to charge my laptop or phone. I was car camping, so I could have charged them that way, but I felt like that was outside the spirit of the exercise, and inconvenient anyway. So instead, I mostly kept my phone turned off. Very quickly, I started being able to think about aspects of my situation that had been too overwhelming, too in motion, to get leverage on the day before. Because I wasn’t dealing with them. I wasn’t keeping up with anything. I was just present, where I was. I wished I’d done this years ago.

And then I realized: if I had keeping a Sabbath, it wouldn’t have taken years to take a step back from social momentum. I’d have gotten a chance within seven days of noticing that there was a problem. And seven days later, another chance, and so on.

Immediately, came the reflexive follow-up thought: of course, not the literal Orthodox Jewish Sabbath. But then I asked my self: why not, exactly?

I went through some of the more onerous-seeming requirements. You are not permitted to write. But when I went on a meditation retreat, they also asked us not to write. And I had no problem with that. It did not seem like an arbitrary superstition to me; it seemed like part of the discipline of an integrated mental practice.

Maybe the Sabbath too is a discipline meant to cultivate a particular sort of mental practice.

You are not allowed to light fires on the Sabbath, which means no cooking; you eat what has been prepared in advance. On that same meditation retreat, we were asked not to bring or prepare our own food, but to ac...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 6: Sabbath Commentary, published by Zvi.

Epistemic Status: Several months of experimentation, then talking from the hip

Commentary On: Bring Back the Sabbath

Required: Slack

I have a lot of thoughts on the topic that don’t belong in the main presentation. I’m going to put them here in disorganized form for the curious. These claims are believed, but I may not have good explicit evidence to defend them with. I’m fine with that.

I. Slack Against Slack

One might challenge Sabbath with, “Isn’t it weird protecting Slack by taking Slack away? Aren’t you avoiding hard bounds on behavior by imposing hard bounds on behavior?“

Yes, I am doing that. Yes it is weird. Also suspicious.

You’re taking some types of Slack away by forbidding and requiring activities, to guard and create the Slack that matters.

This can backfire. When I was a kid the Sabbath was rules preventing fun. Saturday was just Sunday except nothing worked and you sat in a room for three hours while people mumbled in Hebrew. That’s not a solution, that’s making the problem worse. Sunday was free from outside pressures and insanely great! Why not do that?

So no, not everyone needs a Sabbath for Slack or relaxation. It is one solution among many to the problems of outside pressures, to too many choices, to having less than no time and not enough money. Not everyone even has those problems. If you have so much time and so little to do, rather than striking that and reversing it, a regular Sabbath is not right for you. This is your periodic reminder to reverse all advice you hear.

You still need to take stock sometimes. If there’s nothing worth doing, forcing the issue by taking away your social media and match three games might help solve your rut. Is that worth one day in seven? Probably not, but one in forty-nine?

II. Sabbath Dinner

I kept and went into a lot of detail on the Sabbath dinner. The dinner speaks to me and my needs a lot. It might not speak to yours, but I’m a big fan, and want to say more about that. Here are some non-obvious benefits, in addition to the ones I already mentioned – a place and time that enables social gatherings and visits and/or family/relationship time, a strong demarcation and strongly positive experience for the transition to your day of rest, and providing urgency and incentive to take care of business around the house and make it a place worth living in.

Sabbath dinner gives incentive and opportunity to learn to cook. Cooking skill is an investment that pays off. The few things I know how to cook well provide great benefit to me, even though my wife Laura is a much better cook. If you can’t cook, you’ll be forced to do commerce constantly to eat reasonably. Having to go into that mode in order to get your daily sustenance is actually pretty bad. It’s great to know that if need be, you can take care of things yourself, if you’re short on cash or in an unfamiliar place without good options. There’s also something very satisfying about both cooking and knowing how to cook. With time, you learn to make things exactly the way you like, and things are pretty great. They’re even better than that for those around you. Highly recommended. Basic life skills and self-sufficiency are a thing, they are key to Slack. Muddling through without them is a trap.

This then contrasts with the lack of cooking during Sabbath. I suspect that it should go a step further and you should perhaps fast on the Sabbath, with the feast at the start setting you up well for either. Fasting takes away the distraction of thinking about food, and fasting is a key Slack skill – if you need to eat all the time, that can lead to some bad trade-offs. If I don’t have good options I know I can always fast, because I have the practice. Even if cooking is allowed, consumption shouldn’t be a focus...

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This is Slack and the Sabbath, Part 5: Bring Back the Sabbath, published by Zvi.

Epistemic Status: Several months of experimentation

Previously: Choices are Bad, Choices Are Really Bad, Complexity Is Bad, Play in Easy Mode, Play in Hard Mode, Out to Get You, Slack

For More Thoughts After: Sabbath Commentary

Alternate Take (Endorsed): Sabbath Hard and Go Home.

Slack is life. It is under attack. We must fight for it.

Choices Are Bad. Really Bad. We need a break.

Complexity Is Bad. We need a break.

Work is exhausting. We need a break.

Relaxation is hard. Our attempts fail or backfire.

The modern world is Out to Get You. We need a break.

We need time for ourselves. Time that is truly our own.

Without setting aside such time, that won’t happen. Even when you take time, you’ll be continuously choosing to take time, and. well, whoops.

Modern life made the problem worse, but the problem is ancient. The ancients had an answer.

We need rules. We need ritual.

We need the Sabbath.

Cabin in the Woods

The parallels of my and Ben Hoffman’s Sabbath realizations are striking.

A few months ago, like Ben, I needed a break. My job puts me under constant pressure. My weekends weren’t refreshing me. Like Ben, I experimented with camping. Like Ben, I had no spare battery, and left my phone off. I read The Great Transformation. I had meant to do that for weeks. I loved the world leaving me alone. Like Ben, I could relax, slow down, think.

I wasn’t worried about things I could be doing – I couldn’t do them.

Could I get this without the trip? Friends had started hosting Friday night dinners. What about the whole thing? What if we brought back the Sabbath?

Tradition makes rules easier to justify and explain, to others and yourself. These rules were time tested. I could take them and make them my own.

I thought about the components. Which made sense? What rules would let me cut the enemy, and relax?

Return of the Ritual

Rituals need clear beginnings and endings.

Sabbath begins with candles. One lights two candles, and recites a blessing.

For the evening meal, one says additional words and blessings, drinks wine, eats bread from one of two whole loafs and sits down to a proper meal with friends and family.

The candles are a signpost and deadline. Your week is complete and your work is done. There will be guests, so the apartment is ready. The ritual objects, and your needs for tomorrow, are secured. The meal is prepared. Time to feast and relax!

Slack is thus preserved in five ways.

This creates a time and place to see friends and family. Most want more social events, but coordination is hard and events are work. Now there’s always Friday night.

They increase the value of improving your home. Every week you notice the little things that enrich meal, visit and home. They’re Worth It, but easy to forget. Enhancing the little things enhances your life.

They prevent accumulation of personal-and-home-related work debt. A chaotic house is not restful. Postponed chores weigh on you. The deadline forces handling them in advance. Payoff is immediate.

By moving work before the deadline you are forced to make time during the week. You don’t eat into Slack. If you can’t find the time, this alerts you. Emergency!

They create visible failure as you approach hard bounds. When emergency arises, you sacrifice from the ritual. This signals emergency before life falls apart. You still have reserves. The ritual is Slack.

Sabbath ends with another candle. This prevents doing work until you go through non-trivial motions. You must do it on purpose.

Four Freedoms

We need restrictions that free us from the world. We need a new four freedoms.

We need freedom from work. Decide what counts as work to you. Don’t do that. Anything done for money is automatically work. During the week, time is money. Today, do what you value.

We need...