I think I was including some of the material circumstances stuff (which? it’s vague) in my financial situation analysis but was focused on the size of the debt (and not it’s real impact), so I thought the financial situation was still really bad.
Breaking stuff out separately into a material circumstances category seems like a way of trying to avoid some obviously absurd results from how I was thinking about financial situation (like the fact that my “financial situation” as I defined it was worse than someone living on less than a dollar a day). Cuz it let me say “Oh well yeah but that’s just for financial situation; I take account of that other stuff in material circumstances.”
I think it would have been better to have a definition of financial situation that didn’t lead to absurd results, and then break out consideration of the debt on the balance sheet into particular measures where it’s relevant. Like, it affects ability to get a mortgage, so I could have had a narrower “Mortgage Viability” concept that took the debt into account. But rather than do that, I made the financial situation concept, which should be more general and all-encompassing, into a more specialized and narrow idea, and made up a new category, material circumstances, to take into account the stuff that financial situation should have been taking into account.
This is a hedge, which in general is supposed to make people sound less sure about things, but it is written in a way that implies you actually have a better idea about what you are doing than you really do.
You are making it sound like you think that maybe you had a coherent idea or a serious methodology, you just aren’t sure if you did.
But, really, if you had a coherent idea or a serious methodology, you would be able to actually explain it.
I read it as a hedge, similar to your other hedge that I just pointed out in my last message.
The reason I didn’t read it literally is because I think that would lead to an absurdity. It made sense to me for you to be defining your financial situation as “very poor” (which I would think means something like 20th percentile) if you were very narrowly defining your financial situation as just your net worth on a balance sheet. By that measure alone, you might well be in the bottom 20%.
I still think that is what you were doing, at least in part. I think that sometimes you defined “financial situation” as just net worth, which allowed you to put yourself in the bottom 20%. But, at other times, while talking or thinking about it, you might vaguely include some other things (that you never actually named, and that you didn’t have a coherent or consistent idea of). This is a common way to deal with issues, and it allows people to use motte-and-bailey type arguments, where they keep changing what they are arguing about, without ever being clear about it.
I think if you take into account a more full financial picture, including things like your income, expenses, assets, and future earning potential, then it no longer makes sense to put yourself in the bottom 20%. So claiming that you were including other financial information in your idea of “financial situation” and you still thought you were in the bottom 20% is claiming you are making a different type of mistake than the one I think you were making.
(Like, I think you were making a more meta mistake of making up a biased idea of what “financial situation” is in a way that puts you near the bottom. But if really you were including a bunch of other financial information and still putting yourself near the bottom, then you were also making other mistakes involving misunderstanding financial information and rankings.)
I was specifically talking about the measurement of your net worth on a balance sheet, which is what I thought you were using as a measure of “financial situation”.
So that actually wouldn’t give the bank any information about how much debt and assets someone have: it would only give a single number.
Also, I meant is there any case where it is useful in a fairly stand-alone way, without a bunch of other information. Like, credit score, alone, is actually a useful concept, despite just being a single number. But I don’t think that net worth, alone, is useful in the same way.
Part of what I was getting at was that I don’t think net worth is a very useful measure on its own, and it definitely does not paint a useful picture of someone’s financial situation, alone. There are plenty of examples I can think of where people could have the same net worth, but be in vastly different situations, so that they would be treated differently by banks for getting loans, credit cards, mortgages, etc. And I can also think of examples where people with lower net worth would be more able to get loans, etc, than people with higher net worths. (For example, you have a negative net worth, but can still get credit cards. Many people with positive net worths cannot get credit cards, e.g. a homeless person with no debt, but $20 in change.)
So what I meant for you to do was to think about those kinds situations more. Like, I think that your way of measuring financial situation was wrong, and it would be beneficial to actually think it through more, see what you are doing, and see if it actually made sense.
Right. E.g. a teenager working at McDonald’s for minimum wage and a lawyer on the partner track at a law firm who just finished paying off his student loans might both have a networth of 0 but you don’t get much useful information from that about their overall financial situation…
people who have the same amount of student debt but one’s got an elite MBA and the other majored in theater.
or two people who have 100k net worth but one is a spendthrift who recently went through bankruptcy and just got a modest inheritance, and the other is a steady saver who lives well below their means and always pays their bills on time.
Yeah, there are plenty of really common examples that should be easy to think of.
Another example is a 25 year old with a promising career vs a 65 year old retiree with no pension, both with a 50k net worth.
You should be able to think of a lot of them. When you compare two people like that, you can see that their “financial situation” includes a lot more than just their current net worth.
You seem to be changing your mind here, but it’s not clear what you thought before and what you changed your mind to.
This seems like it has been part of a long term issue for you, so it could be worth doing some more thorough analysis, trying to see your own bias, and seeing what other similar biases you have in your thinking.
E.g., anonymous22 pointed out this from your original post:
I don’t think this particular point is necessarily very important, but it seems like it may be part of a pattern. It may be just one of many negative biases that you have been using to hold yourself back. If that is the case, examining it and looking for similar issues could be helpful.
I think I was viewing my career situation in an overly negative way. I’ve been trying to do less of that. I was applying for a job the other day, and after I carefully read the job description, I realized that lots of the actual job responsibilities were things that connected to what I have been doing for a while. So I was able to write an honest cover letter that said “hey, I have done X and Y and Z, which is relevant to some stuff in the description for this job.” No idea whether I’ll get the job, but my attitude was a lot more positive than it has been before, so that seemed good.
I want to have big improvements in my life and I assume if I get better at reasoning and problem solving by learning philosophy then I achieve big improvements in my life. Is that right to expect?