234. Tidiness

In the new year, many will try to develop habits of keeping their homes & workspaces tidy, but maybe their longing for uncluttered space is driven more by a set of cultural biases than any sort of practical advantage.

-Links for the Curious-

There’s magic in mess: why you should embrace a disorderly desk | Financial Times -

[meta]

As a lifelong piler, I really needed to hear this. Thank you Josh!

[platosbeard]

To go off on a slight tangent, tidying up is a useful tool to calm unhelpful mental chatter, but we get just about the same effect watching someone else do it. Ethan Kross talks a little bit about this in _Chatter._

[JakeH.artman]

This is a great video and something I've thought quite a bit about. I think at certain parts you've equated untidiness with a specific kind of organization that works for the individual alone which isn't the kind of untidiness that your opponents would believe in. There is, of course, the kind of untidiness that doesn't work for anyone because things are disorganized, broken, and lost as a result of the lack of organization system. Your modified-untidiness probably arose from the study that you cited: about people's organization systems at their place of work. Of course someone who can get a job is going to have a system that works better than someone who can't get a job because of their disorganized things, life, etc. And surely it seems reasonable to think that people have an incentive to be somewhat organized in their jobs because if they weren't adequately organized, they would have already been fired. It seems clear to me that there was a strong self-selection bias there, which selected for the exact kind of thing that your opponents are talking about. A disorganized person won't keep an office job long enough to be a part of the study, and a really disorganized person won't get to that position in the first place.
Additionally, I think it only makes sense to consider whether there are virtues of tidiness in the individual context. The fact that it is better to be tidy when working with others does not give us reason to believe that it's therefore not better to be tidy when working alone (which is kind of how I saw the argument going, unfortunately). The argument goes: If you aren't organized in your own space, it becomes harder to do the various things you want to do. If virtue happens through conscious effort, then those who can do the things that they want to do are more virtuous. Papers end up in front of your guitar so you don't practice. Your kitchen becomes more difficult to use so it takes you twice as long to cook every meal. Your phone gets buried in a pile of junk you're planning to use for your big research project. So after years of living like this, instead of being a well-practiced guitar player who's finished their big research project and has kept up a lot of close connections, you're disconnected from your loved ones, no better at your hobbies, and far from finishing your projects because you spend hours in the kitchen every day. It seems obvious to me why the former person would be a more virtuous one than the latter. You can fill out the details of my example as you see fit, so long as the untidy person isn't simply just a differently-organized person, they're legitimately disorganized.

[bthomson]

My grandfather went to Princeton at 16. After about a month of living with his older roommate the room was a mess! Gramps was loath to confront the older student so he decided to clean his stuff first and then talk to his roomy. When he got done cleaning his stuff - the room was spotless! Ooops!

[poketopa]

Great great video. So true that the metaphors we use come with side effects that we never really take the time to unpack

[skybluskyblueify]

Similar associations are tied up in infectious disease and even non-infectious disease where people feel embarrassed for being sick or think of a sick person as immoral somehow. This cropped up during the pandemic.

[Xob_Driesestig]

I'm always amazed at how little communication there is between the sciences, and how the same concepts get rediscovered over and over again.
You talk about how cognitive linguistict suggest a conceptual bait and switch is why we depict good characters with stainless white clothes and a clean face. A behavioral economists would call this the "halo effect", a philosopher would call this "wisdom of repugnance", a sociologists would call this "lookism".
We really should start to standardize our jargon across disciplines.

[JasonOlshefsky]

A few years ago I came up with a "system" so-to-speak for managing the various periodic things I get in the mail that "might be important". In the past, they piled up, and when I did finally tidy, I'd find stuff going back more than 5 years. I made 12 hanging folders, one for each month, and any of those "maybe" things get put in that month's folder. When I arrive at the new month, I dump whatever is in the folder for that month. It appeases my need to store those "maybe" things, but also keep things relatively organized.

After the video, I think it's a more extensible solution that somewhat formalizes the piles-of-stuff idea (where seldom-used things end up at the bottom.) By reviewing the year-old items and putting them in a more permanent place, ever-adding to the most-recent, it seems possible to maintain. I may give this a try, you know, for the New Year...

[landspide]

No paper, everything in confluence, messy desk during the week, cleaned as last task on Friday for the weekend :) Rinse repeat, best of both worlds. Great ending! :D

[mkyle]

Maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle. Long term filing for things that need to be kept, and a dedicated messy desk for immediate documents. Like a hard drive vs RAM !

[joeyjoejoeshabadoo]

Lol so I kind of float somewhere in the middle. I have quick refences for standards and design principal etc on my desk which I use regularly. If I don't use them, they get filtered to the bottom and eventually removed.

But I archive everything related to a project to my hard drives for reference, evidence, or examples. It's saved my butt a few time haha

[ylhajee]

Awesome video! I have thought about my own tendencies to pile and file in the digital space. I use Trello as a tool to structure and file away to-do lists and useful bits of information, but I definitely recognize what you mentioned about filers holding on to unnecessary information, and to have it fade into the background rarely to be looked at again. So nowadays I use it mainly for the longer term, while short term to-dos go into my Google Calendar. If I don't get to it, I have to drag it to a future date, and am constantly reminded of it just like the piles of paper on your desk. But the calendar is poorly suited to long term or low priority tasks because they clutter up my calendar without getting done. So those tasks that are too long term for the calendar, but that I don't want to be buried in Trello, I write down on a physical piece of paper and put on my desk.

[Concentrum]

i have become a cleanly person just from living on my own. i personally don't think there's any benefit to a messy workspace, but if a person is so driven that they are in quasi constant pursuit of a goal, i also believe that the "RAM", as somebody else aptly put, should stay loaded until the task is done. the trick, i would argue, is to not miss the point where cleaning the RAM won't negatively affect the agent, but will help them make space for new tasks. this method can of course become problematic when one pursue a lot of goals simultaneously, but here again i would recommend one to pursue one thing at a time, as much as reality will allow it, at least.

[ToriKo_]

I don’t know if I am as taken with Robert Sapolsky’s work as I once was, but maybe I’ll leave an idea here from his book and let you make all the epistemic, ontological, and truth claims for yourself (because, oh boy, I find that stuff difficult). I also read the book like six years ago so take this with a grain of salt

In his book Behave, Sapolsky mentions how evolution had co-opted the insula, which was used for gustatory disgust etc, and gave it the additional role of realizing moral disgust, etc. He sites some studies, like one where subjects, who are placed in a room with the smell of bin juices, scored measurably higher for conservative ideals, than when they were placed in a neutral smelling room. Demonstrating the mix up between moral and hygienic ideals. And I think there may have been more studies talked about, and more neuroscience, evolutionary science, brain physiology etc. And so he makes a case that the moral disgust/physical disgust thing may not really be ground in some deep philosophical/ethical link, as you try to explicate in the kitchen example. But moreso grounded in the circumstantial stuff that led to the insula being the most accessible thing evolution had at hand to develop our strong moral framework. And maybe there’s arguments to be made that we developed moral-related brain regions because being a certain type of social animal (at large) became evolutionarily advantageous.

And I guess I’m saying all of this because it seems relevant to they way you found links between our ethics/‘ways of talking about someone’s character’ and between tidiness (and it’s counterpart) messiness. And you may have actually talked about this before in a thunk episode by I’m not 100%

Also the word tidiness looks weird I thought it was spelt with a y

[DylanUPSB]

You spelled Tidiness differently in the title and thumbnail, not very tidy of you!

[minhducphamnguyen]

My takeaway from this video:
1. The association between tidiness and virtue is more of a result of how we associate abstract concept like morality with words relating to cleanliness and less about any objective morality standard.
2. Tidiness seems to be less effective when it comes to administrative or paper-related works since people who organized their paper works into files (filer) are less inclined to look back at their documents compare to people who looks like they clutter their desk with papers (piler).
3.Tidiness, however, is essential in more technical-oriented profession where they have to works in group where everyone needs space to work effectively and they are working with devices, tools that are either fragile or have the potential to cause harm if misplaced.

[thomasa.anderson]

One problem with this dichotomy is that most people are creatures of habit; so if they are untidy in their personal space, they'll probably be untidy in a shared space.
As for why we moralize tidiness, here's another possible explanation:
Being untidy in a shared space benefits you at the expense of those around you. So when you combine the fact that we're a social species with my previous statement, then being untidy may come off as being selfish. And that is something we very much see as a moral failing.