I’ve long held that civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary. The incomprehensible can be scary but the arbitrary tends to be merely exhausting. Unless the stakes are high, such as in paperwork around taxes or passports and visas. Then the exhaustion becomes tinged with anxiety. Either way the steady increase in arbitrariness creates, in the name of progress, a growing ocean of mind-numbing details you just have to know. Or figure out the hard way by reading instructions. Or by brute force trial-and-error. For example:
- Which way does the USB cable go in?
- Where is the hood button on this rental car?
- Which way do you insert the card into the machine?
- How do you get to the city from the airport in this city?
- You need to get over to the second lane from the left on this exit
- The option you need is in that sub-menu
- This is how you check-in in this particular airport
- This is how you replace this filter in this weird device
- This is how you repack an appliance you want to return
- This is how you use codes and apps to get a package
- Everything to do with health insurance
- All technical shopping
Not surprisingly a lot of such knowledge is symmetry-breaking knowledge or raw information about names or numbers. As tech gets more complex, things seem to get more intuitive locally, but overall the arbitrariness keeps going up. The number of YouTube videos explaining arbitrary shit keeps going up.
Automation often pretends to solve arbitrariness but usually just moves it around. Uber makes getting a ride in a new city supposedly easier, but then you have to learn local stupid games the drivers play, weird edge cases, and so on. GPS makes some aspects of driving much easier but when everyone has GPS you get new kinds of arbitrary.
I think arbitrariness costs are an undertheorized variety of transaction costs. I find them particularly exhausting to deal with. Often I’ll forgo a potentially fun new experience because the arbitrariness burden is too high. Arbitrariness neutralizes intelligence and strategic intuitions. It slows you down to the speed of entropy. It creates barriers around value.
There are only two real solutions to arbitrariness burdens: Paying for premium experiences that lower it, or paying flunkeys to deal with them for you (not always possible). Either way, the fact that costly solutions exist shows that the transaction costs of arbitrariness is real. I’m usually willing to pay to not deal with it if I can afford to. For example, I’m always happy to pay for valet parking. Or “expedited” processes. Or luxuries I don’t otherwise care for just to get lowered arbitrariness benefits. Or a human interface.
There’s something not quite right about this tendency of civilization towards exhausting arbitrariness. Maybe AI will fix it by learning all the arbitrariness rather than moving it around. I’m not optimistic. I suspect the so-called meaning crisis is in fact an arbitrariness burden crisis. Things that might otherwise feel meaningful aren’t anymore once wrapped in sufficient arbitrariness.