Different kinds of handcuffs
Different Kinds of Proverbial Handcuffs
Section titled “Different Kinds of Proverbial Handcuffs”
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I consider golden handcuff to be an s-tier metaphor. It’s straightforward, visual, simple, well known, and important.
The definition of golden handcuffs I’m interested in is that of trapping individuals into expectations of future income, making it painful to ever change to a lower-paying position. Theoretically, making more money should provide freedom, but in practice, many well-salaried employees take on debts and luxurious lifestyles that force them to keep on certain treadmills.
I’ve read that this is something that some financial institutions actively encourage. They intentionally encourage employees to partake in lifestyles that would be difficult to step down from.
So in the proverbial personal balance sheet, one would be deficient to only mention a high salary as a financial increase. At the end of the year, when a newly employed financial banker tallies up their effective income statement, they should include their salary, but also note the presence of their new handcuffs as well.
Golden handcuffs are a nice metaphor, but I find it frustratingly specific. I think we might as well extend this metaphor to a broader class of things that “incur some advantages, but also restrict one’s available actions”. Included below is a list of items that were particularly interesting to me. If you’re reading this and have ideas of others, I encourage you to leave them in the comments.
I see much of this work as discernment work around lock-in. Put differently, in the EA community I hear a lot of worries about “lock-in”, but haven’t seen many breakdowns or sub terminology.
Status/Prestige handcuffs
A person is respected in one area for a type of work. Any change would hazardise this. For example, a manager of 10 software engineers would feel uncomfortable transitioning into an ultimately better career track, if they would begin at the bottom of a different hierarchy. Similarly, a person might attend a prestigious University, and later only feel comfortable associating with others of similarly prestigious backgrounds.
Silicon handcuffs
A person or group becomes dependent on technology. (Sadly the obvious reference is controversial, so I recommend looking at What Technology Wants for a discussion of this.)
Intellectual handcuffs
A person gains specific interests and finds common topics, or discussions with more junior people, boring or repulsive. This leads them to an increasingly narrow set of possible friends.
Identity handcuffs
A person builds an identity around a particular way of understanding the world. They refuse to pursue work or activities that don’t match their intended identity. For example, someone becomes personally attached to journalism at age 10, and later refuses any other profession, even if much better ones for that person are available.
Domestication handcuffs
A person goes through a school system from an early age that makes them fearful of authority figures and fearful of rebelling or defecting against their peers. They might develop a deep seated dread of failure to complete bureaucratic assignments, for instance, through recurring nightmares of getting tested.
Ownership handcuffs
A person acquires stuff that requires space or maintenance. Perhaps they acquire a lot of furniture or a collection of animals. They develop emotional attachments to their things and would experience pain to leave any of it. As said in Fight Club, “The things you own end up owning you.”
These sorts of handcuffs aren’t specific to people who spend a lot of money. Those who try not to are often ones who are the most hesitant to give things up.
Reciprocity handcuffsIt seems like it should be beneficial to give someone a gift. But in a culture that strongly enforces reciprocity, gifts come with obligations.
In my family, gifts are unilaterally planned. It would be calamitous if one party bought gifts but another didn’t. We used to have expensive Christmases, then we totally stopped, then we started again at a small scale and I’m closely monitoring possible risks of it growing again. Christmas and birthday gifts are our primary version of an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.Intentionally biasing gifts are often called bribes.
Media handcuffsMedia positions come with many sorts of handcuffs, in particular the status handcuffs mentioned above. But one particular one that worries me are the handcuffs of limiting communication. As one grows a diverse audience, they develop an increasingly long list of things they can’t publicly say without incurring some intense backlash. The worst case is an international political figure, who can say (and often think) almost nothing.
Not being able to say things is the first step towards not bothering to think things.
This sort of handcuff is evident in organizations that start out edgy and appeal to a small audience, then grow a larger audience, and then find that the resulting incentive gradient greatly discourages them from being able to be edgy.
Brand quality / reputation handcuffs (ceilings and floors)
Strong brands lead to many sorts of actions becoming costly. Weak brands allow flexibility of decisions, but can lock in quality ceilings that come with many other restrictions.
Brands and public images represent far more complexity than seems ideal. One problem is that most people have intense but limited understandings of brands. So they may regard Apple as “high quality”, instead of internalizing a quality breakdown of all of the distinct subparts of Apple.
Apple is an interesting example. They have a strong brand and a distant reach. But a valuable brand comes with similarly large risks and liabilities. If Apple released a mediocre product, that would likely harm its brand, even if the product would otherwise be beneficial to all involved. So there’s a large class of products that could be negative expected value for them to sell, even if development and production costs were hypothetically free. We can call this a quality floor.
A different example of a perceived quality floor would be in Economics. Journals have a high bar regarding specific expectations of quality, rigor, and content. For whatever reason, there are high expectations for mathematical rigor, but low ones for computer simulations. I’m sure there’s a ton of interesting and useful work that could be done if this bar would be modified.
Quality ceilings are based more on harder constraints. The best collaborators generally want to work with high quality people and under prestigious organizations. Companies with poor brands (meaning they are considered mediocre or morally harmful) have to pay substantial premiums for collaborators, if they can get them at all.
This means that many organizations have both a quality ceiling and a quality floor. There’s typically a strong potential employees they can’t access, and a low quality bar that they don’t want to touch.
Therefore, once a new organization is formed, it needs to think carefully about the quality level it can aim for. If the organization starts producing a lot of mediocre work to get started, it could lock itself into a low tier for the long term. But it could also set too high of a bar and exclude the majority of useful work.
Connoisseur handcuffs
Expertise often comes with emotional attachments, and these attachments have downsides. If you want to make a skilled programmer cry, don’t have them do yard work, instead have them fix bugs in a bloated PHP codebase.
Good chocolate might have ruined bad chocolate for me. Functional programming has ruined a lot of object oriented programming. I’ve prided myself for my aesthetic sense, but this seems to come from an added dread in many spaces, and an unease when I myself feel ugly or unfashionable.
It’s easy to mock the pretentious wine critic or spoiled child, but I think myself and most people I know of have these qualities, just in more socially ordinary ways. The downsides impact others, for sure, but also are considerable for oneself. I know programmers who have turned down large sets of promising jobs because they required them to program in ways that they personally found distasteful.
Planning handcuffs
Well crafted plans represent some of the most malicious traps to fall into. Planning can be brilliant if done well and appropriately managed, but often they are both done poorly and incur substantial emotional sacrifices when cancelled.
Extensive plans typically include several steps that have no payoff unless specific later steps are completed. Engaging in a long plan by definition is about dramatically constraining one’s future choices.
Complexity handcuffsComplexity normally requires maintenance. I’ve found that often this downside is typically underappreciated. Complexity here means a lot of things. It refers to:
- Complex codebases with lengthy and intricate interfaces.
- Extensive delegation to specific individuals based on rules; for example, having 10 people, each great at doing only one kind of task.
- A task management system with 150 particular tags and 10 status flags, and 25 administrators with different privileges.
- User interfaces that allow for 350 different features, on computers and mobile devices, in 10 different browsers, in dark and light color settings, with documentation and API access.
- Taxes and laws.
- Complex corporate and government relationships and dependencies.
- A large set of important ideas haphazardly spread out between five thousand blog posts with poetic names.
- An official or unofficial ontology with extensive but particular definitions. One of the most common mistakes rookie software managers make is to push for more functionality than they should. The outcome is not only code debt, but design, product, and documentation debt, plus a requirement for never ending maintenance and upkeep. Products too intricate tend to collapse under their own weight.
A person, organization, or society that demands great complexity must set aside many of its resources to basic maintenance, and this could be dramatically limiting.
Venture capital handcuffs If you own a business, the moment you accept almost all types of investment, you begin a specific path of revenue optimization that’s difficult to get out of. If you accept Venture Capital investment and later decide to change your mind, you’ll have a lot of paperwork, many disappointed colleagues, and likely a substantial reputational hit to get through, in the least. This handcuff is well known, but I don’t think known enough.
Management handcuffsBeing a manager seems like it should be a very flexible position, but in practice, management can be a very constrained position. Having individuals one is in some control over for comes with a great deal of responsibility. Employees and volunteers need to be onboarded, trained, mentored, guided, and occasionally delicately removed. In my own experience, employees and consultants have taken a surprising continuous overhead. When I’m working with others, even just in a management position, it’s much more difficult to take serious time off to focus on specific things. This issue doesn’t just exist for management, it’s there for all colleagues that need to help out, as often responsibility is distributed. The Mythical Man-Month goes into detail on how adding new people to a software project often slows it down.
When one creates an organization and gains employees, it can be incredibly difficult for that person to leave. In most situations they either must find someone else competent at running the organization (which is either very difficult in large organizations, or often near impossible in small ones), or they have to disband the organization.
Association handcuffs
A person develops a negative association with something, making it much more difficult for them to engage with that thing in the future. For example, a society associates backpacks with children, and adults proceed to use much less convenient briefcases.
Publishing handcuffsThere are some restricting norms around public writing. I’m noticing them when writing this piece. Most readers seem to read and comment on pieces shortly after they get published. If considerable changes are made later, no one will be notified. At the same time, it feels very odd to publish different versions of the same post multiple times. So, once the first version is published, the author is limited from giving it another attempt.
This is particularly bad for new terminology. Once a term becomes widely known, it can be near impossible to modify.
One other hazard is that one person writing on a topic can close it off for future writers. One of the best ways to encourage someone to spend a lot of time on a topic is to allow them some easy wins to build a reputation on. An Academic with a small breakthrough early in their career might spend much of the rest of their career building on it, for a combination of reasons I assume to include buy-in and vanity.
This means that publishing original work can make continuations of such work harder, not easier. The corresponding ideal is to publish later and less frequently than otherwise.
Anti-handcuff Handcuffs(fear of commitment)
An intense aversion to acquiring restrictions is itself a restriction. A In doing so, they ironically close themselves off of many good opportunities. For example, dying is a substantial handcuff, but if one has too much fear of dying, they won’t do much when living. One thing I see a lot is young people who don’t want to be boxed into any particular career, but instead develop very few skills or resources. Fear of commitment is a big thing in professional and personal matters.
User handcuffs
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Further discussion
The broad class of “ways humans become restricted” is enormous. Addictions, phobias, commitments, obligations, mental and physical problems, and contracts, all involve restrictions. I think the word “handcuff” makes most sense to get at a particular aspect of something, and makes less sense in cases where the restriction is the dominant factor. “Paralysis handcuffs” doesn’t make much sense to me, I’d just say, “paralysis.”
Abstract handcuffs represent a vast topic that I’m not at all going to do justice to with this post. Each of the handcuffs I’ve mentioned have deep intellectual rabbit holes outlining the space and suggesting solutions to. For example, many kinds of minimalism (owning little, doing little, keeping one’s identity small) act against having these sorts of handcuffs. I think one aspect that gets overlooked are the unified connections between these similar clusters, and I hope this post is interesting in that light.
“Attachments” are discussed heavily in spirituality, particularly around Buddhism and Stoicism. Several of the handcuffs I mention would fit this bill.
Commonalities
Loss aversion is a well studied topic in Economics. People generally prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. This becomes a problem whenever one obtains something they will eventually lose. If you gain 10 units of happiness when upgrading your home, but lose 50 units when downgrading it, then the overall value proposition in an uncertain world is fairly grim.
Some examples:
- Companies are often criticized much more heavily for firing employees than for not hiring them.
- Onboarding a new member of a team can be a motivational win, but having a member leave is often more demotivating. (In my experience)
- Having children can bring happiness, but having your children die seems to often bring disproportionate sadness.
Maintenance
Friends and lovers