He tottered over to the thermostat and there it was: treachery. Despite a long-fought household compromise standard of 74 degrees, someone — Adler’s suspicions instantly centered on his wife — had nudged the temperature up to 78.
For the sleepy freelance writer, it was time to set things right . . . right at 65 degrees. “I just kept pushing that down arrow,” he said of his midnight retaliation. “It was a defensive maneuver.”
The article suggests that women generally prefer higher thermostat settings than men. (It is the opposite in my household.) The focus is on air conditioning in the summer and I wonder whether this ranking reverses in the winter. (My wife prefers more moderate temperatures: cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter. )
Repeated game exam question: will this make the climate wars better or worse? Give your answers and reasons in the comments. Ushanka Shake: Knowledge Problem.
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August 4, 2009 at 3:53 pm
jeff
Answer: it will make things better. In a repeated game, the scope for cooperative behavior is limited by the ability to detect deviations and punish them promptly.
Paradoxically, the iPhone app which allows you to constantly monitor and change the thermostat settings is valuable precisely because it will never be used. The threat that your mate will retaliate immediately means that you will get only fleeting relief from frigidity by using your iPhone to raise the thermostat.
Any attempt to raise the thermostat will be interpreted as a breakdown of cooperation. Thus, she will no longer be willing to compromise at 72, and she will immediately reduce the temperature to her preferred 65. (You will try to bring it back up and the two of you will be locked in a remote thermostat war. It is the fear of this war that keeps you from deviating in the first place.)
Without the iPhone app, it takes longer to detect a deviation and it is harder to enforce the punishment. A slower, and weaker punishment is not strong enough deterrence to keep you from deviating in the first place.
December 24, 2016 at 12:32 pm
Jermaine Falken
And it’s not only gender either. A black guy admitted to me (usually white) that African Americans like things a few degrees warmer on average. Note that there outliers in both directions i.e. Matthew Henson, the black polar explorer in Year 1900 or a white life-long Florida resident to represent the other extreme.
In the case of a tech startup, an innovative CEO gets an opportunity to save some energy. Since a server farm needs to dissipate heat the A/C now needs to remove, make the servers water-cooled and add small radiators with valves in the cubicles for people to adjust. In this case, you’re merely using waste heat to get those anaemic/anorexic/etc people to stop kvetching about a beautifully cold workplace.
When you get hot easy – even compared to normal whities – you learn the first law of thermodynamics the hard way. Heat flows from a hot place to a cold place. And it’s always easier to make heat than it is to make cold.