Let’s say you find yourself in the following situation: a friend from an improvement focused community tells you about some “cool new technique” that will totally improve your life. Maybe it’s Non Violent Communication, something about getting things done, a new meditation, a cool diet or numerous other biohacks. When this happens I tend to both be interested and somewhat skeptical at the same time. How would one evaluate that a particular biohack / life hack is actually useful or noise? Or, if the technique was so good, why doesn’t everyone use it yet?
Enter the Efficient Technique Hypothesis. The Efficient Technique Hypothesis (which can be named Efficient LifeHack Hypothesis or Efficient BioHack Hypothesis) is similar to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which states “asset prices fully reflect all available information.” In practice EMH generally points to the idea that you can’t “beat the market” as a small investor who doesn’t have access to privileged information and you are best off simply investing into a broad index fund.
Efficient Technique Hypothesis is the statement: "All good enough techniques have already propagated through the population." Is this true? If it is false, why is it violated?
We can imagine a break down of both good and bad techniques that exist in the population.
a) Techniques which are bad, but still might sometimes work just the same way that picking some individual stocks *might* sometimes work, but is not in general a risky and potentially bad strategy
b) Techniques which are good, and have reached fixation in the general population. If something is that common normally this has exited the category of “techniques” and entered the category of “normal.” Wearing clothes is a good example. An interesting category of techniques is people rejecting those.
c) Techniques which are in rapid process of fixation, where their utility has been enabled or forced by a recent invention. Smart phones is a good example.
d) Techniques which are only good for a certain audience and not the general population.
e) Techniques which are good for everyone, but have difficulty spreading due to
The corollary of Efficient Technique Hypothesis is as follows: unless the technique is clearly in the process of fixation or has a well defined audience, it's just bad. In fact, why do we need techniques at all if evolution has already finely tuned us for survival?
This is an interesting question.
It is possible that you might encounter lifehacks that are going to go to fixation at some point, you are just one of the early adopters. This can happen if you meet people who have an unusual ability to create new ideas, such as cutting edge startup founders, scientists and nonprofit researchers.
However, even in that case you might ask, why have the technique not been discovered earlier? I suspect that a way to reconcile "efficient" memetic technique evolution along with regular evolution is generally to note that new techniques that quickly reach fixation are enabled or forced by new technological breakthroughs. Invention of smart phones creates both the new normal of "having a smart phone" as well as a reaction of techniques such as "not having your phone on all the time," or "turning off your phone at night." One is an action of technology, one is a reaction to it. In this world view, personal "hacks" are downstream from technological waves. This generally covers the set of (b) and (c) techniques that are either in the process or have already reached fixation.
Efficient Technique Hypothesis would basically state that nothing aside from those exists. Either it's a byproduct of new technology or social technology or it probably doesn't work. I think that statement is too strong, however it's worth diving deep into why.
It seems that (d) category (Techniques which are only good for a certain audience and not the general population) is larger than you might expect because lots of techniques have prerequisites that are not necessarily easy to fulfill. It might be that drawing causal diagrams about your life is most useful if you have spent some time with diagramming software and these kinds of visualizations come easy to you. The question you might ask to figure out if the advice is in this category: “does this technique build upon skills or problems that you have and people in general don’t’?”
Being only good for a certain audience is frequently the case with expensive things as well. For example, even if fancy orthodontics are useful, they might not be affordable for everyone. In this case, it is frequently the issue that life hacks are competing for limited amount of a certain resource, whether it is money, time or attention.
An interesting example of a technique that sometimes comes in and out of fixation is meditation. For a Taoist or a Buddhist, meditation is basically a nonnegotiable technique, a sub-goal for many other goals, whether it is freeing the mind or living a longer life. A modern atheist scientific worldview generally takes the stand of "some benefits," but not so obvious as to be a hard recommendation to everyone. The obvious issue here is a larger investment of time and the "feeling" or excuse of the modern man of being "busy" or, as I like to call it, "time-poor." This "time poverty" prevents health investment into things like meditation.
My theory is that part of the hard push on meditation within those religions is an implied statement that the thing that we would sacrifice to do meditation are likely zero sum social games that lack an underlying purpose, so it can act as a "let's all chill out for 20 minutes" coordination mechanism. So it's way easier and more helpful in a group setting. In addition, in modern times, some people suffer from some mental health or even physical health difficulties that prevent meditation from being helpful.
Another interesting technique is a specific exercise. At this point, we all know that due to a sedentary life we should all exercise, however there is a lot of debate about which exercises are good. I suspect a lot of individual exercises are themselves best for different people, generally based on which parts of one's body have begun to degrade due to a modern lifestyle.
I also think of special note is also the (e) category (Techniques which have difficulty spreading), which is larger than you might expect because lots techniques present the wrong signal to others. One examples are the following: Social interaction doesn’t happen naturally anymore, so some thing it's worth reading these books on influence. However, books on influence or dating evoke a certain "yuck" feeling in others, so people tend to not brag about them as much as, say, going to the gym.
Those ideas might be extremely potent, however expressing them sends the wrong signal, for example the signal “the technique user doesn’t have willpower” or “they need to read books to improve social interaction.” Certain diets, such as “being gluten free” might be great for your health, but also elicit negative social responses. In other words, the virality of a powerful technique can be dampened by sending the wrong signal. To figure out whether something is in this category it’s worth asking: “does talking about this make the person look worse to certain peers?” if the answer is yes, it is evidence the technique is effective, since they are taking a social cost to evangelize it. An interesting example is wearing the same clothes every day. It's not considered very "cool," but for people who don't care, it reduces the amount of decisions made throughout the day.
To wrap up, my overall thoughts about Efficient Technique Hypothesis: generally, it’s worth keeping in mind whether a particular person or group advocating for a new way of doing something is actually more successful in achieving their goals or not. However, I cannot advocate for fully general stance against new lifehacks.
Bear with me for a moment, I am going meta. One of the self defeating ideas of Efficient Technique Hypothesis is that "a fully general stance against all lifehacks” is itself a technique. This is something which I have not seen propagated, or even mentioned outside a couple blogs. So, if I accept it as true and useful, then the statement of “a fully general stance against all lifehacks” *itself* violates the Efficient Technique Hypothesis. Some ideas of the form “a fully general stance against X” have reached near fixation. Example X is pyramid schemes. We come to an interesting contradiction, which is yet another point against Efficient Technique Hypothesis.
This then makes me more certain that the combined category of “techniques with prerequisites” and “techniques which are bad signal” are large enough to seriously consider if any advice you read / hear from successful people might work for you.
Hopefully this post can act as a bit of a meta guide to techniques / advice. The underlying question is always does this technique seem to work for this person? However, there are other questions: Is this person similar to you? Is the technique spreading rapidly? Is it enabled by a recent technological innovation? Answering yes to these is a sign it's a good technique. Somewhat counterintuitively, if a nonsocial technique has a social cost or feels like an anti-signal, then it's also a good sign.
There are also bad ideas. It's never your successful friends who post inspirational quotes, for example. However it's also worth keeping in mind that we are a finely tuned machine by evolution and acting more in accordance to nature can be a powerful guiding "meta-technique" of it's own.