Is delicious food also a lotus? Clearly, it doesn’t make your life better after you’ve eaten it, and that seem to be the criteria you use. But on the other hand, nobody says “I’m quitting delicious food”, the same way they often say “I’m quitting facebook”.
My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don’t improve your life. The problem is when you develop compulsions. There seems to be a difference between simple desire and compulsive desire.
I think it sort of misses the point to worry about what is or isn’t a lotus. The point is to notice what grabs your wanting, and how that affects you later.
Clearly, it doesn’t make your life better after you’ve eaten it, and that seem to be the criteria you use.
Not what I meant to convey. A lotus is something that grabs your wanting directly. When it’s designed by someone else, it usually doesn’t quite fit what’s meaningful to you. Then it’s pretty common to find yourself doing whatever it is a lot, and not benefitting much from it, and not caring about that fact.
My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don’t improve your life.
Agreed.
The problem is when you develop compulsions. There seems to be a difference between simple desire and compulsive desire.
I don’t know what a “compulsion” is. I mean, I know the word. But I don’t really know what it is.
The problem I care about here, is that things can hijack what you care about, and the method they use for it doesn’t correlate much with value delivered. Seems like something worth noticing when it’s happening.
Maybe you mean the same thing. I just don’t know what I’d use to sort out “simple desire” from “compulsive desire”, so to me right now they’re just words.
Compulsions are often tied to obsessions. From the Wikipedia article on compulsive behaviour:
Compulsive behavior is defined as performing an act persistently and repetitively without it necessarily leading to an actual reward or pleasure. Compulsive behaviors could be an attempt to make obsessions go away.The act is usually a small, restricted and repetitive behavior, yet not disturbing in a pathological way. Compulsive behaviors are a need to reduce apprehension caused by internal feelings a person wants to abstain from or control. A major cause of the compulsive behaviors is said to be obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).
I don’t have OCD, but I’ve had similar experiences. These are basic sources I’m using, but words like feeling “coerced” or “constrained” by an obsessive part of my mind into compulsively performing a behaviour wouldn’t be out of place if I had try pointing out what that experience is like for me. It’s often hard to stop doing it even though it feels adverse or painful to perform the behaviour. In the language of psychology, an *obsession* is a thought, while a *compulsion* is a behaviour. A desire is definitely more like a thought than a behaviour, so here when we’re using the term “compulsive desire”, to me it’s ambiguous whether it’s a thought or a behaviour. By compulsive behaviours are typically driven by *push* motivations, obsessions to make something go away. I don’t experience dependency or addiction to a severe degree in the conventional sense of those words, which seems driven by a *pull* motivation. Addictions driven by pull motivations seem driven by a *desire* to fill an unfulfilled goal; your *pulling* something towards you to fulfill an empty goal-slot you can’t fill by other means. (This reminds me of an article in which Diana Fleischman predicts the future impact of sexbots I read earlier today.)
So when I think *compulsive desire* I imagine a desire to fulfill an addiction driven in the first place by a strong pull motivator. I know people who have experienced these compulsive desires much more deeply than I have, such as an (ex-)alcoholic friend who has been part of Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. He’s told me stories of his and others’ addictions, and it strikes me as deeper an addiction than anything I’ve ever felt. It really reinforces to me the purpose behind psychologists or alcohol and drug abuse awareness advocates urging a distinction between the technical use of *dependency*, which is common to most people and includes behaviour colloquially called “addictive”; and *addiction*, which ought to be reserved to refer to the distinctively severe behaviour I mentioned above. That that technical distinction was made in the first place shows the difference of degree between each other’s experiences. So my best guess is a *compulsive desire* is the need to fulfill an urge even though having the desire in the first place is painful.
A lotus is something that grabs your wanting directly. When it’s designed by someone else, it usually doesn’t quite fit what’s meaningful to you.
Yes, most pleasures grab your wanting. I’m suggesting that you actually enjoy collecting arbitrary achievements, there is no “hijacking” about it. And I don’t understand why collecting arbitrary achievements needs to be meaningful, while delicious food is allowed to be meaningless.
There is the issue that these achievements were designed for a goal (improve your learning), and that they fail that goal. However I don’t see why this is an important distinction.
I worry that the more important distinction between collecting achievements and eating food is that the former is a low-status activity.
I just don’t know what I’d use to sort out “simple desire” from “compulsive desire”, so to me right now they’re just words.
Good question. I don’t think there is any objective measure to tell what desire is ok and what is a compulsion. I think, similarly to the word “disease”, a desire is “compulsive” only if you think it causes problems for you.
Yes, most pleasures grab your wanting. I’m suggesting that you actually enjoy collecting arbitrary achievements, there is no “hijacking” about it. And I don’t understand why collecting arbitrary achievements needs to be meaningful, while delicious food is allowed to be meaningless.
Okay, seriously? You want to play this game?
Meta time:
I get that status here comes in part from good arguments. It’s a fine metric for truth-seeking. But it isn’t the same as truth-seeking, and it Goodharts into disagreement-hunting even where the disagreements don’t matter.
I’m trying to point at a simple observation: some things grab your wanting directly and yank you off-course. Seems like a good idea to notice when that happens. That’s all.
I’m not saying that one shouldn’t ever let those want-grabbers do their thing. But maybe you can’t tell I wasn’t saying that; communication is hard. But if you think I am saying that… then can’t you just notice that that’s stupid, mention that, and highlight the point I should have made?
So… I mean, really, you seriously think you’re meaningfully refuting my points by saying I enjoy achievements and therefore there’s no hijacking? Seriously? Seriously?
I mean, I think your next norm-driven move is to say “Yes, seriously.” And then do some kind of weird philosophical thing that, I don’t know, makes it sound like I’m arguing that some wants are good and others are bad, and then knocking down that strawman. Or something.
But… come on! Really?
Can we just… not fence for status?
</meta>
I don’t understand why collecting arbitrary achievements needs to be meaningful, while delicious food is allowed to be meaningless.
I never said anything about food. Or about what needs to be meaningful. Just that there are want-grabbers that are meaningfulness-symmetric.
I don’t usually think of good food as lotus-like. Like, here are some pleasurable non-lotuses (for me):
Walks in nature.
Kissing someone I’m dating.
Meditating.
Intense exercise.
Breaking a fast with good food.
Doing an acrobatic flip.
I basically never find these yanking me away from what I’m doing. I just like them. Sometimes I want to do some of them more and it’s hard to make myself. Very not lotus-ish.
Sometimes I don’t do these things because I’m busy, I don’t know, getting sucked into getting achievements on some game that leaves Tetris effects in my brain.
I mean, if I want to do that, then that seems cool.
Seems bad not to even notice that’s happening though. Then Facebook gets to program my wants however it chooses to.
I worry that the more important distinction between collecting achievements and eating food is that the former is a low-status activity.
I don’t think of it as low-status. FWIW.
I don’t think there is any objective measure to tell what desire is ok and what is a compulsion. I think, similarly to the word “disease”, a desire is “compulsive” only if you think it causes problems for you.
Uh… then I’m not sure what your point is. You said:
“My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don’t improve your life. The problem is when you develop compulsions. There seems to be a difference between simple desire and compulsive desire.”
So… if I take you literally, I think you just said that the only problem is when you develop a desire that causes you a problem.
Like, I don’t think that’s actually what you mean. I’m strawmanning your words to point out that I think I haven’t understood your real message.
I understand the impulse to go “really, you can’t be serious”, especially given the tendency of LWers to nitpick, but I think one should be cautious about invoking it as long as there are charitable alternative interpretations.
In this particular case, I suspect we’re running into a genuine difference between minds here. That is, I’ve encountered some people who genuinely seem to not experience compulsions: they might still e.g. procrastinate instead of doing something important, but their subjective experience is closer to “I don’t want to do the important thing yet, so I’m choosing to do something fun instead” rather than “I know I should be doing the important thing but I can’t make myself do it”.
The discomfort experienced by an OCD patient is triggered by thoughts that are unambiguously experienced as alien to the patient’s core sense of self. Even in the most serious cases, when the unwanted thought arises—say, a compulsion to wash one’s hands for the tenth time in an hour—the patient is aware that her hands are not actually dirty. That is to say, in people suffering from OCD some part of the conscious mind remains aloof as an impartial spectator, aware of the compulsive thought but not identified with it. This feeling of being compelled, against one’s will, into an intimate alliance with thoughts and desires not my own is referred to technically as “ego-dystonic thinking”—a defining symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Ego-dystonic thinking is not peculiar to OCD patients; to some extent, it’s a familiar dimension of everyone’s mental life. Although most of us are deeply identified with our thoughts most of the time—“I think, therefore I am”—nevertheless under certain circumstances we know what it is to experience a thought as intrusive, or to reflect in such way as to distance ourselves from thoughts that cry out for attention.
Whereas for some people, it seems like there are no urges that are experienced as ego-dystonic; all desires and urges are experienced as egosyntonic, or as parts of the self which one identifies with. For such a person, “compulsion” isn’t a natural category, because it’s something that they’ve never experienced.
From their responses, I’m guessing that zulupineapple is probably closer to that kind of a person.
I understand the impulse to go “really, you can’t be serious”, especially given the tendency of LWers to nitpick, but I think one should be cautious about invoking it as long as there are charitable alternative interpretations.
That’s not sustainable. There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.
That actually *needs* a strong pushback. It creates a kind of emotional fatigue on the authors that legitimately drags down the quality of future articles.
On the other hand, if one wishes to solve this problem, one also needs to have a clear idea of what exactly is causing it. If people’s behavior is driven by status-seeking, then that probably warrants different methods for dealing with it than if their behavior was driven by something else.
I have no doubt that some of the thing you described, is driven mostly by status-seeking. But I still maintain that, when evaluating the behavior of any given commenter, one should be cautious about jumping to that conclusion. Because:
1) On LW, “You’re just trying to win status rather than caring about the truth” is one of the easiest and most negative assumptions of someone’s motives that you can find. And when people are annoyed at something, they really like jumping to easy conclusions that paint the other person in a very bad light. If one does not take the time to look at reasonable alternative hypotheses, it’s easy to end up concluding that everyone else is just some shade of “evil or dumb”, regardless of whether that was true or not.
2) Ascribing bad motives to someone is a self-fulfilling propechy. Maybe someone is just genuinely confused and trying to figure out what you are saying. Then you go “oh, you want to play this game? could we stop dueling for status?” Well, now you’ve made a public accusation of them having low motives, forcing them to defend themselves if they don’t want to lose face. Regardless of whether the conversation had a status-seeking element to it before, it sure does now.
I’ll admit to having some kind of cognitive privilege here, in that I genuinely don’t experience the ‘death by papercuts’ tone that you and a lot of others are talking about. I don’t know why not; it’s always puzzled me that people have talked about LW feeling like a hostile environment to post things on, and I’ve never felt that. This is particularly weird since I feel like I’ve been pretty thin-skinned on other online forums, easily getting upset if people imply bad things about me. But here I never get that vibe, maybe because people always seem to focus their criticism on arguments rather than on people. I’ve always felt like discussions on LW are mostly just rigorous and thorough, but rarely hostile.
Similarly, I see very few comments that I’d describe as “whataboutisms” or similar. I just see people coming from different directions and perspectives, inhabiting different places in mindspace, with the inevitable consequence that often one needs to do a lot of work to bridge the inferential distances involved. I don’t see that as a bad thing; I see it as something good and healthy, and one of the things that makes LW great, that it reveals differences between minds that people had never thought to question before, and helps the participants understand each other better when the details and differences are thoroughly hashed out.
But like I said, my perspective is strongly biased by the fact that I don’t seem to experience the emotional cost that other people seem to experience. (In terms of the parable of the dog and the lizard, I’m the dog.) So I don’t really know how to appropriately weigh it, as I basically only feel the benefits of the current discussion culture, and none of the costs.
We have limited cognition and limited emotional investment, much of which has already just been spent on creating what is hopefully a high-quality post. ONE person doing it through status-seeking creates like 10 copy-cats, of which eight probably ARE doing it genuinely.
But giving them all the benefit of the doubt lets the status-seeking saboteur hide among the rest, and separating them all out takes effort that wears down the author.
I think that kaj is talking about “don’t read motivations into people as part of your criticism, or at least be more cautious about doing so” – criticize them for the action they’re doing if the action is bad.
I think ialdabaoth is saying ’yeah, but right now basically nobody is criticizing or stopping the people doing the death-by-cuts-thing, and whenever anyone tries, the moderators yell at them instead.”
(I think right now the death-by-papercutters are basically coming in juuust under a line that the moderators feel awkward about taking action on, and the people criticizing them are coming in juust over that line, and yes, this is a bad dynamic)
I’m currently looking into solutions that are more on the “solve it with technology” side of things than the “solve it with social”, but regardless agree that the status quo is bad.
What kinds of technological solutions are you thinking of?
Feel free to talk about it later if the ideas aren’t ready for public presentation yet. In general I’m concerned that criticism is important, truth-seeking is hard to separate from status-seeking (authors can be self-deceived as easily as commenters about their judgments/motivations), and whatever solution we adopt not cause more harm than good through unintended side effects.
I touched upon this in a recent meta post, although in a different context. (Basically, I expect small/big upvote distinctions to help with this issue, at least somewhat, while also being positive from a truthseeking perspective. Later on I’ll write up clearer thoughts on why I’m expecting this to help)
I anticipate that your tech solution will also help Eliezer come back—my intuition says that this is part of what he feels aversion to wasting energy on.
Weren’t the new moderation tools—where someone can make a top-level post and then delete every critical or contrary comment without a trace[1] (or, indeed, any comment at all, for any reason)—supposed to be Eliezer’s precondition for returning? I opposed that change, and still do, but it’s done—and now we’re hearing that it wasn’t enough? How seriously can we take Eliezer’s “I’ll come back when you __” stance this time, and how many other changes do you intend to make in the service of this goal?
[1] By the way, what’s the status of the moderation log feature?
Oh, actually I got a basic version of the moderation log done awhile ago and then I think I forgot to list it in an update post (or maybe I mentioned it but it got lost in the shuffle, unsure). Sorry
Neat. Er, are the “User” and “Deleted by user” columns meant to be the same? Because it seems like they *are* the same but I’d have expected the former to contain the name of the user who *posted* the thing-that-got-deleted, not the name of the user who deleted it.
Oh, yeah. (actually come to think of it I may have noticed that bug, though “I’ll fix that bug and then announce it, and then never got around to fixing it.”)
Sure. But in the meantime, realize that the fact that Val’s comment was downvoted into the negatives is a signal about something, and it’s about something you and Ben and Ollie and Kaj are doing.
And then decide whether you’re okay with all the consequences of that.
There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.
Can you link to some posts that have suffered from this?
I drew from my own experience to make the same point in this comment. I broke it down into:
push and pull motivations driving desires
*compulsive desire* in context appearing to mean something like a pull-driven behaviour. The distinction between pull and push motivations here is fuzzy, but “compulsive desire” strikes me more as more like “addiction”, which is chasing something and pull it toward you, which I expect can also exist in OCD, but some obsessive compulsions in OCD and my own have been driven by push motivations; the urge to *push* something away to get away from it, usually an intrusive thought.
In the words you’re using, what we colloquially call “addictions” are in psychiatry or other technical fields known as “dependencies”, and “addiction” as a word being reserved for especially severe cases. So it seems my experience is of ego-dystonic push motivations, dependency is typically an experience of ego-syntonic pull motivations, but drug addiction may typically be experienced as an ego-dystonic *pull* motivation. I think this reinforces your point about how we’re talking about a difference between minds, as the experiences of severe drug/alcohol addiction appear beyond what I’ve experienced, and from appearances, others participating in this thread.
(Bonus point: because I’m replying to you, Kaj, and I thought you’d get this, I’ll explain the rationale behind the distinction between dependency and addiction in rationalist terms.) A “global catastrophic risk” (GCR) is to dependency (i.e., psychological addiction) what an “existential risk” (x-risk) is to addiction (i.e,. dependency+physical addiction). Just as x-risk reducers want to reserve the term “existential risk” for those GCRs which will have a terminal and trans-generational impact, so people can distinguish between the risk of misaligned AI from self-driving cars vs. a singleton. A drug dependency can be thought of as a *personal* catastrophic risk, while a drug addiction can be thought of as an *existential* personal risk. A marijuana dependency can be catastrophically debilitating, but nobody overdoses on marijuana. People can overdose on heroin. Thus in this framework one could say someone has a marijuana *dependency* or a heroin addiction, but it’d be erroneous to speak of a marijuana *addiction*. The distinction is addictions often kill people, while dependencies most often don’t, and how we use these words has serious consequences for public health policy.
That’s interesting. I definitely never feel like my thoughts or desires are alien to me. That sounds very unhealthy. But, I definitely exhibit compulsions, or at least compulsive behaviors. I think the difference might be different perspectives or mental habits, rather than a real difference between minds. One thing is rationalization—“I’m watching funny youtube videos, that’s probably because I want and like funny youtube videos”. Another thing is a sort of self awareness—I may feel for a moment “I want to work, instead of watching funny youtube videos”, but then immediately remember that, in fact, working is hard, and I don’t actually want it that much (although I do want to be a sort of person who works more, not sure to what extent this is “egodystonic”).
That’s pretty interesting. Some practices seem squarely aimed at converting people who are dystonic to syntonic. Heavy overlap with locus of control training.
I get that status here comes in part from good arguments.
I really don’t like that sort of status explanation. I’m under no illusion that this is giving me any sort of status. If it does, then I have no idea what that status looks like.
Seems like a good idea to notice when that happens.
It’s never bad to notice what you’re doing, so I have nothing to say about that.
I’m not saying that one shouldn’t ever let those want-grabbers do their thing. But maybe you can’t tell I wasn’t saying that;
Nobody said “never”, but the post seems clearly cautionary to me. You use words like “useless”, “addiction”, “hijack” which have very negative connotations (as does “lotus” itself). Also, you linked to “Your Brain On Porn”, which does promote abstinence, as I understand.
More generally, I automatically placed your post into the same mental bucket as various “evil facebook is manipulating you” articles, which should explain why I interpret any ambiguities negatively. It might be unfair, but I can’t say that it doesn’t fit.
Was I not supposed to read your post that way?
So… if I take you literally, I think you just said that the only problem is when you develop a desire that causes you a problem.
Yeah, I’m not saying anything smart here, though it’s not quite that circular. I mean, compulsion is something you can get diagnosed with, I think. Also, I think, “compulsion” is the correct term for “addictions” that don’t actually involve drugs (e.g. gambling, facebook).
My point in bringing up “compulsions” was that there is already a word for “desires that cause problems”, and I don’t really understand why we want a new word, or in what way “lotus” is different. If it is different, I wonder if it is a natural category. That’s why I asked whether food is a lotus at the very beginning—I don’t really understand what the category looks like. I would have appreciated more analysis on that.
My current guess is that non-lotus pleasures are those that have some sort of negative feedback loops in them—e.g. eating isn’t a lotus, because once you’re full, it doesn’t feel as good. On the other hand, work can be a lotus, if you reach a state where you don’t want to stop, and there is nothing negative about such “lotus”. So it’s not exactly “compulsion” but a little more general, though all compulsions are also “lotuses”. Is that right?
My current guess is that non-lotus pleasures are those that have some sort of negative feedback loops in them—e.g. eating isn’t a lotus, because once you’re full, it doesn’t feel as good. On the other hand, work can be a lotus, if you reach a state where you don’t want to stop, and there is nothing negative about such “lotus”. So it’s not exactly “compulsion” but a little more general, though all compulsions are also “lotuses”. Is that right?
The core component of the lotus—the reason why Duncan referred to that in the first place—is that the lotus removes you from the plot. What falls into that category depends on what you think the plot is. Someone focused primarily on their life satisfaction will have different views from someone interested in the march of scientific progress, or from someone who is focused primarily on existential risk, or so on.
So a thing is a “lotus” if you desire it, but would prefer not to desire it? Well, that’s a meaningful category, but it’s very different from the compulsiveness that Valentine seems to describe. Or does a thing need both properties, to be a “lotus”.
More importantly, what is this “plot” and where does it come from? It’s good to have preferences over preferences, but I worry that you’re identifying with them way too much.
I’ve also personally found that always eating delicious foods will make me subconsciously start looking for food in moments of boredom.
I do think it’s important to experience pleasures in life, and delicious food is a great treat, but like too many things in our lives, our food supply is being engineered to superstimulus levels and caution is totally warranted.
Feel free to substitute food with any other common short-term pleasure. Yes, it’s probably possible to develop an unhealthy relationship with anything. But does that make every pleasure a lotus? If it does then “lotus” isn’t a useful term.
I think the following is (1) at least close to what Valentine is saying and (2) obviously not content-free: Wanting and liking are separate things. When we like things, we tend to want them as a result. And sometimes we want things because (that’s an “evolutionary” because) they are useful to us. But there are things we want because of processes other than utility->wanting (via evolution) and liking->wanting (via learning). Call these things “lotuses”.
I make the following claims.
1. Some things are lotuses in this sense. For instance, those Duolingo “achievements” were lotuses for Valentine. He found himself wanting them before ever getting any (so it’s not that he got some, found that he enjoyed getting them, and wanted them for the sake of that enjoyment). And they certainly aren’t a close match for anything that makes much difference to evolutionary “fitness”.
2. Not everything we want is a lotus in this sense. For instance, we want food because if we don’t eat we die and our potential ancestors who cared much less about getting food were less successful. So food isn’t a lotus (though you could argue that some specific categories of food are). We want sex both for similar evolutionary reasons and because (in most cases) when we’ve had it in the past we’ve enjoyed it a lot. (Again, it’s possible that some sexual activities are lotuses for some people.)
3. This notion of lotus is potentially useful. I would like my wants to be well aligned with what’s (broadly speaking) good for me. If I want something out of proportion to the good it does me and the pleasure it gives me, I would like to know that (and may then try to find ways to want it less, or to make it harder to get what I want in this case, or to make it provide more good or pleasure). Lotus/not-lotus doesn’t line up exactly with this, but it’s a pretty good match.
(Is this notion of lotus the best one in its neighbourhood? I don’t know. For instance, perhaps we would do better to consider more directly the notion of a thing we want out of proportion to the benefits it provides. That’s nearer to our goals, but further from the causes of things—I think Valentine-lotuses are nearer to being a single kind of thing than “things that we want out of proportion to their benefits” are. It’s not obvious to me how the tradeoffs work out.)
He found himself wanting them before ever getting any (so it’s not that he got some, found that he enjoyed getting them, and wanted them for the sake of that enjoyment).
He found out they existed by getting one.
Regardless, this feels like not quite the thing. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy getting them. It’s that he was trying to learn French, and now suddenly instead he was trying to earn achievements in “learning French”. No matter how much he liked those achievements, they got in the way of actually learning French.
With that in mind, I think the answer to “is food a lotus” would be: for some people, in some contexts, yes.
Like, if I go to a networking event intending to meet people, but instead I spend all my time gorging myself at the buffet.
I had a goal, and the food meant that instead of working towards my goal, now I’m doing something that won’t help it at all. If food is sufficiently lotus-like for me, I might need to completely avoid networking events with buffets. This is true even if I actually really enjoy food, and endorse that enjoyment in general.
Whoops, you’re right about how he found out; my apologies. Still, my reading of the OP is that the craving Valentine felt for earning achievements wasn’t primarily a result of the actual pleasure he got when he did it.
I agree that the definition of “lotus” I proposed is not quite the thing in the sense that it doesn’t quite track what we care about, and said as much in my last paragraph; I think “thing we want out of proportion to its benefits” is pretty close to being the thing, but whether that makes it a better definition to use isn’t obvious to me.
(If I understand your proposal right, it’s maybe different again: something is a “lotus” if we want it, and there’s something closely related that would be beneficial or pleasurable for us, but the two don’t match. That feels to me like it’s again not quite the thing—something could be perilously want-hijacking, and worth “noticing the taste of”, without that sort of proximity to useful wants.)
My food example doesn’t feel to me like the food is particularly close to the networking. Which is to say, I agree with your last sentence.
(I don’t feel like I’m trying to propose a definition here, just gesture vaguely at a cluster and some features of it that seem relevant. Similarly, I don’t have particular feelings about your proposed definition. Most of my comment might have been better directed as a reply to someone else.)
Thinking of brain-hijacking in terms of a “superstimulus” is probably the best way to think of what people mean by “hijacked” when they use the word on LW, as opposed to a more violent connotation.
My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don’t improve your life.
Ah, but delicious food does improve my life. I enjoy eating it, after all! Sensory pleasures, aesthetic pleasures, visceral satisfaction—those things constitute improvements to my life.
I do not have time to write the comment I’d like to write about this—one with a full analysis of this question—but here are some quick thoughts, things that seem relevant:
The difference between “wanting” and “liking”
The difference between “wanting” and “wanting to want” (i.e., higher-order desires)
Endorsed vs. unendorsed { pleasures, desires, preferences, reactions to experiences }
Tradeoffs between preferences / desires / pleasures
(If anyone finds the relevance of any of these things to the topic non-obvious, let me know and I’ll write more about it.)
Ah, but delicious food does improve my life. I enjoy eating it, after all!
Yes, and Valentine apparently enjoys collecting arbitrary achievements. There is nothing wrong with that, though, it seems that he’s feeling some guilt about it.
here are some quick thoughts, things that seem relevant
I think “wanting to want” is the key difference here. Not sure how much the others apply.
“Enjoy” is too simple to describe what’s true here. I find myself motivated to collect them. When I get another one, I get a “I’m getting closer!” feeling. Getting them all gives me a few moments of satisfaction, sort of like having carefully organized a silverware drawer might.
And I agree, there’s nothing wrong with that per se.
I just don’t want that process to hijack my effort to learn French.
[…] it seems that [Valentine is] feeling some guilt about it.
Uh, no. I don’t know where you got that impression. I don’t feel guilty about eating lotus. I just want to notice when I am, because apparently I can be fed lotus without my asking for it. If I don’t notice, then others can tell me what my goals are, even accidentally. I don’t like that.
I enjoy candy. If someone gives me candy, that’s good. Even if I’m trying to learn French, and someone offers me candy rewards for reaching arbitrary milestones, that’s still good. Even if I’m somehow not aware that the milestones are arbitrary and that they don’t really help me learn French, it’s still good, because I’m getting candy, and I like candy. I would never call that “hijacking”. No, I’m exchanging a miniscule bit of French-ability for some candy. It’s a trade that satisfies my preferences. I have nothing even slightly negative to say about these candy-givers.
You, on the other hand, do use such harsh words as “hijack”, which suggests that there are some negative emotions related to the lotus. I’m only guessing that guilt might be the cause (this is “guilt” in the sense of “guilty pleasure”).
Also, you used the word “lotus” from the Odyssey, where it is not depicted in a very positive light. Was I not supposed to deduce anything from that choice of a name?
I think all you’re missing is words like “lotus” and “hijacked” have developed connotations on LessWrong which aren’t as harsh as the basic connotations of those words used outside the context of LW, and that it’s those connotations Val sought to bring to mind in his post, and not that of hijacking planes or the Odyssey.
Many people who are overweight do “quit” tasty food in order to lose weight, although it’s not really the same thing, because the issue isn’t the time-wasting but the unhealthiness.
It seems to me that a defining characteristic of lotuses is that they waste time. Eating tasty food doesn’t usually take more time than other food. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite, given fast food and preprepared junk food.
Fast food wasn’t quite what I was thinking of. Instead immagine someone who goes to fancy restaurants often, buys the most expensive wines, etc. We call those people gourmets, I think. Does that make food a lotus? Or is it a healthy hobby?
Is delicious food also a lotus? Clearly, it doesn’t make your life better after you’ve eaten it, and that seem to be the criteria you use. But on the other hand, nobody says “I’m quitting delicious food”, the same way they often say “I’m quitting facebook”.
My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don’t improve your life. The problem is when you develop compulsions. There seems to be a difference between simple desire and compulsive desire.
I think it sort of misses the point to worry about what is or isn’t a lotus. The point is to notice what grabs your wanting, and how that affects you later.
Not what I meant to convey. A lotus is something that grabs your wanting directly. When it’s designed by someone else, it usually doesn’t quite fit what’s meaningful to you. Then it’s pretty common to find yourself doing whatever it is a lot, and not benefitting much from it, and not caring about that fact.
Agreed.
I don’t know what a “compulsion” is. I mean, I know the word. But I don’t really know what it is.
The problem I care about here, is that things can hijack what you care about, and the method they use for it doesn’t correlate much with value delivered. Seems like something worth noticing when it’s happening.
Maybe you mean the same thing. I just don’t know what I’d use to sort out “simple desire” from “compulsive desire”, so to me right now they’re just words.
When I read about “compulsion”, it’s definitely more than a word to me. From the dictionary.com definition of compulsion.
Compulsions are often tied to obsessions. From the Wikipedia article on compulsive behaviour:
I don’t have OCD, but I’ve had similar experiences. These are basic sources I’m using, but words like feeling “coerced” or “constrained” by an obsessive part of my mind into compulsively performing a behaviour wouldn’t be out of place if I had try pointing out what that experience is like for me. It’s often hard to stop doing it even though it feels adverse or painful to perform the behaviour. In the language of psychology, an *obsession* is a thought, while a *compulsion* is a behaviour. A desire is definitely more like a thought than a behaviour, so here when we’re using the term “compulsive desire”, to me it’s ambiguous whether it’s a thought or a behaviour. By compulsive behaviours are typically driven by *push* motivations, obsessions to make something go away. I don’t experience dependency or addiction to a severe degree in the conventional sense of those words, which seems driven by a *pull* motivation. Addictions driven by pull motivations seem driven by a *desire* to fill an unfulfilled goal; your *pulling* something towards you to fulfill an empty goal-slot you can’t fill by other means. (This reminds me of an article in which Diana Fleischman predicts the future impact of sexbots I read earlier today.)
So when I think *compulsive desire* I imagine a desire to fulfill an addiction driven in the first place by a strong pull motivator. I know people who have experienced these compulsive desires much more deeply than I have, such as an (ex-)alcoholic friend who has been part of Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. He’s told me stories of his and others’ addictions, and it strikes me as deeper an addiction than anything I’ve ever felt. It really reinforces to me the purpose behind psychologists or alcohol and drug abuse awareness advocates urging a distinction between the technical use of *dependency*, which is common to most people and includes behaviour colloquially called “addictive”; and *addiction*, which ought to be reserved to refer to the distinctively severe behaviour I mentioned above. That that technical distinction was made in the first place shows the difference of degree between each other’s experiences. So my best guess is a *compulsive desire* is the need to fulfill an urge even though having the desire in the first place is painful.
Yes, most pleasures grab your wanting. I’m suggesting that you actually enjoy collecting arbitrary achievements, there is no “hijacking” about it. And I don’t understand why collecting arbitrary achievements needs to be meaningful, while delicious food is allowed to be meaningless.
There is the issue that these achievements were designed for a goal (improve your learning), and that they fail that goal. However I don’t see why this is an important distinction.
I worry that the more important distinction between collecting achievements and eating food is that the former is a low-status activity.
Good question. I don’t think there is any objective measure to tell what desire is ok and what is a compulsion. I think, similarly to the word “disease”, a desire is “compulsive” only if you think it causes problems for you.
Okay, seriously? You want to play this game?
Meta time:
I get that status here comes in part from good arguments. It’s a fine metric for truth-seeking. But it isn’t the same as truth-seeking, and it Goodharts into disagreement-hunting even where the disagreements don’t matter.
I’m trying to point at a simple observation: some things grab your wanting directly and yank you off-course. Seems like a good idea to notice when that happens. That’s all.
I’m not saying that one shouldn’t ever let those want-grabbers do their thing. But maybe you can’t tell I wasn’t saying that; communication is hard. But if you think I am saying that… then can’t you just notice that that’s stupid, mention that, and highlight the point I should have made?
So… I mean, really, you seriously think you’re meaningfully refuting my points by saying I enjoy achievements and therefore there’s no hijacking? Seriously? Seriously?
I mean, I think your next norm-driven move is to say “Yes, seriously.” And then do some kind of weird philosophical thing that, I don’t know, makes it sound like I’m arguing that some wants are good and others are bad, and then knocking down that strawman. Or something.
But… come on! Really?
Can we just… not fence for status?
</meta>
I never said anything about food. Or about what needs to be meaningful. Just that there are want-grabbers that are meaningfulness-symmetric.
I don’t usually think of good food as lotus-like. Like, here are some pleasurable non-lotuses (for me):
Walks in nature.
Kissing someone I’m dating.
Meditating.
Intense exercise.
Breaking a fast with good food.
Doing an acrobatic flip.
I basically never find these yanking me away from what I’m doing. I just like them. Sometimes I want to do some of them more and it’s hard to make myself. Very not lotus-ish.
Sometimes I don’t do these things because I’m busy, I don’t know, getting sucked into getting achievements on some game that leaves Tetris effects in my brain.
I mean, if I want to do that, then that seems cool.
Seems bad not to even notice that’s happening though. Then Facebook gets to program my wants however it chooses to.
I don’t think of it as low-status. FWIW.
Uh… then I’m not sure what your point is. You said:
“My point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary pleasures that don’t improve your life. The problem is when you develop compulsions. There seems to be a difference between simple desire and compulsive desire.”
So… if I take you literally, I think you just said that the only problem is when you develop a desire that causes you a problem.
Like, I don’t think that’s actually what you mean. I’m strawmanning your words to point out that I think I haven’t understood your real message.
Help me understand?
I understand the impulse to go “really, you can’t be serious”, especially given the tendency of LWers to nitpick, but I think one should be cautious about invoking it as long as there are charitable alternative interpretations.
In this particular case, I suspect we’re running into a genuine difference between minds here. That is, I’ve encountered some people who genuinely seem to not experience compulsions: they might still e.g. procrastinate instead of doing something important, but their subjective experience is closer to “I don’t want to do the important thing yet, so I’m choosing to do something fun instead” rather than “I know I should be doing the important thing but I can’t make myself do it”.
In other words, compulsions are usually understood as something ego-dystonic:
Whereas for some people, it seems like there are no urges that are experienced as ego-dystonic; all desires and urges are experienced as egosyntonic, or as parts of the self which one identifies with. For such a person, “compulsion” isn’t a natural category, because it’s something that they’ve never experienced.
From their responses, I’m guessing that zulupineapple is probably closer to that kind of a person.
That’s not sustainable. There really are a certain subset of articles that have been suffering ‘death by papercuts’. Yes, they get upvotes; yes, they get good comments—but the entire tone of their debates has been pretty thoroughly shredded by whataboutisms.
That actually *needs* a strong pushback. It creates a kind of emotional fatigue on the authors that legitimately drags down the quality of future articles.
That’s a reasonable point.
On the other hand, if one wishes to solve this problem, one also needs to have a clear idea of what exactly is causing it. If people’s behavior is driven by status-seeking, then that probably warrants different methods for dealing with it than if their behavior was driven by something else.
I have no doubt that some of the thing you described, is driven mostly by status-seeking. But I still maintain that, when evaluating the behavior of any given commenter, one should be cautious about jumping to that conclusion. Because:
1) On LW, “You’re just trying to win status rather than caring about the truth” is one of the easiest and most negative assumptions of someone’s motives that you can find. And when people are annoyed at something, they really like jumping to easy conclusions that paint the other person in a very bad light. If one does not take the time to look at reasonable alternative hypotheses, it’s easy to end up concluding that everyone else is just some shade of “evil or dumb”, regardless of whether that was true or not.
2) Ascribing bad motives to someone is a self-fulfilling propechy. Maybe someone is just genuinely confused and trying to figure out what you are saying. Then you go “oh, you want to play this game? could we stop dueling for status?” Well, now you’ve made a public accusation of them having low motives, forcing them to defend themselves if they don’t want to lose face. Regardless of whether the conversation had a status-seeking element to it before, it sure does now.
I’ll admit to having some kind of cognitive privilege here, in that I genuinely don’t experience the ‘death by papercuts’ tone that you and a lot of others are talking about. I don’t know why not; it’s always puzzled me that people have talked about LW feeling like a hostile environment to post things on, and I’ve never felt that. This is particularly weird since I feel like I’ve been pretty thin-skinned on other online forums, easily getting upset if people imply bad things about me. But here I never get that vibe, maybe because people always seem to focus their criticism on arguments rather than on people. I’ve always felt like discussions on LW are mostly just rigorous and thorough, but rarely hostile.
Similarly, I see very few comments that I’d describe as “whataboutisms” or similar. I just see people coming from different directions and perspectives, inhabiting different places in mindspace, with the inevitable consequence that often one needs to do a lot of work to bridge the inferential distances involved. I don’t see that as a bad thing; I see it as something good and healthy, and one of the things that makes LW great, that it reveals differences between minds that people had never thought to question before, and helps the participants understand each other better when the details and differences are thoroughly hashed out.
But like I said, my perspective is strongly biased by the fact that I don’t seem to experience the emotional cost that other people seem to experience. (In terms of the parable of the dog and the lizard, I’m the dog.) So I don’t really know how to appropriately weigh it, as I basically only feel the benefits of the current discussion culture, and none of the costs.
We have limited cognition and limited emotional investment, much of which has already just been spent on creating what is hopefully a high-quality post. ONE person doing it through status-seeking creates like 10 copy-cats, of which eight probably ARE doing it genuinely.
But giving them all the benefit of the doubt lets the status-seeking saboteur hide among the rest, and separating them all out takes effort that wears down the author.
It’s not sustainable.
I think that kaj is talking about “don’t read motivations into people as part of your criticism, or at least be more cautious about doing so” – criticize them for the action they’re doing if the action is bad.
I think ialdabaoth is saying ’yeah, but right now basically nobody is criticizing or stopping the people doing the death-by-cuts-thing, and whenever anyone tries, the moderators yell at them instead.”
(I think right now the death-by-papercutters are basically coming in juuust under a line that the moderators feel awkward about taking action on, and the people criticizing them are coming in juust over that line, and yes, this is a bad dynamic)
I’m currently looking into solutions that are more on the “solve it with technology” side of things than the “solve it with social”, but regardless agree that the status quo is bad.
What kinds of technological solutions are you thinking of?
Feel free to talk about it later if the ideas aren’t ready for public presentation yet. In general I’m concerned that criticism is important, truth-seeking is hard to separate from status-seeking (authors can be self-deceived as easily as commenters about their judgments/motivations), and whatever solution we adopt not cause more harm than good through unintended side effects.
I touched upon this in a recent meta post, although in a different context. (Basically, I expect small/big upvote distinctions to help with this issue, at least somewhat, while also being positive from a truthseeking perspective. Later on I’ll write up clearer thoughts on why I’m expecting this to help)
I anticipate that your tech solution will also help Eliezer come back—my intuition says that this is part of what he feels aversion to wasting energy on.
Oh yeah I have better than intuition, I have Eliezer literally* saying to us “dude I will try coming back when you take care of this shit.”
*okay okay almost literally
Weren’t the new moderation tools—where someone can make a top-level post and then delete every critical or contrary comment without a trace[1] (or, indeed, any comment at all, for any reason)—supposed to be Eliezer’s precondition for returning? I opposed that change, and still do, but it’s done—and now we’re hearing that it wasn’t enough? How seriously can we take Eliezer’s “I’ll come back when you __” stance this time, and how many other changes do you intend to make in the service of this goal?
[1] By the way, what’s the status of the moderation log feature?
Oh, actually I got a basic version of the moderation log done awhile ago and then I think I forgot to list it in an update post (or maybe I mentioned it but it got lost in the shuffle, unsure). Sorry
In any case, https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation is here. Haven’t yet implemented a “link this at the bottom of the comment section” or some-such yet.
Sorry about that.
Neat. Er, are the “User” and “Deleted by user” columns meant to be the same? Because it seems like they *are* the same but I’d have expected the former to contain the name of the user who *posted* the thing-that-got-deleted, not the name of the user who deleted it.
Oh, yeah. (actually come to think of it I may have noticed that bug, though “I’ll fix that bug and then announce it, and then never got around to fixing it.”)
Sure. But in the meantime, realize that the fact that Val’s comment was downvoted into the negatives is a signal about something, and it’s about something you and Ben and Ollie and Kaj are doing.
And then decide whether you’re okay with all the consequences of that.
Can you link to some posts that have suffered from this?
I drew from my own experience to make the same point in this comment. I broke it down into:
push and pull motivations driving desires
*compulsive desire* in context appearing to mean something like a pull-driven behaviour. The distinction between pull and push motivations here is fuzzy, but “compulsive desire” strikes me more as more like “addiction”, which is chasing something and pull it toward you, which I expect can also exist in OCD, but some obsessive compulsions in OCD and my own have been driven by push motivations; the urge to *push* something away to get away from it, usually an intrusive thought.
In the words you’re using, what we colloquially call “addictions” are in psychiatry or other technical fields known as “dependencies”, and “addiction” as a word being reserved for especially severe cases. So it seems my experience is of ego-dystonic push motivations, dependency is typically an experience of ego-syntonic pull motivations, but drug addiction may typically be experienced as an ego-dystonic *pull* motivation. I think this reinforces your point about how we’re talking about a difference between minds, as the experiences of severe drug/alcohol addiction appear beyond what I’ve experienced, and from appearances, others participating in this thread.
(Bonus point: because I’m replying to you, Kaj, and I thought you’d get this, I’ll explain the rationale behind the distinction between dependency and addiction in rationalist terms.) A “global catastrophic risk” (GCR) is to dependency (i.e., psychological addiction) what an “existential risk” (x-risk) is to addiction (i.e,. dependency+physical addiction). Just as x-risk reducers want to reserve the term “existential risk” for those GCRs which will have a terminal and trans-generational impact, so people can distinguish between the risk of misaligned AI from self-driving cars vs. a singleton. A drug dependency can be thought of as a *personal* catastrophic risk, while a drug addiction can be thought of as an *existential* personal risk. A marijuana dependency can be catastrophically debilitating, but nobody overdoses on marijuana. People can overdose on heroin. Thus in this framework one could say someone has a marijuana *dependency* or a heroin addiction, but it’d be erroneous to speak of a marijuana *addiction*. The distinction is addictions often kill people, while dependencies most often don’t, and how we use these words has serious consequences for public health policy.
That’s interesting. I definitely never feel like my thoughts or desires are alien to me. That sounds very unhealthy. But, I definitely exhibit compulsions, or at least compulsive behaviors. I think the difference might be different perspectives or mental habits, rather than a real difference between minds. One thing is rationalization—“I’m watching funny youtube videos, that’s probably because I want and like funny youtube videos”. Another thing is a sort of self awareness—I may feel for a moment “I want to work, instead of watching funny youtube videos”, but then immediately remember that, in fact, working is hard, and I don’t actually want it that much (although I do want to be a sort of person who works more, not sure to what extent this is “egodystonic”).
That’s pretty interesting. Some practices seem squarely aimed at converting people who are dystonic to syntonic. Heavy overlap with locus of control training.
I really don’t like that sort of status explanation. I’m under no illusion that this is giving me any sort of status. If it does, then I have no idea what that status looks like.
It’s never bad to notice what you’re doing, so I have nothing to say about that.
Nobody said “never”, but the post seems clearly cautionary to me. You use words like “useless”, “addiction”, “hijack” which have very negative connotations (as does “lotus” itself). Also, you linked to “Your Brain On Porn”, which does promote abstinence, as I understand.
More generally, I automatically placed your post into the same mental bucket as various “evil facebook is manipulating you” articles, which should explain why I interpret any ambiguities negatively. It might be unfair, but I can’t say that it doesn’t fit.
Was I not supposed to read your post that way?
Yeah, I’m not saying anything smart here, though it’s not quite that circular. I mean, compulsion is something you can get diagnosed with, I think. Also, I think, “compulsion” is the correct term for “addictions” that don’t actually involve drugs (e.g. gambling, facebook).
My point in bringing up “compulsions” was that there is already a word for “desires that cause problems”, and I don’t really understand why we want a new word, or in what way “lotus” is different. If it is different, I wonder if it is a natural category. That’s why I asked whether food is a lotus at the very beginning—I don’t really understand what the category looks like. I would have appreciated more analysis on that.
My current guess is that non-lotus pleasures are those that have some sort of negative feedback loops in them—e.g. eating isn’t a lotus, because once you’re full, it doesn’t feel as good. On the other hand, work can be a lotus, if you reach a state where you don’t want to stop, and there is nothing negative about such “lotus”. So it’s not exactly “compulsion” but a little more general, though all compulsions are also “lotuses”. Is that right?
The core component of the lotus—the reason why Duncan referred to that in the first place—is that the lotus removes you from the plot. What falls into that category depends on what you think the plot is. Someone focused primarily on their life satisfaction will have different views from someone interested in the march of scientific progress, or from someone who is focused primarily on existential risk, or so on.
So a thing is a “lotus” if you desire it, but would prefer not to desire it? Well, that’s a meaningful category, but it’s very different from the compulsiveness that Valentine seems to describe. Or does a thing need both properties, to be a “lotus”.
More importantly, what is this “plot” and where does it come from? It’s good to have preferences over preferences, but I worry that you’re identifying with them way too much.
I’d call delicious food a lotus for me. Sometimes it feels so easy for me to fall into addictions that I could get addicted to cereal.
Palatable food may indeed highjack things in our brains leading to negative consequences.
I’ve also personally found that always eating delicious foods will make me subconsciously start looking for food in moments of boredom.
I do think it’s important to experience pleasures in life, and delicious food is a great treat, but like too many things in our lives, our food supply is being engineered to superstimulus levels and caution is totally warranted.
Feel free to substitute food with any other common short-term pleasure. Yes, it’s probably possible to develop an unhealthy relationship with anything. But does that make every pleasure a lotus? If it does then “lotus” isn’t a useful term.
I think the following is (1) at least close to what Valentine is saying and (2) obviously not content-free: Wanting and liking are separate things. When we like things, we tend to want them as a result. And sometimes we want things because (that’s an “evolutionary” because) they are useful to us. But there are things we want because of processes other than utility->wanting (via evolution) and liking->wanting (via learning). Call these things “lotuses”.
I make the following claims.
1. Some things are lotuses in this sense. For instance, those Duolingo “achievements” were lotuses for Valentine. He found himself wanting them before ever getting any (so it’s not that he got some, found that he enjoyed getting them, and wanted them for the sake of that enjoyment). And they certainly aren’t a close match for anything that makes much difference to evolutionary “fitness”.
2. Not everything we want is a lotus in this sense. For instance, we want food because if we don’t eat we die and our potential ancestors who cared much less about getting food were less successful. So food isn’t a lotus (though you could argue that some specific categories of food are). We want sex both for similar evolutionary reasons and because (in most cases) when we’ve had it in the past we’ve enjoyed it a lot. (Again, it’s possible that some sexual activities are lotuses for some people.)
3. This notion of lotus is potentially useful. I would like my wants to be well aligned with what’s (broadly speaking) good for me. If I want something out of proportion to the good it does me and the pleasure it gives me, I would like to know that (and may then try to find ways to want it less, or to make it harder to get what I want in this case, or to make it provide more good or pleasure). Lotus/not-lotus doesn’t line up exactly with this, but it’s a pretty good match.
(Is this notion of lotus the best one in its neighbourhood? I don’t know. For instance, perhaps we would do better to consider more directly the notion of a thing we want out of proportion to the benefits it provides. That’s nearer to our goals, but further from the causes of things—I think Valentine-lotuses are nearer to being a single kind of thing than “things that we want out of proportion to their benefits” are. It’s not obvious to me how the tradeoffs work out.)
He found out they existed by getting one.
Regardless, this feels like not quite the thing. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy getting them. It’s that he was trying to learn French, and now suddenly instead he was trying to earn achievements in “learning French”. No matter how much he liked those achievements, they got in the way of actually learning French.
With that in mind, I think the answer to “is food a lotus” would be: for some people, in some contexts, yes.
Like, if I go to a networking event intending to meet people, but instead I spend all my time gorging myself at the buffet.
I had a goal, and the food meant that instead of working towards my goal, now I’m doing something that won’t help it at all. If food is sufficiently lotus-like for me, I might need to completely avoid networking events with buffets. This is true even if I actually really enjoy food, and endorse that enjoyment in general.
Whoops, you’re right about how he found out; my apologies. Still, my reading of the OP is that the craving Valentine felt for earning achievements wasn’t primarily a result of the actual pleasure he got when he did it.
I agree that the definition of “lotus” I proposed is not quite the thing in the sense that it doesn’t quite track what we care about, and said as much in my last paragraph; I think “thing we want out of proportion to its benefits” is pretty close to being the thing, but whether that makes it a better definition to use isn’t obvious to me.
(If I understand your proposal right, it’s maybe different again: something is a “lotus” if we want it, and there’s something closely related that would be beneficial or pleasurable for us, but the two don’t match. That feels to me like it’s again not quite the thing—something could be perilously want-hijacking, and worth “noticing the taste of”, without that sort of proximity to useful wants.)
My food example doesn’t feel to me like the food is particularly close to the networking. Which is to say, I agree with your last sentence.
(I don’t feel like I’m trying to propose a definition here, just gesture vaguely at a cluster and some features of it that seem relevant. Similarly, I don’t have particular feelings about your proposed definition. Most of my comment might have been better directed as a reply to someone else.)
It sounds like one rationalist’s lotus ponens is another rationalist’s lotus tollens.
Thinking of brain-hijacking in terms of a “superstimulus” is probably the best way to think of what people mean by “hijacked” when they use the word on LW, as opposed to a more violent connotation.
Ah, but delicious food does improve my life. I enjoy eating it, after all! Sensory pleasures, aesthetic pleasures, visceral satisfaction—those things constitute improvements to my life.
I do not have time to write the comment I’d like to write about this—one with a full analysis of this question—but here are some quick thoughts, things that seem relevant:
The difference between “wanting” and “liking”
The difference between “wanting” and “wanting to want” (i.e., higher-order desires)
Endorsed vs. unendorsed { pleasures, desires, preferences, reactions to experiences }
Tradeoffs between preferences / desires / pleasures
(If anyone finds the relevance of any of these things to the topic non-obvious, let me know and I’ll write more about it.)
For benefit of people not familiar with the stuff Said is referencing, here’s a Scott Alexander post delving into the differences between wanting and liking (including links to previous discussion, which also include “vs endorsing”).
Yes, and Valentine apparently enjoys collecting arbitrary achievements. There is nothing wrong with that, though, it seems that he’s feeling some guilt about it.
I think “wanting to want” is the key difference here. Not sure how much the others apply.
“Enjoy” is too simple to describe what’s true here. I find myself motivated to collect them. When I get another one, I get a “I’m getting closer!” feeling. Getting them all gives me a few moments of satisfaction, sort of like having carefully organized a silverware drawer might.
And I agree, there’s nothing wrong with that per se.
I just don’t want that process to hijack my effort to learn French.
Uh, no. I don’t know where you got that impression. I don’t feel guilty about eating lotus. I just want to notice when I am, because apparently I can be fed lotus without my asking for it. If I don’t notice, then others can tell me what my goals are, even accidentally. I don’t like that.
I enjoy candy. If someone gives me candy, that’s good. Even if I’m trying to learn French, and someone offers me candy rewards for reaching arbitrary milestones, that’s still good. Even if I’m somehow not aware that the milestones are arbitrary and that they don’t really help me learn French, it’s still good, because I’m getting candy, and I like candy. I would never call that “hijacking”. No, I’m exchanging a miniscule bit of French-ability for some candy. It’s a trade that satisfies my preferences. I have nothing even slightly negative to say about these candy-givers.
You, on the other hand, do use such harsh words as “hijack”, which suggests that there are some negative emotions related to the lotus. I’m only guessing that guilt might be the cause (this is “guilt” in the sense of “guilty pleasure”).
Also, you used the word “lotus” from the Odyssey, where it is not depicted in a very positive light. Was I not supposed to deduce anything from that choice of a name?
I think all you’re missing is words like “lotus” and “hijacked” have developed connotations on LessWrong which aren’t as harsh as the basic connotations of those words used outside the context of LW, and that it’s those connotations Val sought to bring to mind in his post, and not that of hijacking planes or the Odyssey.
Oh. Can you give me some links to that?
Many people who are overweight do “quit” tasty food in order to lose weight, although it’s not really the same thing, because the issue isn’t the time-wasting but the unhealthiness.
It seems to me that a defining characteristic of lotuses is that they waste time. Eating tasty food doesn’t usually take more time than other food. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite, given fast food and preprepared junk food.
Fast food wasn’t quite what I was thinking of. Instead immagine someone who goes to fancy restaurants often, buys the most expensive wines, etc. We call those people gourmets, I think. Does that make food a lotus? Or is it a healthy hobby?