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.
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.