Cold vs Hot
Nick, Fraser, Chris and Peter discuss whether Cold is worse than Hot.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing whether cold is worse than hot. So obviously this is a debate that's raging through the nation at the moment. Nick, can you lead us in and tell us why we're talking about this? It was just
Speaker B:something that occurred to me when I was in Iceland recently, last week. You know, it deserves, it lives up to its name certainly at this time of the year. It was pretty cold and I just, they had, I went to this, I went to this place called the Blue Lagoon which is basically a sort of volcanic pool where you can go for a swim and at the head end of me it was like, there was a sort of icy blizzard but the rest of me was nice and warm because it was underwater and it just, you know, getting out was horrible. Getting out into the cold wind was really horrible and I just, you know, I had to think about well what is, why is cold? Cold is definitely not, it's different, quite different to hot. When you're too hot it just, it doesn't feel at all the same as when you're too cold. There's something really intrusive about the sensation of being cold. You cannot avoid it, you know, if you're too cold it just takes over your entire sort of reasoning and all you think is I just want to get warm. You can't think about anything whereas I sort of had this idea that being too hot never seems quite as bad as being too cold. That's it really, I mean, does the, is cold worse than hot and does the question even make sense? Okay, well I can
Speaker A:answer that question for you. So is cold worse than hot? No is the answer and I think the problem here is you've not been in cold enough places or hot enough places or most specifically you haven't been in hot enough places. What's the hottest place you've been? I remember once being
Speaker B:in, I mean this doesn't sound very impressive, but Seville when I think the temperature outside
Speaker C:was something like 50 degrees. It was bonkers. No, not hot enough. I think I disagree with you Fraser.
Speaker A:I think, well let me state my case and then you come back. So I have, actually I've got personal experience of living in a very cold country and living in a very hot country. So I've lived in Poland where come the winter it was pretty cold. We're talking like minus sort of 25, 30, something like that. And I've also lived in Brazil and Qatar and I can't remember the temperatures there exactly except it was bloody hot. And one of the things you've mentioned about cold being inescapable, that's exactly how I felt about the heat. And especially in somewhere in, I mean there is a difference between the heat in Qatar and the heat in Brazil. And in Qatar, well in Brazil it's just walking around in soup, okay? And I just sort of lose the will to live or really to think either. And in Qatar it's so hot that you can't even sort of, you can't even remember what thinking was like, you know? So you really can't escape it at all. So however, what I will admit is that personally I do have trouble dealing with heat in general, which I should have thought about before moving to these countries, but that's another point. So Peter, tell me, I'm wrong, am I?
Speaker C:Well, you may have a personal preference for cooler climes. Maybe you're a Pictish or Nordic of descent, I don't know. But I think the invasiveness of cold versus the invasiveness of hot that Nick's describing might have something to do with the life-threatening type of, the life-threatening nature of cold. There are more places on earth which are cold you can't survive in than there are hot places you can survive. As a species, I think we can go anywhere, and assuming that we're fed and watered, so you could live in the middle of the Sahara, as people do, and survive. Whereas you'd suffer a more ready kind of exposure if you try to do the same in the Arctic. There's fewer resources there and you would perish pretty quickly. So I think it strikes at the heart of the biology of our species that we are just designed to operate in warmer climes and the colder climes are more threatening to us.
Speaker D:I think what's, rather than the, you know, whether an ambient temperature is better higher or lower, I think it's worth thinking about relative to our ability to either dissipate or generate heat to make up the deficit and keep our body temperature at the desired, you know, 37 degrees Celsius or whatever yours happens to be. And in those circumstances, I think it is generally easier for us when we're sedentary to find ways of dissipating the heat, not through our body's mechanisms, but through seeking shade, cooling ourselves down with water, etc. than it is to do so to generate heat and to make up the deficit. I mean, you know, there are only so many more clothes you can put on and, you know, it just seems easier when you're in an environment to dissipate heat than it does to generate heat.
Speaker A:So in the debate, hot versus cold, it seems that the answer is, is this easier to make yourself more comfortable when it's hot than it is when it's cold? I think so. But also, I mean,
Speaker B:I think within reason, I mean, if it was a thousand degrees, I mean, I'd still, I'd probably rather be a bit chilly than have to go and live on the surface of the sun.
Speaker D:Yeah. But always with this rational stuff. Yeah. In terms of, if you can't actually, so if your body is getting too hot and it's unable to cope with dissipating enough heat and is struggling to deal with that versus it getting too cold and not being able to generate enough heat to keep our body temperature where it is required to function, I don't think there's much difference in it there. So if you are forcibly cooled to a certain extent, and if you are forcibly heated effectively, the energetic cost of losing heat versus the energetic cost of raising heat is not massively dissimilar because when you take into account the cardiovascular effect of having to pump additional blood to the surface to cool yourself off and some of the other mechanisms that we use to cool our body, the energetic cost isn't particularly different. In terms of which is more lethal, again, you know, hypothermia and hyperthermia, there's not a great deal of difference between, you know, which is more likely to kill you. And in fact, actually, because of the heat generated by exercise, often people are more susceptible to dying of hyperthermia in a temperate climate than they are of dying from hypothermia in that climate. So there's not much in it physiologically. I suppose the question sort of remains of which is less pleasant. And I would argue that if I had to die of hypothermia or hyperthermia, I would sooner die of extreme, you know, exposure to extreme cold than extreme heat. I think it is a, you know, when you look at Leonardo DiCaprio at the end of the Titanic, you know, that's a reasonably peaceful death, far more, I might add. Good solid scientific evidence. Yeah, that's right. Far more than he
Speaker C:deserved after subjecting us to that. Being surrounded by all that, all the other hundreds of people suffering and dying and screaming. Yeah, it sounds very peaceful. Yeah. But no,
Speaker A:I agree with Chris. I think hypothermia is a nicer way to die. Don't people take all their clothes off? Yeah. Paradoxical undressing. Yeah. Possibly to speed the process. But also, I think, yeah. Oh, after a while, you just feel a bit sleepy. Yeah. I'll have a nice sleep, I think. Whereas I think with hyperthermia, I think it's just, you know, disease excruciating kind of disorientation
Speaker C:and so on. Peter. Right. To move this on. Yes, let's. A little bit. I think we were talking about this off air. I think it strikes an interesting point about public policy making and the choices that people make on other people's behalf. So there is no fundamental objective measure of someone's happiness or the inverse perhaps being suffering. So you can't work out whether this person who says this room is too cold versus this person who says this room is too hot. Who is suffering most? So which way should you turn your thermostat? And this is crucial because if we had such a way of measuring the absolute happiness of people, then we'd have a means of maximising the absolute happiness of all people and use that as a basis for public policy, for tax expenditure and all sorts of things. So that's a key point is we don't have that thing. It's not possible to measure. So we have to rely on very distant proxies for happiness and logical arguments and ethical and moral arguments for why we make certain decisions. And it often boils down to who's got the most money, who's lobbying hardest, who's shouting the most for certain things. And that's what's driving public policy rather than any kind of absolute objective measure. But in terms of... Grav, Nick, please. Yeah, I mean, just to
Speaker B:go into a bit more detail there, the economic efficiency argument would be this, that you would... So what you would be doing is putting... So you've got five people in a room, you would effectively sell the temperature to them. So they would be bidding on wanting to make the temperature go up and down. And yes, so the person who had the most money would probably end up having the temperature closest to what they wanted. But the efficiency argument is that, well, in a market... So if you have a market for what the temperature should be and some efficient way of clearing that market, the people who end up in a room that's too cold are being compensated at the value that they place on being too cold. So if Peter pays me £20, you've got loads of money, he pays me £20 to put the temperature down by a degree. But to me, that's only worth £10. That's fine, I'm better off. So I'm £10 worse off because the temperature is colder than I'd like, but I'm £20 better off because Peter's had to pay me to get it down there. But the thing is that the problem is that there is still no objective scale. We tend to use money because it is a really good proxy because with money you can get whatever it is you want. So actually, it's not the £20, it is indeed the jumper or whatever it is I'm going to buy with the jumper that I'm being compensated, whatever I'm going to buy with £20 that I'm being compensated for. So that could be anything, we don't have to specify what it is, it's just £20 of whatever the thing is that I want the most. But there is still, we are using effectively relative prices. So we don't know, for example, well maybe I'm really not materialist and I don't value money very much at all. And actually, there may be other things that I would be willing to sacrifice, but I can't because they're not transferable. So the problem is that we even in a market set up, we're still effectively talking about the relative prices. It might be that I really, really love money or whatever it is, I really love the things you can buy with money, much more than someone else. And so £10 to me is going to be worth more than £10 to that other person. And we just have no means, it's not even clear whether talking about that, the idea that there is some objective level of happiness that someone's at, only we can't measure it, whether that even makes sense itself. But it is as Peter says, it's fundamental to public policymaking, because we have to decide how we're going to allocate these sort of public goods. How much street lighting do we need? How clean do we want the streets to be? How much pollution are we going to tolerate? All of those sorts of questions which involve sort of public commons and we have to make
Speaker A:common rules about it. A question I want to ask, but no, Peter, Chris, you go ahead. Well, I was
Speaker D:just going to say, I think we probably do rationally plan things like temperature, because it's obviously set for, say, government buildings or a large organisation. And I think the way they tend to do that is to pick the mean perceived ideal temperature and hope that perception of ideal heat is normally distributed and that you effectively, you know, are least far away from the most number of people's ideal temperature and therefore suffering is reduced as much as possible.
Speaker B:But what if there's one dude who really, you know, really loves being cold and a bunch of other people
Speaker A:who don't really care that much? That's the problem. And also that guy who really cares is really vocal
Speaker C:about it and really pushes it. I mean, I've had first hand experience of this. I mean, I used to work in an office and there was the office was about eight people, most of whom were men. There was a couple of women who worked in the office. One woman in particular, she was kind of a pale, slight sickly kind of person, always ill. And she would always complain that the room was too cold. And she would wear, you know, she'd put jumpers and scarves and hats on all day, even in the height of summer. And everybody else in the office would complain the room was too hot. So there was this exact problem was being manifest. Now, it could be that her suffering caused by being too cold for her outweighed all of the suffering that we had, that it was too hot. If we could measure it somehow, we could say that on the scale of nastiness, the hotness is one point for each person, whereas for her, it's 20 points that were far away, and we should put the temperature up. So that's really the point that we can't measure how the absolute happiness level of people and the market system gives us sort of a useful proxy, but it's based on this assumption that people are good at valuing the assets and the money and they do so equally.
Speaker A:And there's a secondary value there as well, then you have to make a decision about to what extent this person complaining all the time, and how much that annoys you and how much that stops you from doing your work, and a trade off between that and a compromise with the temperature going, all right, well, we'll sort of turn it up a bit. And that'll just sort of, you know, keep me, you know, that'll keep this stop you from being so annoyed, I guess.
Speaker B:I know this is something I mean, it's not temperature, but sort of optimal tidiness levels, which, you know, caused the most domestic problems, you know, when I've shared flats with people, is the question of, you know, but essentially, what, what tends to happen is that the people who, who care most about, about, you know, let's say the bathroom being cleaned a lot tends to always be the ones ending up doing it because they notice first and they more, they're more motivated to do something about it. And so that ends up with them, you know, let's say doing cleaning the bathroom nearly all the time. And the question is, what is an equitable arrangement there, you know, is an equitable arrangement going to be where we split it and, you know, I, I clean the bathroom 50% of the time, even though I don't think it needs doing because I've got a higher tolerance for dirt and mess. You know, what is a fair way of doing that? And because I'm an economist, I've always in those situations suggested auctioning the household tasks and effectively, you know, saying, well, yeah, I don't mind, I'll pay you, you know, I'll pay you five quid to clean the bathroom. But then people, flatmates tends to see themselves as being transformed into some kind of skivvy and, and resist that. And there's this, there's this kind of desire to have, in inverted commas, a fair, fair outcome, you know, where, where you split tasks evenly. And I think that's what, you know, Chris is talking about with the sort of fairness algorithm, pick the average of what people want the temperature to be, but then that's, you know, really making an assumption, which is the point of the issue, which is that are the people who then find themselves too cold as a result, are they in some sense worse off than the people who find themselves a bit too hot? And I think I've, I think I've come to the conclusion that I'm not sure the question makes sense. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about the idea of absolute levels of whatever we mean by happiness. I think actually, even internally, we can only really think about it in terms of, in terms of some sort of trade off. What price does this absolute level of happiness come at? You know, what would, what else would I be willing to give up or, you know, in order to achieve a slightly, in this case, higher temperature?
Speaker A:It's another one of those examples where it just makes sense to sort of give up and go home, where it's just an imperfect world and, and human existences by nature suffering. And we just have to deal with that. Or is there a perfect place out there, bringing it back to our example, is there a perfect place to live out there, sort of, on a sort of, sort of a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean with a pleasant breeze and a nice sunshine. And there is some sort of public policy utopia out there where, yeah, where in fact there is a no, there is a no need for civil servants because everything runs nicely.
Speaker B:Yeah, there, well, first of all, there is a, there is a kind of very, not very, well. Center parks. There is a, there is an economic concept, which is sometimes used to analyze these sort of public policy issues, which is Pareto optimality, which is essentially, if we could make someone better off without making someone else worse off, we should do that. Right. But that's not very restrictive. I mean, this is a situation where I've got a million eggs and you guys don't have any eggs. That's Pareto optimal because you guys can't have more eggs without me having fewer eggs. You know, so, so that's, that's Pareto optimal, but it doesn't seem like a particularly fair outcome. So Pareto optimality doesn't usually get you very far. But I think the idea is that actually, you know, technological improvements, which enable people to, you know, personalize their own environment better are going to enable more optimal outcomes. So, you know, if we have, if you were able to have your own personal microclimate, you know, special clothes that change the temperature you're experiencing, that's, it's very much like, you know, when we used to have, we used to have, you know, TV that, you know, everyone, everyone got the same TV service because you couldn't stop people from receiving the TV. The BBC had to decide what everyone needed to watch at seven o'clock. And that was it. You know, that was a really sort of public policy problem, which has largely been solved now by the existence of, you know, pay pay-per-view TV, which means that now we can end up with, you know, you end up with better funded arts channels and things because the people who, who want that can pay for it.
Speaker A:Well, you used the example, actually, I was about to say, but there are social knock-ons from this, which are not necessarily positive. So one of the, and I think I tend to agree this, one of the wonderful things about only having two channels to choose from is there's a kind of a national experience of something. Unlike this more compartmentalized life that is increasingly carved out for everyone where there's a less sense of community and we will become too much more selfish, I would say.
Speaker D:Yeah, I also think that there's something, there's something desirable about being, about not, about not having choice. So when, when you go to the kind of restaurant where they simply serve you whatever it is, they, they serve you their specialities and that's it. Take it, take it or leave it. And that can be a very enjoyable experience. And there's, there's also the removal of, of sort of serendipitous experience of somebody has imposed something on you. Suddenly you find out, oh, actually, I really like the room being 12 degrees. You know, I, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have experienced that otherwise. And I can see the, see the place of this. So I think there's a need to this, this more, you know, personalized delivery of services. But, but thinking about ways of maintaining some element of it, which is outside of your control and allows you to experience things which you haven't directly chosen yourself.
Speaker C:Personal preference thing gives you the option because there are personality types. And I know a few who, who, even though they enjoy the serendipitous moment of trying something new, they enjoy it less because they know there was still a risk that they didn't, they might not have enjoyed it. And they, they would rather just stay at home and do the same thing and, and stay in the bubble. So being able, being able to give them their own bio suit that maintain their temperature or even less complicated things like let them work from home and give them, give them a laptop and be able to dial into network systems or have two rooms and split the office into two rooms, one hot, one cold. Just very simple technological solutions. Gives, would give people the option to choose whether or not to be risk takers and go non a la carte and go, go, go and stay in a nice hotel, try out living in cold.
Speaker A:Well, I mean, as a solution, I think you're hinting at what you want to say here, but you haven't quite said it. Is that you're looking forward to the day when we can all download our brains into a supercomputer and not worry about this.
Speaker C:Looking forward, I've already started.
Speaker A:And, and you just got Alexa or whatever name is looking after your whims. And yeah, you don't have to worry about whether your body's cold or not. Cause it just kind of automatically happens. Well, you haven't got a body. Yeah. You haven't got a body to worry about. Okay. So I don't have, we answered this question is cold, but I mean, obviously Nick's wrong, right? The cold is worse than hot. Right. And I think we've definitively answered that. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg. Thank you very much for listening until next time. Bye bye.
