This also reminds me of Dijkstra’s famous note on programming:
My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
Celebrating “energy spent” also seems like looking at the wrong side of the ledger. It’s what you get for that energy that matters, now how much you wasted.
(I am mentioning this because referencing a known meme is how you can compress a longer argument into tweet size. Something like: “mistaking ‘energy spent’ for success is the e/acc version of evaluating programmers by ‘lines produced’”.)
This is a philosophically tricky question. Let’s count material resources as spent. But on what? On cycles of computation? But these are also spent. Spent on what? Maybe on pleasant experiences. But pleasant experiences are a kind of consumption, and a worthy life isn’t characterized by how much you’ve consumed. A worthy life is characterized by what you’ve output. But output what? Help others get material resources, for instance?
And so we find ourselves in a loop. It’s not clear where the “right side of the ledger” is to be found at all.
But pleasant experiences are a kind of consumption, and a worthy life isn’t characterized by how much you’ve consumed. A worthy life is characterized by what you’ve output.
This sounds to me like confusing instrumental and terminal goals.
The things I do for others are only worthy because they are needed. Imagine baking tons of bread that no one wants to eat, so it just gets thrown in the garbage. Would that be a worthy activity?
Pleasant experiences are intrinsically worthy; that’s what the word “pleasant” means, kind of. (We can criticize them if they also have some negative side effect, of course. But that just means that their total value is a sum of some positive and some negative components.)
When we judge a person who spends 10% of their resources on pleasure and 90% on producing for others “more worthy” than a person who spends 100% of their resources on pleasure, a part of that calculation is that the production for others will result in some extra pleasure down the line (even if only in the sense of “pleasure of not starving for a while”).
If we instead had one person who spends 10% resources on pleasure and 90% on generating useless paperclips, and another person who spends 100% resources on pleasure, we would probably just call the first person stupid. If we had a group of people, where everyone produces paperclips, gives them to the next person in the circle, who takes them apart and then reassembles them into new paperclips and gives them to the next person again… we would call the entire group crazy.
a part of that calculation is that the production for others will result in some extra pleasure down the line
I don’t agree with this view. The person who does things, taken to a high degree, is Leonardo da Vinci. The person who consumes stuff, taken to a high degree, is a kind of couch potato or sea sponge that doesn’t even need much of a brain. Saying that the former is lowly “instrumental” while the latter is lofty “terminal” sounds very wrong to me.
Either Leonardo enjoys what he is doing (in that case there is terminal value for himself) or he is doing it for other people to enjoy (instrumental value) or both (both kinds of value).
In a hypothetical world where neither is true, i.e. Leonardo hates doing things and no one cares whether he does them or not, he should stop doing that.
He enjoys what he’s doing, but that’s not the most important measure. If you offered him a hypothetical harmless drug that could bring him even more enjoyment but stop him from working, he would refuse.
That’s a tautology then, “people want what they want”. If I understood Villiam right, he was making a more substantive point: that all aspects of “what we want” ultimately reduce to pleasure, because it’s intrinsically valuable and (presumably) nothing else is. Which is what I’m arguing against.
The original point was against using energy consumption as a measure of worthiness. It’s true that all worthy things tend to consume energy, but energy consumption isn’t proportional to worthiness, and some things that consume energy aren’t worth anything at all. This holds whether one adopts a purely hedonistic view of utility or not.
Terminal values, presumably. If such things exist. In practice, you just have to examine ends of ends of ends of etc. far enough to eliminate bullshit work and yak shearing expeditions.
To steelman it, I think the “wasteful” position makes also a kind of sense: being pointlessly frugal when you’re swimming in abundance can be the source of unnecessary suffering. But turning waste into a metric unto itself is begging to get Goodhart’d into doing some very stupid stuff.
This also reminds me of Dijkstra’s famous note on programming:
Celebrating “energy spent” also seems like looking at the wrong side of the ledger. It’s what you get for that energy that matters, now how much you wasted.
(I am mentioning this because referencing a known meme is how you can compress a longer argument into tweet size. Something like: “mistaking ‘energy spent’ for success is the e/acc version of evaluating programmers by ‘lines produced’”.)
This is a philosophically tricky question. Let’s count material resources as spent. But on what? On cycles of computation? But these are also spent. Spent on what? Maybe on pleasant experiences. But pleasant experiences are a kind of consumption, and a worthy life isn’t characterized by how much you’ve consumed. A worthy life is characterized by what you’ve output. But output what? Help others get material resources, for instance?
And so we find ourselves in a loop. It’s not clear where the “right side of the ledger” is to be found at all.
This sounds to me like confusing instrumental and terminal goals.
The things I do for others are only worthy because they are needed. Imagine baking tons of bread that no one wants to eat, so it just gets thrown in the garbage. Would that be a worthy activity?
Pleasant experiences are intrinsically worthy; that’s what the word “pleasant” means, kind of. (We can criticize them if they also have some negative side effect, of course. But that just means that their total value is a sum of some positive and some negative components.)
When we judge a person who spends 10% of their resources on pleasure and 90% on producing for others “more worthy” than a person who spends 100% of their resources on pleasure, a part of that calculation is that the production for others will result in some extra pleasure down the line (even if only in the sense of “pleasure of not starving for a while”).
If we instead had one person who spends 10% resources on pleasure and 90% on generating useless paperclips, and another person who spends 100% resources on pleasure, we would probably just call the first person stupid. If we had a group of people, where everyone produces paperclips, gives them to the next person in the circle, who takes them apart and then reassembles them into new paperclips and gives them to the next person again… we would call the entire group crazy.
I don’t agree with this view. The person who does things, taken to a high degree, is Leonardo da Vinci. The person who consumes stuff, taken to a high degree, is a kind of couch potato or sea sponge that doesn’t even need much of a brain. Saying that the former is lowly “instrumental” while the latter is lofty “terminal” sounds very wrong to me.
Either Leonardo enjoys what he is doing (in that case there is terminal value for himself) or he is doing it for other people to enjoy (instrumental value) or both (both kinds of value).
In a hypothetical world where neither is true, i.e. Leonardo hates doing things and no one cares whether he does them or not, he should stop doing that.
He enjoys what he’s doing, but that’s not the most important measure. If you offered him a hypothetical harmless drug that could bring him even more enjoyment but stop him from working, he would refuse.
But the refusal of wireheading is itself in service of a terminal value—because “satisfaction” is more than simple pleasure.
That’s a tautology then, “people want what they want”. If I understood Villiam right, he was making a more substantive point: that all aspects of “what we want” ultimately reduce to pleasure, because it’s intrinsically valuable and (presumably) nothing else is. Which is what I’m arguing against.
The original point was against using energy consumption as a measure of worthiness. It’s true that all worthy things tend to consume energy, but energy consumption isn’t proportional to worthiness, and some things that consume energy aren’t worth anything at all. This holds whether one adopts a purely hedonistic view of utility or not.
Terminal values, presumably. If such things exist. In practice, you just have to examine ends of ends of ends of etc. far enough to eliminate bullshit work and yak shearing expeditions.
Right. See also: Zachtronics puzzles.
To steelman it, I think the “wasteful” position makes also a kind of sense: being pointlessly frugal when you’re swimming in abundance can be the source of unnecessary suffering. But turning waste into a metric unto itself is begging to get Goodhart’d into doing some very stupid stuff.