What Cleaning the Lint Trap Says About Your Political Philosophy
Growing up my dad and I had an ongoing spat about the right way to clean our clothing drier’s lint trap.
He argued that it should be cleaned after each run, that way you don’t need to worry about cleaning up someone else’s mess.
I argued that it should be cleaned before each run, that way you don’t need to worry about what the person before you did or didn’t do.
(The reason why this was such a point of contention was that my dad was concerned about lingering lint leading to fires, and therefore wanted to be sure that the lint trap was always empty before the machine was run.)
The Game Theory
It turns out that in the case where the clothing drier is being used in an alternating fashion by two people, then this is very similar to the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma problem in Game Theory. For two people A and B, they each have two options: either clean out the lint trap before using the machine, or clean it out after. Each person wants to minimize the number of times that they need to clean out the trap, and each time they do we can think of this as yielding a “negative reward” of -1. This allows us to write out what in Game Theory is known as a payoff matrix.
If both players always clean out the trap beforehand, everything is fine. Each of them has to clean it out once, and only once, before each use of the machine, meaning they each get a payoff of -1. The same is true if they always clean it out after.
But what if they start off both always cleaning after, and then player A decides to switch to cleaning before? In that case, player A no longer has to do anything, since player B cleaning after means that the trap will always already be cleaned when A arrives. This means player A now gets a payoff of 0, strictly better than before. Meanwhile player B is now forced to clean out player A’s remnants before starting the machine each time and clean up after themselves, resulting in a payoff of -2, strictly worse than before.
Within the confines of the game, the only action that player B can take at this point to better their situation is to also switch to cleaning before, which will then restore the payoffs to -1 for both players. This tendency of the After/After strategy to devolve into the Before/Before strategy implies that the Before/Before strategy is a so-called Nash Equilibrium. It’s the combination of strategies such that it’s not in either’s player’s best interest to switch to doing something else.
The Political Philosophy
At the time I was having these conversations with my dad, I didn’t know anything about Game Theory, and instead thought about our predicament from the perspective of political ideologies.
From his perspective, it made sense to clean up after himself for the same reason you shouldn’t litter in the rainforest: it ensures that you’re leaving the world as nice a place as the way you found it.
From my perspective, it made sense to clean up beforehand because it ensured that the machine would always work properly when I needed it, and that I would never accidentally set my clothes on fire.
These correspond to a more collectivist vs a more individualist political philosophy. In the former case you’re taking steps to look after the needs of others and the wider society, whereas in the latter case you focus on bolstering traits like self-sufficiency and autonomy.
In the case of the lint trap, both the collectivist and individualist approaches are equivalent in terms of results so long as both parties are doing the same thing, but in most cases there are clear pros and cons with each.
Individualism is the de-facto religion of the United States, which makes sense due to its close links to modern capitalism. Businesses greedily pursuing their own self-interest is a large part of what drives rapid technological innovation, and is the reason why half of the world now carries around a supercomputer in their pocket.
By contrast, the merits of collectivism were on full display during Covid, where countries with more collectivist cultures had dramatically fewer Covid cases and deaths compared to countries with more individualist cultures (see figure). This was due at least in part to their wider adherence to public health measures such as masking and social distancing.
It’s interesting to note all of the ways in which this collectivist/individualist divide (which in the United States roughly corresponds to the left/right political divide) correctly predicts the broader political, professional, and recreational differences between myself and my dad:
- My dad is generally supportive of far-left political candidates and policies, whereas I prefer center-left and moderate candidates and policies.
- My dad spent his life working in the public sector, including volunteering in the Peace Corp, whereas I’ve worked primarily in the private sector, including for Big Tech.
- My dad loves spending time in nature, especially state and national parks, whereas I prefer spending time on Twitter, which was heavily influenced by founder Jack Dorsey’s libertarian politics.
Conclusion
I talked to my dad while writing this article, and he remembered our arguments over the lint trap well. He agreed that it was a good microcosm through which to view our broadly differing world-views, and that the game theory analysis made sense.
But he still insisted that the lint trap should be cleaned after running the drier.
- Topical Fire Report Series: Clothes Dryer Fires in Residential Buildings (2008–2010). U.S. Department of Homeland Security: U.S. Fire Administration National Fire Data Center, August 2012.
- Kendra Cherry. Individualistic Cultures and Behavior. Verywell Mind, December 2020.
- Jack Dorsey, a Plausible Libertarian. AfterEcon, January 2021.
- S. O’Dea. Smartphone penetration worldwide as share of global population 2016–2020. Statista, March 2021.
- Yossi Maaravi, Aharon Levy, Tamar Gur, Dan Confino, Sandra Segal. “The Tragedy of the Commons”: How Individualism and Collectivism Affected the Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Public Health, February 2021.
