Why I never come to visit
Go and read the post Ugh Fields on Less Wrong. To take the author's own tl;dr version: Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an Ugh Field. The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.
The post goes into this idea in some more detail, conjectures about how Ugh Fields form, and suggests some things to do (and not to do) about them. For instance, nagging someone to (for instance) pay the overdue gas bill will probably have the effect of reinforcing their Ugh Field surrounding gas bills, and actually exacerbate the underlying problem; but asking "do you think you have an Ugh Field about gas bills?" might be the first step to dispelling it. Go and read the article, it's quite short.
[If you're unfamiliar with Less Wrong in general, it's a radical atheist millenarian death cult community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. They're big on cognitive biases, Bayesian statistics, decision theory, averting the impending robocalypse, that kind of thing. For a highly entertaining introduction to their thought, I recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a Harry Potter/Less Wrong crossover fanfic.]
Reading this, I realise that I'm suffering from a few Ugh Fields of my own. In particular, I've developed a few nasty Ugh Fields surrounding messy codebases I've had to work with, and these are in danger of fusing into an Ugh Field surrounding programming in general. Needless to say, this is a serious problem in my line of work. But actually, I want to talk about an Ugh Field that I've had for longer - the one surrounding travel. More precisely, the one surrounding organising travel, which has now reached the point that I'll almost reflexively pass up opportunities that come with an obligation to travel rather than even think about fighting with travel-agent websites (and spending hundreds of pounds). I deal with obligations that require travel by handing wormwood_pearl my credit card and retiring to the far side of the room until she's made the problem go away, but (a) that's unfair on her, (b) I'm probably definitely missing out on a lot, because I'm turning down major opportunities rather than even go that far. I didn't go to a lot of potentially useful conferences during my PhD, I didn't go to a lot of cool-sounding juggling conventions, and more recently I've failed to go on several mountaineering trips that I'd probably have loved. And friends outside Scotland have grown used to my not visiting.
So if you ever wondered why I never took you up on your invitation to visit you in $exotic_location, that's why. At least, that's a large part of why: my environmental concerns about excessive travel are real, money genuinely has been rather tight for the last six years, and I do find the actual travel bit fairly stressful, but probably 60% of the reason I haven't left the UK in three years (and have hardly left Scotland in that time) has been to do with my Ugh Field.
Now, what should I do about it?
The post goes into this idea in some more detail, conjectures about how Ugh Fields form, and suggests some things to do (and not to do) about them. For instance, nagging someone to (for instance) pay the overdue gas bill will probably have the effect of reinforcing their Ugh Field surrounding gas bills, and actually exacerbate the underlying problem; but asking "do you think you have an Ugh Field about gas bills?" might be the first step to dispelling it. Go and read the article, it's quite short.
[If you're unfamiliar with Less Wrong in general, it's a radical atheist millenarian death cult community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. They're big on cognitive biases, Bayesian statistics, decision theory, averting the impending robocalypse, that kind of thing. For a highly entertaining introduction to their thought, I recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a Harry Potter/Less Wrong crossover fanfic.]
Reading this, I realise that I'm suffering from a few Ugh Fields of my own. In particular, I've developed a few nasty Ugh Fields surrounding messy codebases I've had to work with, and these are in danger of fusing into an Ugh Field surrounding programming in general. Needless to say, this is a serious problem in my line of work. But actually, I want to talk about an Ugh Field that I've had for longer - the one surrounding travel. More precisely, the one surrounding organising travel, which has now reached the point that I'll almost reflexively pass up opportunities that come with an obligation to travel rather than even think about fighting with travel-agent websites (and spending hundreds of pounds). I deal with obligations that require travel by handing wormwood_pearl my credit card and retiring to the far side of the room until she's made the problem go away, but (a) that's unfair on her, (b) I'm probably definitely missing out on a lot, because I'm turning down major opportunities rather than even go that far. I didn't go to a lot of potentially useful conferences during my PhD, I didn't go to a lot of cool-sounding juggling conventions, and more recently I've failed to go on several mountaineering trips that I'd probably have loved. And friends outside Scotland have grown used to my not visiting.
So if you ever wondered why I never took you up on your invitation to visit you in $exotic_location, that's why. At least, that's a large part of why: my environmental concerns about excessive travel are real, money genuinely has been rather tight for the last six years, and I do find the actual travel bit fairly stressful, but probably 60% of the reason I haven't left the UK in three years (and have hardly left Scotland in that time) has been to do with my Ugh Field.
Now, what should I do about it?