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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years!

If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost.

Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising.

Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads...

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From what I have seen, people's perspective on value lies on a very wide spectrum. My mom won't buy a YouTube premium subscription, because she said she likes the ads. It's a kind of discovery platform for her. It's not that I share the same perspective, but I respect her about that.

I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.).

For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it.

These things are very subtle and are sometimes about ethos, and not about value at all. For instance:

* You propose I buy your ¤4 overhyped toothbrush. If I spend 10 minutes digging around, I could find a sub-¤1 toothbrush. Effectively I'm doing 10 minutes of work at less than minimum wage in order to avoid owning the premium toothbrush. Do I do this? I might! The reason is that I want no part in your hype.

* You offer me a loyalty scheme that will genuinely save me money if I participate. I only have to pay attention to your offers and routinely identify myself and I might get 10% savings, all the time. I decline this because you don't get to use my brain cycles for your profit, even if I profit too.

* You offer me a free thing that happens to track me and funnels data to data brokers. I decline it even though it does me no actual harm at all, because I don't want you to make money from personal facts about me, even when the facts are robotically aggregated and anonymised. Ethics are at stake: ethically speaking, you can just piss off. That is worth more than a free gadget, and it's not even an equation.

>If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point?

the problem here really, from both sides of the argument, is the assumption that humans are rational economic actors.

One side assumes that it is not worth 20 dollars to update the site quickly thus she does not do it, but really for that to be true (given costs of psychologists sessions etc.) then it would not even be worth updating the site, or paying for the site hosting or the domain at all.

The other side assumes that given that she is updating the site it must be worth paying 20 dollars to do so quickly and asks why she does not, given that it is worth updating the site.

If humans are rational economic actors she should be updating her professional site because it has some professional benefit to her that she is aware of, but this creates the two problems stated above.

This problem, and the examples you give, are resolved by understanding that humans are not really rational economic actors and the reason that she is updating the site and not paying the extra 20 dollars at the same time cannot be resolved to a non-contradictory answer.

We are at best, partially rational economic actors. Rational-like.

There's a quote I love:

> The idea was nice, but it involved humans.

I've responded to your other comment too, but regarding anyone's assumption that it's worth paying $20 to have it done quickly, but there was no urgency as it's been a thing she's been wanting to do for years.

She probably put it off because the need to actually contact other people to kick off the process was way more of an impediment than anything, whereas on a Sunday afternoon when I was visiting, we kicked off the process on a whim.

She was able to "work with" ChatGPT during after-hours and in <15-minute sessions, between her doing other things, so it's not like she was likely to have used the time productively anyway.

We aren't even rational like, we are after the fact rationalizers.

Behavior is largely sentiment driven or random and then we invent a story after the fact to frame the behavior as "rational".

"Rationality" is when these two processes happen to line up and that happens very rarely.

We do have the right language in "economic actor" because economics itself is a type of performance. Economics is closer to theater than to chemistry. The non-performative version of economics is a hedge fund.

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